APRIL FOOLS EDITION:
Public School Administrator by Day, Mind Reader by Night
NEIRAD enilno edition
Did you know that Principal Haron is a psychic?
Believe it, DHS. Our very own Mr. Haron, who describes himself as a simple bookworm and basketball fan, has a second side to himself that is blowing—and perhaps penetrating—minds all across DHS.
Recent demonstrations of his extra-sensory abilities have turned many BC Calculus students from skeptics into believers—myself included. Mr. Haron has been cooking up magic in his A-wing classroom, and not just in the form of intricate differential equations.
Mr. Haron has performed two amazing psychic tricks for his lucky students, the first of which I have only heard rumors of (but still attest to its truthfulness). As the story goes, Mr. Haron incepted a psychic connection between BC student Steven Ciasullo and his unsuspecting girlfriend, Katie Vodola. He influenced both students, in separate classes and separate wings of the building, to randomly select the same symbol from a pile. If you really don’t believe Mr. Haron can do this, I reference you to the end of our most recent Blue Wave News.
How does this work, you ask? Have you ever seen Ghostbusters? Try to remember the first scene, where Bill Murray is conducting a science experiment with symbol-cards, an electrode, a nerdy male grad student, and a hot girl, doing more flirting than experimenting. Well, that’s not quite how our experiment ran, but there is a parallel.
Those cards Murray used are actually real tools of paranormal science, called Zener Cards, and Mr. Haron uses them frequently to demonstrate his abilities. A set of these comprises of five cards with a symbol—a star, square, circle, cross, or wave pattern—on one side and a blank surface on the other. They have been used at institutions such as Duke and Princeton to test the pseudoscience of parapsychology. Add DHS to that list.
I had the privilege of experiencing the second trick first hand. It resembled one of those games you see at baseball stadiums where you have to identify a token hidden under a moving hat. Differences: Mr. Haron didn’t have the luxury of being shown where the token was initially placed, and had five options to choose from—two more chances to be wrong.
After one student escorted Mr. Haron out of the room, we slid the five Zener Cards into small, opaque manila envelopes: four cards face-up and one card face-down for Mr. Haron to pick out with his psychic abilities. Even though there is no way he could have seen which envelop we put the downwards-facing card in, we shuffled the envelopes around for good measure. Then we welcomed Mr. Haron back into the room.
Mr. Haron calmly sat down at a desk where the identical envelops were laid out, setting aside the ones he believed did not contain the downwards-facing card one at a time. When he got down to his last two choices, his hand hovered over one envelop for a second, as if he were trying to divine its contents with his palm, and then the other. Back and forth, fifty-fifty. After considering both, tension rising, cue the dark string crescendo, he took that first envelop and set it aside, convinced the downward facing card would be in the last envelop remaining directly in front of him.
He opened the discarded cards one by one. Circle. Cross. Square. Back down to the last two cards. Imagine our amazement when Mr. Haron’s fingers slowly drew out an upwards facing star. He did it. He had correctly singled out the one downwards facing card, with no guidance but from the magic powers in his head. For kicks, we opened that last packet, and sure enough it contained face-down stripes.
There were gasps and wide-eyes a-plenty. He had our entire class jaw-dropped. And we’re no impressionable, meddling kids—Mr. Haron certainly does not teach remedial addition in his spare time. We are Calculus students, possibly the most literal, math/science-oriented students in the entire school. You know if Mr. Haron has us believing in magic, there must be some teeth to the issue.
So I investigated, asking some teachers around the school about Mr. Haron’s psychic history as a sort of background check. Seems like his story checks out.
AP Chem teacher Mr. Ruggierri tells me that in his 14 years of knowing Mr. Haron, he’s always been impressed by the principal’s pyschic abilities. He claims that “Mr. Haron’s powers are so great that he knew as a fetus what day he would be born on.”
Mr. Marash, Physics teacher, also vouched for Mr. Haron. He told me a little bit about what it’s like to work for a psychic: “I’ll walk into his office to ask something, but before I say anything he’ll tell me ‘the answer to your question is yes,’ or ‘no,’ or ‘I’ll think about it and get back to you later.’”
“It makes my job easier. You don’t have to have a conversation—he just BOOM hits you with an answer.”
Mr. Marash also postulated that while Mr. Haron’s abilities make teachers’ lives easier, it must be a very difficult load for him to bear. Certainly, “the task of filtering out all those voices he hears” is not an enviable one.
Images of a recent Fringe episode come to mind, where a heroic telepath is crippled by the assaulting tsunami of unwanted human thought he encounters in populated places, forcing him into self-imposed exile. Mr. Haron, on the other hand, seems quite happy to have his abilities at his disposal.
It seems Mr. Haron has succeeded thus far in refining and mastering his powers–think Obi Wan instead of young Annakin. While he tells me he can’t put a date on the first time he discovered them, he says he “explored” them in college. Right. College is a great time for exploration, isn’t it?
All kidding aside, Mr. Haron has a history of post-secondary excellence. He has degrees from two Ivys, an undergraduate at Penn and a graduate at Columbia. I suspect, though, that he really was getting around inside the elite league, paying secret visits to a shocking third Ivy League institution: Princeton’s Engineering Anomalies Research center, or PEAR.
Behind that unassuming acronym and intelligent-sounding title is a very controversial organization whose sole purpose was to prove and improve the field of parapsychology with the scientific method. Shady and privately funded–some suspect the Soviet Military–it was recently shut down amid massive public criticism. In Mr. Haron’s day, though, the institution was thriving and only a short weekend drive away from Colombia or Penn.
With these abilities, I imagined Mr. Haron would have been tempted to quit school and make it big in Vegas or Atlantic City. Mr. Haron assures me, though, that “I only use my powers for good.” He tells me they’re very useful in his job, helping him “get to the bottom of some mysteries”–and, of course, in the occasional poker game against Mr. Dooley.
Mr. Dooley can attest to that last statement, responding with a laugh, “we’ve all funded his children’s college educations that way.” I repeat, only for good.
So, if you have any sense in you, you know to watch what you say around Mr. Haron. Hopefully, next time you see him walking down the hall, you will make sure to watch what you think as well.
One last thing: Mr. Haron, using his powerful psychic abilities, has one radical prediction: tomorrow is Saturday, and Sunday comes afterwards.
