1

TEDx AAS - December 2012

Semester I Exams

Sports© AAS Yearbook Pho-togtraphty

Advertisements©StuCo page

TEDx at AAS- Xenia Rakovshik

December 14th, 2012 - Preempting the onset of the winter break at the end of last year’s academic session, the Anglo American School of Moscow joined the worldwide phenomenon know as TED Talks, hosting its own TEDx talk in the Bolshoi The-atre located under the high-school office.

According to their offi-cial webpage (www.ted.com/pages/about) “TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spread-ing.” Starting in 1984 as conference bringing to-gether individuals from occupations concerned with Technology, En-tertainment and Design, the now worldwide phe-nomena has broadened its thematic scope to encompass a myriad of social and intellectually

stimulating concerns facing people today. “Created in the spirit of TED’s mission, “ideas worth spreading,” the TEDx program is de-signed to give commu-nities, organization and individuals the oppor-tunity to stimulate dia-logue through TED-like experiences at the local level. TEDx events are fully planned and coor-dinated independently, facilitated by the dedi-cated work of those in-volved, on a communi-ty-by-community basis.

In addition to several videos from experts and intellectuals rang-ing from author John Green’s “The Paper Town Academy” to Jeff Hancock’s “The Future of Lying”, the confer-ence featured some of the school’s faculty members including His-

tory, Economics and Social Studies teacher Paul Pickering with “Capitalist Realism Ate Hip Hop!” Chemistry teacher Kees Kuijlaars and his talk on “Inter-net Resource in Science Education: Hopes and Fears” , School Direc-tor Jon P. Zurfluh with “What Are we Miss-ing?” and Mathematics teacher Joseph Khan on “Mindset for the New Tech Era”. The confer-ence always welcomed guest speakers “Maxim Titov on “Energy Ef-ficiency – Myths and Realities” and REV. Matthew A. Laferty on “Transcending Borders with the Transcendent.” High-school student speakers included se-niors Seifu Al-Midahi with “The Napoleon Moment in Academics”, Sai Agnihotram with his “A Self-Centered

Place” and sophomore Hannah Durkin “When Not Knowing Is Good”.

“As soon as I heard that AAS was hosting a TEDx event, I knew that I had to talk about the degrading relationship between Schools and Universities” relates Seifu Al-Midahi, “be-cause it was something that was in my mind this whole year as I went through the University application process as a senior.”

On her presentation on the drawbacks of cen-sorship Hannah Durkin commented, “I had ex-perienced censorship living in Russia and China, I also thought that it connected to the main idea of the confer-

Friday , January 25th, 2013

Members of the TEDx team © AAS Yearbook photography

Special thanks to supervisor Francy Johnson Continued on page 02...

2 3

A Student’s Perspective on TEDx- Lola Borissenko

Primarily, a round of applause to the organiz-ers and participants of the great educational event, known as TED-X. Something important to point out was that all the presentations, live and recorded were ac-curate to us as young adults living in a mod-ern and rapidly develop-ing world. Throughout the conference, infor-mation technologies and our use of resources were strongly empha-sized; with additional facts on popular culture, the education and cen-sure. The final presenta-tion of Mr. Joseph Khan gave us the impression of a decent conclusion of the whole confer-ence with the informa-tion that it provided. His presentation also introduced a, perhaps simple at first, yet ab-solutely brilliant point about the past, present

and future of our gen-eration’s development. It was the charisma of the presenter and the evident emphasis on globally important facts which made Mr. Khan very thrilling to watch. The introduction was focused on the ‘Baby Boom’ generation, par-ticularly in the United States of America, the generation Mr. Khan himself is part of. As the presenter pointed out, as the children of their generation grew up, consumerism de-veloped quickly so that it could support the new generation. As was mentioned by other notable presenters, dur-ing the conference, Mr. Khan talked about the use of Earth’s resourc-es and their particular role in the progress that started in the mid-20th century.

‘But oil cannot last for-

ever’, Mr. Khan wisely pointed out. With this assertion, the audience was now introduced to the second part of the presentation, which fo-cused on the generation of our High School’s students, known as ‘Generation Next’. One remark that the present-er made, which was ab-solutely clever, clearly illustrated the future our generation holds.

