Psychology teacher announces plans to retire at end of year

The

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Friday, April 11, 2014 Volume 53 Edition 21

Tennis TriumphYoung varsity team opens season with victory/page 4

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It seems that yet another teacher is reaching a big mile-stone on psychology’s so-cial clock: retirement. After it spread all over the school, psy-chology teacher Charlie Blair-Broeker dispelled rumors when he announced that he would be retiring from teaching after 36 years at Cedar Falls High School.

Blair-Broeker went to col-lege at St. Olaf College, major-ing in psychology. After that, he attended graduate school at the University of Iowa, and it was as he was walking to class one day that he realized that he wanted to be a high school psychology teacher. He had never considered the career before, but he knew he wanted to do it. “I cut class that morn-ing to go to the registrar’s of-fice and learn how to make [it] happen,” Blair-Broeker said.

Early on in his career, Blair-Broeker was a substitute teach-er in Iowa City and Ann Arbor.

He also taught for one year in Kearney, Neb. Then he came to Cedar Falls High S c h o o l , where he has re-mained for 36 years. He has taught sev-eral sub-jects over the years: A s i a n , Latin and A f r i c a n -Amer ican h i s t o r y , honors so-cial stud-ies, Ameri-c a n government, U.S. history, psy-chology and AP psychology. He finally decided to retire be-cause he “just kind of felt like it was time to move on.”

Senior AP psychology stu-

dent Anna Hubbard said that she feels sad that future AP

p s y c h o l -ogy stu-d e n t s won’t be able to have Blair-Broeker as a teacher, but she’s glad she had the opportuni-ty to learn p s y c h o l -ogy from him. “Blair-Broeker is one of the best teach-ers I’ve had at this

school. Not only is he a good person, but he really helps to prepare his students for col-lege,” Hubbard said.

Blair-Broeker said that his favorite part of teaching has

been the people. “Teaching is all about the people, both stu-dents and colleagues,” Blair-Broeker said. The worst part of teaching for him has been grading essays, cafeteria su-pervision and faculty meetings, and although teaching has its ups and downs, he really ap-preciates the career he’s had. “In many ways, teaching has been my life. It’s hard to imag-ine a more satisfying career,” Blair-Broeker said.

In his retirement, Blair-Broeker isn’t quite sure what he’s going to do. He hopes to do some teaching as an ad-junct if anyone will have him, and he thinks he’ll probably continue to write and conduct workshops for psychology teachers. Finally, Blair-Broeker said, “I’d like to travel more, keep the car cleaner and do lots more crossword puzzles.”

Senior AP psychology stu-dent Maddie Andreassen said that what she likes most about

Blair-Broeker is that he is very welcoming and makes you feel comfortable in class. She also said he adds funny things to whatever subject he is discuss-ing and makes the class infor-mative, while giving students something to look forward to every day. “I have to say that I am really sad to see him go, but I will respect his decision because I respect him a lot and want him to do what’s best for him. He is the best teacher I’ve ever had and possibly ever will,” Andreassen said.

Blair-Broeker is known at the high school for his intelli-gence and wisdom. With that, he has three words of advice to the students of Cedar Falls High School: “Find passion in your life. There is great satis-faction in accomplishing dif-ficult goals. Work every day to make the world a better place for everyone.”

By Editor-in-Chief MalloryVALLENTINE

Science teacher plans to retireafter teaching for 46 years

Next in the line of a slew of CFHS staff moving on for next year, biology teacher John Black has announced his retire-ment, or, as he likes to call it, “transition.” Whatever its title, Mr. Black definitely deserves it: this year marks his 46th year of teaching high school biology.

Mr. Black received his B.S. at UNI and his M.S. at North-ern Illinois University, and he served as a graduate teaching assistant at Northern Illinois for one year. He then taught at Monticello High School for 35 years.

After that particular “transi-tion,” he and his wife Patricia (who now teaches Spanish here) moved their children, Maria (’13) and current senior Carlos, to Argentina to get to know Mrs. Black’s relatives and learn some of the Argentinian

culture. “It was very successful three years,” Mr. Black said.

