Stepping foot into Maggie’s Portuguese class, I pick up an old print edition of the Talon and read about an alien Graded.
School was different back then – in 2015, 2005, 1999 – articles about world events, Big 8 title fights, and school drama seem foreign yet all too familiar. You typically recognize people’s last names, like Cami Giraldez’s “Who Are the Flower Children,” or students whom teachers still reference with suspicious fondness. But go back far enough, and it’s like reading dispatches from another planet, one pre-internet.
I read an article once that announced the Extended Essay would now range from 6,500 to 8,000 words. I’m glad that isn’t our reality. (If it ever becomes true, please riot.)
Anyway, in these old editions, you read about the internet becoming widespread. You read about senioritis as if it were a real thing (it is!). And you realize that some things never change.
But what does change and seeps through the yellowed pages is how each generation saw this place as their own. Their Graded isn’t ours, and ours won’t be yours. Yet you can still feel their version humming like a well-oiled machine beneath the surface, like faint handwriting bleeding through an old manuscript. The school becomes a palimpsest: every generation scribbling its own notes in the margins, doodling on the corners, layering new jokes over old inside jokes. PGC walls get repainted, teachers leave, areas get renamed, but the school stays. The Talon stays – Ship of Theseus reference?!
There’s something comforting in that. Every few years, students graduate, teachers move on, and the cycle of “this year’s going to be different” repeats. But the school remains. The Talon is a time capsule with coffee stains – proof that people were here, trying to make sense of our world one article at a time.
Hey, if you’re reading this in twenty years or so, please find me. Tell me what’s changed. Tell me if the Talon still prints on paper and whether its Instagram account has become globally renowned. Tell me if senioritis was finally diagnosed as a real disease and whether it can get us out of IB exams.
And if not, well, at least now you know we were here, writing, laughing, and occasionally pretending to study. This is our layer of ink on the palimpsest. Don’t erase it. Just add your own.
Sincerely,
João Barbosa ‘26