‘Imagine if I am look-ing for employers’, he started off, ‘but I am no ordinary boss. I tell you that you can come to work whenever you want, spend as much time at work as you want, you are very lib-erated with your ac-tions at work as well. However, the work has to be done, and I will not pay you. In fact, you will pay me to be occupied. Would you come and work for

me?’ the audience was intrigued and negatively shook their heads in re-sponse to the interesting offer.

‘Well, guess what, you perform such tasks every day’, Mr. Khan continued, ‘do you know how? I’ll tell you, FACEBOOK’. The au-dience was surprised with the interesting for-mulation of such online activity of ours. The presenter’s point how-ever made clear sense and signified that the future lies not in the resources such as gas and oil, what the ‘Baby boom’ generation made use or, but in informa-tion. As Mr. Khan wise-ly pointed out, unlike the Earth’s resources, the system of informa-tion will not collapse if more and more people use it, but will in fact grow.

‘This is up to you to develop,’ Mr. Khan noticed, ‘us… we are done!’ he concluded with a smile. That might not be so true. Although the ‘Baby Boom’ gen-eration did make good use of Earth’s resources, it was the one who start-ed the whole notion of information technolo-gies. World Wide Web was introduced before we were born, and the popular social network was developed when we were in elementary school. You gave us the idea and a good start; it is our turn to continue it. That would be, perhaps, a decent conclusion not only to Mr. Khan’s pre-sentation, but to the to the entire TED-X con-ference, which hope-fully inspired our gen-eration to be ambitious and innovative.

Seifu Al-Midahi (Senior and Director of Communications for the Student Council) © AAS Yearbook photography

Paul Pickering © AAS Yearbook photography

Hannah Durkin (Sophomore) © AAS Yearbook photography

Kees Kuijlaars

Sai Agnitoram (Senior) © AAS Yearbook photography

Joseph Khan ©AAS Yearbook Photography

ence and that I could do a speech that would leave people thinking about what I had said.”

However in providing these select students with an opportunity to share their ideas with a larger audience the thrill of sharing ideas was somewhat undercut with a sense of forebod-ing.

All student TEDx speakers available for comment referred to the trouble they had cut-ting down the amount they wanted to say into

a simple 15 to 20 min-utes. “I rehearsed the presentation roughly ten times total to make sure that it was under, but the time always fluctuated between 17:00 minutes to 18:30 minutes in my rehearsals,” confessed Seifu Al-Midahi, “At the end however, my pre-sentation was thankfully shorter than the 18:00 minutes limit time. The overall experience was fantastic. Several col-leagues came up to me after my presentation and declared their love for my presentation and said that it was by far

the most well-delivered speech they’ve seen from me.

However, Hannah re-calls that the true value of the conference was msot visible in the af-termath of the presen-tations, “..when people came up to me and talked about how they had disagreed or agreed with what I said. I was really proud that people had felt strongly enough about what I had said to want to talk to me about.”

All TEDx AAS vid-eos are available on the TED website or on youtube through TED’s

channel (http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSatVjzQd2dTOIHe4lo0XKAufyQ-Jd-lG).

Special thanks to TEDx AAS cordinators San-dra lifshits and Ramona Popescu, Speaker Co-ordinators Sai Agni-hotram, Boris Botachev and Sonya Kirillova as well as Public Rela-tions and Media staff Ramona Popescu and Kirill Mazurin. Sched-uling coordination was done by Mina Song and Sun woo Lee with te-chonological coordina-tors Camilla Simmons and Timur Karimov. Venue organization was

done by Moa Schaf-fer and Sandra Lifshits, with Nika Stump as Streaming/Coordina-tor. A special thank you also goes to the onstage host Jakob Muratov and the PenguinLIVE filming team: Johanna Merirand, Kevin Huh, Anna Lamond, Jona-than Spjut, Jane Byon, Maz Emmenegger, Kaan Cankat, Kate Chi-chikashvili, Roisin Mc-Nulty and Anais Roger-Evans.