While in Argentina, Mr. Black taught biol-ogy in Eng-lish at a bi-lingual high s c h o o l . After that, the Blacks m o v e d back to Ce-dar Falls, where Mr. Black has taught for six years now. The first year he did a lot of substitute teaching, including a long-term subbing for fellow science

teacher Marcey Hand’s mater-nity leave. The next year, Mr.

Black was b r o u g h t on as a f u l l - t i m e s c i e n c e teacher.

M r . Black said he has al-ways en-joyed sci-ence, but he did not always plan to teach. “I was always interested in insects,” Mr. Black said. His father had

experience as a veterinar-ian assistant, so Mr. Black in-

tended to study pre-veterinary medicine at UNI. However, his brother was a teacher, and Mr. Black liked that direction as well, so instead of a vet, he be-came a biology teacher.

Despite his obvious pas-sion for science, Mr. Black ac-knowledges that after 46 years of teaching, it’s time to move on. In the future he plans to do some more substitute teach-ing, hone his photography skills and do some conserva-tion work.

Throughout his time here, Mr. Black has most enjoyed his interaction with the staff. Be-cause Cedar Falls High School has four other biology teach-ers, Mr. Black loves being able to share ideas with other teach-ers, something he was not able to do at his former schools. Mr. Black also enjoys the universal

positives of interacting with students.

Mr. Black is just one of many staff leaving CFHS this year, yet he is optimistic about the the future of the high school. “My attitude is, we’ll be missed, but others step in, and they’ll fit in quite well.”

The high school was lucky, however, to have found a teacher with such a deeply in-vested interest in his subject. Mr. Black has some advice for students interested in science and education, too: “Develop a passion for it,” he said.

By Editor-in-Chief EllenWALLINGFORD

John Black will retire at the end of the school year.

Charlie Blair-Broeker announced earlier this year that he is retiring.

Friday, April 11, 2014 HI-LINETiger

The

OPINION2Our View

Staff Writer Kaitlyn

BROCKA

Staff Writer Kaleb

BENGSTON

So everyone who plays video games hears something ridiculous about them, or something in the game that just sounds weird, right? How about we bring out some of the more popular theories about a few games.

Let’s start with some theo-ries about Pokemon. Did you know that, with some research of the games, some gamers believe that humans in the game of humans are actually Pokemon. In the games there are random bookcases scat-tered in random places of the games. You can sometimes interact with these bookcases and read some Pokemon his-tory. In a piece of Sinnoh Folk-lore it said that a Pokemon that lived in a forest “shed its hide to sleep as a human.” Does that not hint at the fact that Humans are Pokemon?

There’s also the fact that many Pokemon, especially psychic Pokemon, have the body figure of a human. Don’t forget thatevery single game has trainers that have psychic powers.

Now here’s something weird about the game Skyrim that everyone knows about be-cause literally every guard talks about it. It’s the strong rise of

getting an arrow in the knee, and sadly, it seems to happen to many guards in Skyrim.

What they mean is that they got married and “got an arrow to the knee” when they kneeled down to propose, but maybe they should have used a different saying because this one doesn’t seem to work too well. Would getting an arrow to the knee really be so bad as to make you stop adventuring and end up a boring old city guard? Unless the arrow hit the direct front of the knee, you would only have a ruined ten-don that could possibly heal, or if it hit you dead on, you end up with a shattered kneecap.

Well, since the world of Sky-rim is obviously based off the age of the Vikings, let’s look at a viking arrow. They were so long and power was needed to even fire the bows so that the arrows could penetrate the

enemies’ armor, skin and even make it to the horse the guy was riding.

Today, surgery could help most of the knee injuries, but back in the Viking age, people believed in spells and magic healing, which wouldn’t help very well. They also cured things by pushing the arrow through until it came out, which meant any bones or muscle in the way was ruined, so it’s sort of a miracle that Sky-rim people can even walk.

