This year’s Gym Night theme Workin’ for the Weekend has come as a surprise for many Neshaminy High School students. Students have mixed feelings regarding the theme and the opportunity for it to produce entertaining performances as well as a fair competition.
In a poll conducted using students from all grade levels at NHS asking whether or not they liked this year’s theme, the results were pretty evenly split, with 54% of students saying they like it and 46% saying they do not.
The students who like it stated that the theme is “original,”
“creative,” and “has a lot of potential for good ideas”. People who are against it said that it is “boring” and “confusing”.
The main complaint from most students about this theme is that it seems unfair to certain grades. Each grade level for the Red and Blue teams have a different, specific occupation as their dance theme, and students suspect that it will not be an equal competition.
In the same poll, students ranked the specific themes from best to worst, and the overall highest-scoring favorite theme was Detectives, which has been chosen by Red sophomores. Coming in second place was Astronauts, the theme for Red seniors. In third was Scientists, for Blue juniors. After that comes the Red freshmen’s Safari Guides, Blue
sophomores’ Archaeologists, Red juniors’ Troops or Armed Forces, Blue
freshmen’s Directors, and lastly, Blue seniors’ Authors.
Of the four grade levels, two of them, Sophomores and Juniors, have the Blue theme ranked higher than the Red theme. The other two, Freshmen and Seniors, have the Red theme ranked higher.
While this means both teams are favored equally, students don’t want the winners to be determined by the theme; they want it to be
determined by the quality of the dances.
The following question in the poll showed that 46% of students think that the dance themes guarantee which team will win, 27.7% said they have no idea, and only 26.3% said they don’t think the themes determine the winner. The majority of students believe that the winners are unfairly decided.
However, despite the contradicting views on this year’s theme,
students still love Gym Night. Arguably NHS’s biggest tradition, most
students want to participate no matter what the theme. 82.5% of students
reported that the Gym Night theme was not a factor in making the deciding of whether or not to participate in Gym Night.
It’s safe to say that although there are many different views on the theme of this years Gym Night, everyone is looking forward to March 3 and 4 to see which team will come out on top this year!