4 5

IB Column - The (Terror of) Semester I Examinations - Annie May

©IBO

Coming back from winter break with happy thoughts and memories from the experiences that everyone had during the 3 weeks, all the Freshmen, Sophomores, and Juniors. were thinking the same thing: EXAMS. The terrifying idea of actually working after a long time of rest was not very appealing to students and many are still trying to push it out of their minds. But there actually is a bright side to this looming cloud of stress, exhaustion, and overall terror. After putting down their pencil at the end of their last exam, many students feel a new emotion that is actually quite reassuring: relief. Often, if students put in the time to study hard

and prepare, the exams don’t turn out to be so terrible. And what could be better than a week of half days and free food? Contrary to what you may think, teachers write the exam questions with hope that students will be able to answer them. A BBC article about exam tips encourages students to take 10 minute breaks, gradually building up the study time in between. Though cramming is a favorite method of studying for many students, it is not suggested and it is likely that you will retain less information than if you had been studying all week. The main thing to remember on the day of your exam is: RELAX. Stress will not help and sometimes it can even cause students to forget important information,

especially if they were cramming the night before. Think about it: if you work hard these two weeks and complete your exams, less than a month later there is another school break! More time to rest and recover from the terror that you have endured. But in all honesty, exams aren’t that bad, and in the long run they will yield excellent results when receiving your end of semester report card and applying to university.

The IB Column is a section that has been created as a response to a growing demand for clarification amongst students about a myriad of academic subjects. By adressing some frequently asked questions we hope to create a forum where students can voice concerns or give advice to one another to help facilitate a more cohesive and supportive learning environment. If you have any questions, concerns, or correc-tions, please write to us at aas.point@gmail.com.

Basketball Invitational Results

The first Basketball “Penguin Invitational” tournament of the new year, taking place from the 18th to 19th of January, included a total

of 16 teams, 40 games and over 160 student-athletes.

All tournament honours were awarded to Jacob Scott, Cole Mc-Faul, Lolo Picquet, Alexandra Hellman, Jonathan Haviv and Cath-

erine Chadwick

Athletic director of the year award went to AAS’ very on Richard McLeod.

Basketball Invitational © AAS Yearbook photography

6 7

Removing Profanity from Russian Sentiment

In October of 2012, deputies of the United Russia party voted a bill into the State Duma for the fulfill-ment of statute 13:21, proposing a fine for profanity in mass me-dia. In January of 2013, United Russia deputies have already submitted amendments to the bill, preparing for its pass-ing into federal law.

In an official state-ment by State duma Deputy Speaker Sergei Zhelnznayk, the bill proposes fines ranging from two-thousand to

three-thousand roubles for Russian citizens, five-thousand to twen-ty-thousand roubles for government rep-resentatives and up to two-hundred-thousand roubles for corpora-tions and organizations whom engage in “pre-paring and spreading profanity within mass media”.

Officials in the majority party present the bill as a measure facilitating the intellectual growth and protection of the “Russian youth from corrupting and damag-ing information that

may harm their health and development” in-cluding “the use uncul-tured and inappropriate language, swearing and vulgarity”. Though the law prohibits profanity only in materials meant for children and ado-lescents, discussions within the Duma have reported to touch on the removal of offend-ing phrases from clas-sic literature of writers such as Mayakovski and Pushkin under the pretenses of encourag-ing similar employ-ment of disrespectful language in the rhetoric of adolescents in their

online activities. Edi-noross clarifies that “ at the moment, discussion about the restriction of inappropriate language in literature is not an issue, although its fully possible that sooner or later it might come to touch on such topics.”

However, the in recent weeks the Duma has reported to have re-ceived a multitude of complaints regarding the employment of foul language not only in materials for consum-ers under the age of eighteen, but in print media, radio programs

and television. “Even-tually the proposed changes to the law will extend to the prohibi-tion of obscene lan-guage on all programs and publications,” Ve-domosti writes.

Representative of the faction “A Just Russia” Evdokia Bikova pro-posed the government should consider the regulation of profanity “...not just in mass me-dia, but in the arts and theatres.”