Now here’s the shock-ing part: you’re not the one shooting all these guys in the knees and letting them live, right? Have you read that one rule that says the doctor gets a piece of gold for each frag-ment of bone? It seems like the doctors of Skyrim are the only ones with any motive. Why do you not see any doctors in Skyrim? Well, they got rich and moved away somewhere warm leaving the handicapped Sky-rim by themselves. Theories are interesting — especially if you look way too far into them.

South by Southwest, or SXSW, ended just a couple weeks ago, and many impor-tant things happened. SXSW began in 1987 and was origi-nally a music festival. Over the years, it has become a hotspot for many technologies to showcase and companies to advertise. That does not mean music has stopped. Many bands played at SXSW, includ-ing B.o.B, The Ben Miller Band, Hed PE and many more, but recently SXSW has become a center point for new technolo-gies. Companies like Microsoft, Google, Rooster Teeth, Virtuix Omni and many other compa-nies, along with political cam-paigns, also showcased.

One of the popular attrac-tions of SXSW was Microsoft’s release of Titanfall, an ex-tremely popular game taking the Xbox community by storm. Titanfall is the first release by Respawn Entertainment, a company that was started by two of the creators of the Call of Duty series. Titanfall sales are skyrocketing, and now

the game is coupled with the Xbox One upon sale, a move Microsoft went for to increase Xbox One sales. It’s working: the Xbox One, with Titanfall included, has sold over 1 mil-lion systems. The premise was that people are buying the PS4 because it’s $100 cheaper. The Xbox One has the Kinect in it, which is expensive in itself, but a lot of people didn’t want to deal with the Kinect. So Micro-soft bundled the console and Titanfall together to make the price difference less shocking.

The classic Rooster Teeth podcast was showcased at SXSW, and half the crew, Gus and Gavin, were there to dis-cuss sponsors, gaming and Samsung’s new TV. The new 4K TV is the cutting edge of HD, with crisp images and a resolu-tion unlike any conventional TV we see. The standard Televi-sion has 1080 pixels, or 1080p, and the 4K TV has 4000p. That’s a huge jump from the standard 1080p. These TV’s are also known as Full Ultra HD TV’s, which sport 7680

x 4320 lines of pixels, com-pared to your standard UHDTV which contain a measly 3840 x 2160 lines of pixels. All of this sounds amazing, but there’s one issue: there’s no content that supports 4K TVs. But as on the podcast, Gavin Free made a good point that the develop-ment and marketing of these products will force companies to be the first ones to release content for it. That may seem like speculation, but people are going to want these TVs when there is content. The only counter to that is that compa-nies aren’t going to release things for the 4K because the market isn’t stable for them. The businesses feel too se-cure in the current generation of technology that they won’t delve into this new product.

SXSW had many tech show-cases and a competition was held for many tech experts, media and investors. The win-ner of the wearable category was the Silicon Valley startup Skully Helmets, creator of an augmented-reality motorcy-

cle helmet. The helmet has a 180-degree rear-view camera that projects images to a trans-parent headset display, so the driver’s eyes can see around them in every direction while never having to leave the road ahead. This beat out Google Glass, which was projected to win, but Skully Helmets snuck up and stole the victory and $4,000.

On a political aspect, a few things happened; Ed Snowden spoke via Skype and Come and Take It Austin had an open carry march. Snowden spoke along with American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) about Americans having to stand up and force a massive change and oversight of the power-grabbing NSA. “I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution. And I saw the Constitution was being violated on a massive scale,” he said to the 3,000 people in the auditorium at the Austin Convention Center, “South by Southwest and the tech com-munity, the people in the room in Austin, they’re the folks who

Austin festival spotlights next ‘big things’

Videogame fans debate myths

can fix this,” Snowden said earlier. “There’s a political re-sponse that needs to occur, but there’s also a tech response that needs to occur.” Snowden said that if he could do it again, he would. He said that it was something that needed to hap-pen. Come and Take It Austin marched along the streets of SXSW, and against what they suspected would happen, ev-erything went smoothly. They taught people that were in-terested about guns, and the people who didn’t care just went on with their day.

