![Adding a tray of canned corn to the pile, junior Michael Collop assists in transporting donations for the Holiday Food Drive. The event, hosted schoolwide from Dec. 10-17, raised over 5,000 food items to deliver to the Parkway Food Pantry, helping several families in need. [The drive] is a great thing for us to do because you're giving to those who are less fortunate, and it helps provide for people who can't provide for themselves. [The] competition is always fun, too. It was fun to be in [social studies teacher Jess] Chazen’s class, because he always gets worked up over [the competition]. He made it exciting, and was always convincing us to turn in cans for the drive,” Collop said.](https://bestofsno.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/feature-photo-unsung-2.png)
![NEW CHALLENGE, NEW TEAM MEMBERS: Every season, VEX creates a new game that robotics team members are faced with and have to build a robot to compete in. This year’s game forces students to create a robot that is able to stack rings onto mobile goals in order to score points. The change in games each season is something that robotics teacher Audrea Moyers appreciates.
“One of the things that I like about VEX is that they have a new problem to solve every year,” she said. ¨Even though the equipment’s the same, they have to analyze the game, and they have to come up with solutions that are unique that year. They are using their knowledge from prior years, but they have to kind of redesign a problem.”
As returning teams were faced a new game, some new teams and members had to adapt to a uncommon playing field and game.
“Three of our four teams were competing for the first time this year, and they had very different experiences match to match, so I think they learned a lot,¨ she said. ¨It’s hard just watching a video online to know how it’s actually going to be in person, so they all learned a lot about what gameplay is like, how to work with an alliance partner [and] how to adapt during the day to changes.”](https://bestofsno.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_9283-1-1200x800.jpg)
On an average school day, after school, sophomore Lisa Tao spends 30 minutes on TikTok, scrolling through countless videos. One video she comes across offers a video that suggests “The Bell Jar,” written in 1963 by Sylvia Plath. Intrigued by the recommendation, Lisa decides to look more into the book and the author’s background, which the video mentioned.
On her “For You” page, this type of video is not uncommon. In fact, approximately half of the videos’s Lisa watches are from BookTok, a subculture of TikTok dedicated to discussing books.
BookTok — which offers recommendations, reviews and discussions of a broad range of literature — has become widely popular among teens, yet it has amassed mixed reactions among its viewers. While some enjoy BookTok’s recommendations and the space it provides for discourse, others have found its promoted books to lack diverse representation.
“There’re so many different kinds of books there, and it’s just really interesting to see such a wide set of books being shown in teen media,” Lisa said.
Sophomore Sinéad Nagubadi has enjoyed numerous book recommendations from the platform. However, she said many of the books she initially saw promoted on BookTok lacked diverse voices.
“TikTok pushes forward a lot of authors who don’t really understand good representation,” she said. “And then the good books with accurate representation are kind of pushed into the shadows.”
Middle school librarians Tad Andracki and Amy Atkinson appreciate the way BookTok has encouraged readers to engage with books they might have otherwise not seen. They utilized BookTok’s popularity to create a display dedicated to some of the books promoted by TikTok’s algorithm, as well as other related options.
“Students will really latch on to one particular title that they’ve seen on BookTok that have been amplified by, like, the algorithm,” Mr. Andracki said. “But what our display was able to do was also take those recommendations and say, ‘Here’s something else that you might also be interested in reading that hasn’t been picked up by BookTok.’”
The algorithm is also impacting the publishing industry, as shown by data from the NPD BookScan, which displays the top selling books from each month, many of which are widely popular on BookTok. NPD Books’ executive director of business development and the primary industry analyst, Kristen McLean, credits BookTok’s growing popularity with the rise in print sales from 2020 to 2021 in the fiction category.
“Overall, reading the book was a really interesting and thought-provoking experience,” Lisa said. “I would definitely look to BookTok again for another recommendation.”
This story was originally published on U-High Midway on September 22, 2022.