- Xenia Rakovshik High School Stockholm Syndrome

- Xenia Rakovshik

Where did you at-tend high school and what were your favou-rite/least favourite and subjects? St. Joseph’s College, Dumfries, Scotland.PE English & Art were my favourite subjects. Maths, Religious Education and Sewing were my least favou-rite.

You’ve mentioned in some of your classes that you attended several different high schools. How many high schools did you attend and why? No I only attended one High School as a student. I have worked at six different Schools in Luton, London, Melbourne, Milan, Lilongwe and Moscow.

How do you think your teachers would have described you as a student during your high-school career? Talkative, disruptive and only interested in sport.

What were your main hobbies or interests during your years in high school, or uni-versity for that matter? Favourite bands, music, etc? Sports, reading, travel and music were and still are main interests.My favourite bands when I was in High School were; Deacon Blue, Pet Shop Boys, Eurythmics, Big Audio Dynamite, James.

What was your plan after leaving high school, if you had one? I wanted to become a professional football player. Finally, good advice helped me to choose University, which opened doors for travel and lifestyle choices. I still play football-slowly.

In retrospect are there attitudes you had towards learning

you’d change now that you’re a teacher? What advice would you give yourself now and how receptive do you believe you would be? It would be easy to say I should have worked harder or gone further down the professional football road. How-ever, I think the only really useful advice I got related to finding balance in life. That would be the only ad-vice I could reasonably give, from that most other things seem to follow.

What’s the most interesting aspect of being a TOK teacher for you? Recognizing that we all continue to learn. School should not be about teachers being right. The ability to change one’s mind is important. To be able to admit lack of knowl-edge and enjoy finding out more. Also, that children and young adults are citizens too and should be treated with mutual respect as well as being given guidance when required.

If you could change one thing about the high school what would it be and why? I think the pace of life at AAS is too fast. I believe in quality not quantity in terms of learning. We need to slow down a little, remove some of the unnecessary busyness in School. Higher order thinking cannot happen effectively if people (students and teach-ers) are overworked or stressed.

How do you think the current system of grading classwork affects student’s moti-vation to work or their studies? What system would you propose school’s use to assess their students? In the short time I have spent working at AAS, school assess-ment policies and procedures continue to improve. Students are mostly motivated to learn and very positive to work with. I believe further improvement would ensue with a criterion referenced system using the IB scoring system to avoid some confusion

which results from our community being familiar with a large number of different na-tional scoring systems. Ideally, in the longer term, assessment in education might focus much more on ‘how we learn’ rather than on ‘what we learn’. All the world’s universi-ties would have to be convinced of this first of course!

If you could choose to be any historical figure for a day (phi-losopher, sports icon, etc…) who would it be, on what day and why? I could choose hundreds; As a TOK teacher I enjoy the quest for knowledge so Einstein or Marie Curie maybe on big discovery days. I’d like to know what Lee Harvey Oswald knew, so being him for that day in Dallas would be interesting. Anybody who has ever been to space-I’d like to do that, to look back and really see where we all live from a totally dif-ferent perspective.

AdvertisementsOpen Mic-Night Student Council is hosting its first Open Mic Night! Come to the green room on the 7th of February (3:45-5:45) to relax among friends and watch some of the great entertainment that the students of AAS have to offer. Entry is free. Consumables are free. Coffee is not free. Bring your own friends, we will not provide you with friends.Please come! Location: The Green Room (If anybody wants to provide entertainment at this event, please sign up on the signup sheet at the StuCo Board)

AAS Art Auction AAS is planning to host an art auction with pieces provided by the AAS community. This means that you, be you parent, student, teacher or otherwise, can donate your artwork to be sold for a good cause. All proceedings go to the chartiable organization Nastenka which works with cancer-stricken patients. For more information contact colleen.nel-son@aas.ru

Technology Update - Three-Dimensional Printing- Alexander Rakovshik

Many things have advanced further on as time has passed, medi-cine, travel, even video games (sorry, couldn’t resist), but among them, the 3D printer gives us more than we could ever hope for. Starting off with the concept, of just bring-ing the 3rd dimension to 2D printing, designs started of creating them within the 1980’s, but back then they were known as Selec-tive Laser Sintering (SLS). It’s a good thing then that a couple of MIT students simply named the concept “3D Printing” around 1995, and thus started a period of 3D printing revolutionizing.