SXSW overall was really good this year, and Austin hopes to have an even bet-ter one in 2015. What kind of technologies will we see in a year? What political changes will have occurred? What new bands will have a chance to showcase themselves at the SXSW festival? Only a year stands between the end of this great SXSW and next year’s.

The Tiger Hi-Line is a weekly publication of the journalism classes at Cedar Falls High School, 1015 Division Street, Cedar Falls, Iowa 50613. Our website is www.hiline.cfschools.org. The Hi-Line is distributed to CFHS students on Fridays to read during their fifth period classes.

Columns and letters do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Hi-Line staff or Cedar Falls Schools. The Hi-Line editorial is presented weekly in the editorial labeled Our View, and it is the view of the major-ity of the editors listed below.

Reader opinions on any topic are welcome and should be sent to The Tiger Hi-Line staff or delivered to room 208. All letters must be signed. Letters must be submitted by 3 p.m. on Monday for publication in the following Friday edition. Letters may not exceed 300 words and may be edited to meet space limitations. Writers should include their contact information for verification.

Editors-in-Chief: Austin Anderson, Martha Hall, Mallory Vallen-tine and Ellen Wallingford Staff: Zuhayr Alam, Kaleb Bengston, Kaitlyn Brocka, Macken-zie Dallenbach and Abby Young

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Senior Chioma Onuigbo gives blood at the Lifeserve drive. The blood drive raised 83 pints of blood from 82 first-time donors for 249 pa-tients. Way to go, donors and all involved.

Friday, April 11, 2014HI-LINETiger

The

SPORTS 3Athlete

Weekofthe

Senior Carlos Black is one of three returning seniors to have contributed to last year’s team. He leads a defensive line that has produced three shutouts in four games and has only given up two goals all year.

How long have you been playing soccer?

I’ve been playing since I was in preschool. My mom, being from Argentina, really wanted me to play soccer, and so I’ve been playing all these years.

How is the coaching change from Printz to Steffy?

They’re not really different, he and Printz. They’re really close, and they have the same coaching style. I’ve had Steffy since freshman year, so he really knows our strengths and weaknesses.

How is the team looking? We’ve played pretty well. I think

we have a possibility of having a re-ally good team this year and have a good chance at making it to State. That’s our goal, and I think we can accomplish that.

What do you do to get ready for games? What do you jam out to pregame?

A lot of rap, Kendrick Lamar. I like to stay chill; I don’t do a lot. I like to get to the games early so I can take my time and start to focus in.

Do you model your game af-ter anyone? Carles Puyol, he plays centerback for Barcelona and the Spanish National Team and Dante from Brazil. They’re both center backs and play defense, so I really admire their games and try to play how they play.

Carlos Black Soccer

TigersActionin

Men’s Track April 11 Bob Varley Invite

@ Loras College 11:30 a.m.Women’s Track

April 12 @ CR Kennedy10 a.m.

Men’s Tennis(5-0)April 11 @ Ames

4 p.m.Women’s Tennis(3-0)April 15 Vs CR Prarie

4 p.m.Men’s Soccer(3-1)April 14 @ Linn-Mar

5:15 p.m.Women’s Soccer(0-1)April 14 Vs Linn-Mar

5 p.m.Women’s Golf(1-0)

April 15 MVC Triangular @ Pheasant Ridge 3:15 p.m.

ANDERSON By Editor-in-Chief Austin

Crazy 2014 ranks with Maddest of March tourneys

Young women’s golf team opens with promising win

Pure Madness. The 2014 NCAA Tourna-ment was absolutely

insane. It was full of inconceiv-able upsets, exhilarating fin-ishes and soul crushing defeats. To make things even crazier, bil-lionaire Warren Buffett, vowed one billion dollars to anyone who was able to get every sin-gle pick correct.

With that opportunity dan-gling, 11 million brackets were submitted on ESPN.com, an all time high for the website. The most common champion se-lected was No.1 seed Florida who were picked by one out of every four people.