The concept of 3D printing is fairly sim-ple, it’s basically just like a normal printer, printing out ink across the page, but another function is added. The

part that makes the 3D printer what it is, is that the object being printed is on a lower able platform. So basi-cally, once it prints one layer, the tray moves down a bit so that the next layer can be printed out. Also, one of the best things about this printer, the cost of printing out these items are significantly less than making things such as molds. It even has capabilities

of making biological organs, not that plastic stuff you see at the hospitals, and to do this they just replace the material in the ink cartridge with actual live cells. This innova-tion can bring who knows how many years to our average life span. But unfortunate-ly, along with being able to make organs (as well as cupcakes I might add), it also is able to print out gun

components, allowing you to literally print out your very own gun, so who knows how that’s going to turn out.

While this technology can so far pretty much print out small scale objects (as well as at very long periods of time), it still has so much space to advance and grow. If we can build this right, it could have the ability of ac-tually manipulating the

“copy paste” function, where on one device you have the object being scanned, and on the other device, the object is quickly being printed out with the appropriate substances. For now this device is more for commercial use rather than domes-tic, but who knows in how many years that can change.

Model of 3-D Printer (above) and products (right) © mir3d.ru

© Paul Lennon

Penguin PressWant to submit an editorial piece? An advertisement? Sug-gestions, comments or concerns? Send us an e-mail at aas.point@gmail.com

8 9

ArtworkCircleColorDesign ElementFormFreeformImpliedInvented LineNegativeOvalPerspectivePositive RealRectangleShapeSimulatedSpace

Square Texture tRIANGLEvALUEviSUAL

Word Search - Art: Elements of Art

Sudoku Puzzles

© academicgames.org

Easy Difficult

Culture Corner- Sasha Parodi

© zastavki.com

The winter holidays may be over, yet inter-esting and fun activi-ties continue to swamp the ever-active city of Moscow!

The Mythology On-line exhibit in the Polytechnic Museum. This unique exhibit

combines within itself the real world with the virtual. You can learn all about the life of the virtual world and check out interesting works of artists from Russia, Italy, Canada and much more. The exhibit will be showing until the 10th February, 2013. The entrance fee is 150

rubles per person and it is open daily from 10:00-18:00. Address: New Square, ¾.

Want to get out of the Moscow slush and cold, but can’t actu-ally leave the country? Visit the retro-French café Madam Boulanje, where you can get a

wonderful taste French cuisine and pastries. Here, there is truly something for every-one. Stop by and take a look for yourself: Nikitsky Boulevard, 12 (metro station: Arbats-kaya)

If you’re a Charlie Chaplin fan you defi-

nitely don’t want to miss the chance to learn more about him through the photo ex-hibit at the Multimedia Art Museum. The ex-hibit will be showing up until the 17th Febru-ary, 2013. Address: Os-tozhenka st, 16. Entry Fee: 300.

Advertisements

Custom T-ShirtsDo you want custom t-shirts made for your team, class, activity, or event? Absolutely no Pho-toshop knowledge required! We can work with you to design these t-shirts to your liking. For more information (prices, sample designs, sizes, etc.), contact Sergey Mann at: sergeymann@gmail.com.”

AAS LitmagSend in submissions under the theme of “Elements” to aaslit-mag@gmail.com. Submissions may be in the form of illustra-tion, visual arts, prose, poetry... anything else your creative mind desires.

Theatre Audi-tions

Theatre production auditions take place on the 07th of February from 15:45 to 17:45. For more in-formation please contact: The performance will take place on the

10“ Untitled”, by Gabi Januskaite (Grade 12)

AAS empowers each student to: Respect Self & Others, Love Learning, and Contribute as a Globally Aware Citizen in order to achieve individual academicand holistic excellence.