President Barack Obama se-lected No. 1 seeds Florida and Arizona to go with No. 4 seeds Michigan State and Louisville. He predicted Michigan State to top Louisville. Although he only hit on one Final Four team, Obama fell in the 73.8 percen-tile.

The madness started in the very first game when No. 11 seed Dayton from the Atlan-tic-10 upset Big 10 powerhouse Ohio State and 80 percent of brackets on ESPN.com were already busted. Dayton would make it all the way to the Elite

Eight under the direction of Archie Miller, the brother of Ari-zona head coach Sean Miller.

The round of 64 frenzy con-tinued as upsets like North Da-kota State over Oklahoma, Ste-phen F. Austin over VCU and Harvard over Cincinnati kicked off the tournament’s madness.

No. 8 seed Kentucky added a big upset over Wichita State in the round of 32. Wichita State came in as the first to en-ter the tournament undefeated since UNLV did it in 1991, but the Shockers’ perfect 34-0 season ended 34-1 after point guard Fred Van Vleet’s shot couldn’t find the bottom of the net as time expired.

John Callipari and his five starting freshmen moved on to face defending national cham-pions Louisville for the second time. Kentucky got the upper-hand in the first matchup win-ning 73-66 and made it a twin killing as they won the Sweet 16 matchup 74-69. The Wildcats moved on to face the Wolver-ines of Michigan where fresh-man Aaron Harrison hit a game winning three pointer with 2.3 seconds left to send Kentucky to their second Final Four in three years.

The Big 10’s Wisconsin came up next in the Final Four. The Wildcats were down two. Andrew Harrison passed it to his twin brother Aaron, who hit a nearly identical shot from three as the one that in an ear-lier game had propelled his team over Michigan. The Wild-cats had beaten Wisconsin. Big Blue Nation and Kentucky would face the University of Connecticut in the champion-ship game.

No. 7 seed UConn didn’t take the easy route to the Fi-nal Four. In the opening round they were taken to overtime and nearly beaten in the very first game by St. Joe’s. The Huskies then went on to beat No. 2 VIllanova, a banged up No. 3 Iowa State and pos-sible tournament favorite No. 4 Michigan State to advance to the Final Four. They were pit-ted up against the top seed in the entire tournament, Florida, who was riding a 30-game win-ning streak. UConn defeated Florida 63-53 and were the first seven seed to ever make an ap-pearance in the title game.

In the unlikely matchup, UConn stormed out to an early lead behind senior Shabazz

Napier, and while Kentucky came within a single point, three separate times in the sec-ond half, they were unable to replicate what the Fab Five of Michigan did and win the title with five freshmen starters.

Napier was named the Final Four’s most outstanding player and will likely be picked in the first round of the NBA draft along with many of his Ken-tucky competitors.

The 2014 tournament might have been the best yet, and while the national runner up was filled with freshmen, the “year of the freshmen” head-lined by Andrew Wiggins, Jabari Parker, and Joel Embiid never lived up to the hype as none of those players were able to advance to the Sweet 16.

There are still some deci-sions to be made on futures, but three teams to look out for next season are Wisconsin, Duke, and Arizona.

March Madness solidified its place as the best time of the sports year this season, and I know I’m not alone in saying this, I can’t wait until next year.

The last time women’s golf coach Megan Youngkent had a team this young and tal-ented was in 2009. For the next four years, the women’s team qualified for State behind the smooth strokes of Allison Rollinger and Megan Brewer. Those girls helped the Tigers finish seventh in 2010, win the title in 2011 and finish second in 2012. In 2013, the girls fin-ished a disappointing fourth after less than ideal conditions allowed for only one round to be played.

Rollinger, who finished fourth individually at State, and Brewer were among six of the seven varsity players to gradu-ate in 2013. The only varsity member returning is sopho-more Emily Braun who along with junior Kristie Boyle, were named team captains. “Emily and Kristie are our captains and the team chose them. They’ve been designated our leaders but really at any time there’s freshmen helping juniors and vice versa,” Youngkent said.

Boyle is coming into her first varsity campaign and with no seniors on the team, is excited to step into the leadership role

that comes along with her cap-taincy. “I’m just trying to pre-pare myself for whatever things come. I’m just making sure the team is focused and can reach our goal of State.”

To go along with the cap-tains, sophomore Alex Miller joins freshmen Taylor Sernett and twins Hannah and Hailey Bermel on the group of six that will compete at varsity meets. The Bermel twins come from a rich bloodline of golfers as their father, John Bermel, was an All-American at Central College. He has competed in 15 PGA Professional National Cham-pionships since 1991 and last year qualified for his first U.S. Senior Open. He was the 2012 Iowa professional golfer of the year and has 13 career hole in

ones. He also currently coaches the men’s and women’s teams at UNI as well as is the PGA head professional at Pheasant Ridge Golf Course.

Their brother Jacob record-ed two top 11 finishes at State, and their sister Abby had an il-lustrious career playing for Ce-dar Falls. She finished fourth in her senior season at State and qualified for three state meets. She and her team missed quali-fying by a few strokes her soph-omore year, but she was able to play through a stress fracture her junior year and individually finish ninth. “My whole family absolutely loves golf, and so I know we are all super proud of the girls, and I know this is the beginning of two great careers for them,” Abby said.

The team got off to a great start to their season, beating Waverly 193-223. Hannah and Hailey Bermel joined Emily Braun with a low score of 49 as the Tigers edged the Go-Hawks to start their season off the right way.

“They’re resilient and they can roll with the punches. They could have come into the club-house pretty upset, and they weren’t happy about their score, but they used it as drive for what they needed to work on,” Youngkent said.

The Tigers lost six seniors from last year’s state qualify-ing team and have one of the youngest teams of any sport at Cedar Falls as half their varsity roster are freshman. Youngkent isn’t worried. “When the sea-son ended last year, everyone came up to me and said, ‘Oh my, goodness you’re losing all these great seniors.’ I think people will be surprised when I show up with a van of freshmen that are gonna pick up right where (last year’s team) left off.”

YOUNGKENT

“I think people will be surprised when I show up with a van of freshmen that are gonna pick up right where (last year’s team) left off.” —Golf Coach Megan

ANDERSON By Editor-in-Chief Austin

Friday, April 11, 2014 HI-LINETiger

The

SPORTS4

Jensen Kaufman Rachel Paup Becky Hughes Ariana Mitra Sophie Mallaro

Maddie McCann

Mallory Vallentine

Agatha Fenech Photos

Mia Poleksić and Rachel Paup

The women’s tennis team has started off the season undefeated. The team has played in one tourna-ment beating Mason City 9-0 and Waverly Shell Rock, winning 6-3. The team took the top three places in both singles matches and doubles matches. Sophie Mallaro was the first singles champion, Madison McCann was the second singles champion and Becky Hughes was the third singles champion. For doubles, Mallaro and Ariana Mitra were the first doubles champions, McCann and Hughes were the second doubles champions and Mia Poleksic and Rachel Paup won the third doubles championship. The team had a match against Linn-Mar and came up with a win of five to four.

This year the team has five of the

eight varsity players returning on the team. The team has one big goal for the season: to make it to State.

Although the team was one match away from making it to State last year, the women’s tennis team has never made it to the state tournament. “This team will need everyone to play up to their potential for this season to be what we hope it will be,” head coach Mike Knox said.

There is only one senior on the var-sity team this year, Sophie Mallaro. Af-ter high school Mallaro is planning on staying involved in tennis by being on a club team. “I’m going to miss the atmo-sphere at the meets and the competi-tion, but most of all, I’m going to miss my amazing teammates,” Mallaro said.

YOUNG By Staff Writer Abby

Opening Winners

Junior Mia Poleksić runs to the ball during her doubles match with partner Rachel Paup. The pair won the third doubles championship.

Tennis team starts strong with victories over Mason City, Waverly and Linn-Mar