Everything was quiet on the third floor of CHS as the hours of the fifth block ticked by. A few scattered students studied on folding tables in the third-floor hallway and muffled discussions wafted from nearby classrooms. Suddenly, a door slammed. Careening around the corner, seniors Owen Swaney and Ryan Grant were locked in intense combat. With fellow members of their class spectating the ordeal, they each delivered a final blow before hurrying back to their classroom.
What just occurred was not the boiling over of a long, bitter feud, but rather the opposite: Swaney and his friends unwinding on their break from calculus class. Swaney often takes an intense approach to his breaks and finds they help him return to class refreshed, re-energized and ready to learn.
“We just start messing around on break to let our minds drift off from school a little bit,” Swaney said. “We’d be goofing off in the hallway, and then we just kind of start fighting because it’s fun and we can.”
We believe play fights during math class are just an example of one of CHS’s most important strengths: the freedom to be silly. Silliness helps us bond and form new friendships; it helps us recharge our batteries for more serious things to come. Perhaps most importantly, it teaches us how to live our lives the way we want and not in the tired patterns of those before us.
You may have heard that everything happens for a reason. Sometimes, too much reason can get in the way of the things that matter. Letting go of reason and doing things for fun helps us find ourselves. Colin Courage knows this better than most.
Those familiar with the halls of CHS will recognize the game of Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em robots that sits, often unused, in the third-floor hallway. Courage had been playing with friends when the Blue Bomber was violently ejected from the match.
“I broke the robots by punching [my opponent] so hard that the robot flew off the board,” Courage said. “It’s a good game, and especially because Vial has it out there during school, it’s a go-to.”
Through the lens of silliness, places that once seemed ordinary and dull can be transformed into landscapes full of opportunities to discover something new, just like the third-floor hallway on that fateful Friday. Go through life playfully, and before long, time will have been spent making genuine memories.
Still, it’s no secret that life has its challenges. The ability to face down difficulties is a tremendously valuable life skill, but not one that’s easy to come by. The good news is that with just a little silliness, obstacles that once seemed insurmountable crumble away.
As the reigning school chubby bunny champion, Thomas Radesky’s challenges might be more unique than most. The chubby bunny challenge is simple: fit as many marshmallows in your mouth as possible.
On Jan. 10, 2025, Radesky reclaimed the school record with an astonishing 58 marshmallows. Radesky’s success at marshmallow stuffing is powered by his capacity for fun. Without his sense of silliness, the challenge would lose its appeal and he would not be the champion today. Motivation is key in the face of hard challenges, and silliness provides a boundless supply.
“It’s a silly challenge, and I’m really competitive,” Radesky said. “There’s this push to be super mature, but you always have to be a little silly, otherwise, you just get cold.”
Claiming the title is no small feat. It took Radesky time and practice before he could attempt to take the record. Even after taking it once, Ripley Huffman, another freshman, claimed the title with 52 marshmallows.
This battle of jaw flexibility and silliness made for more fun than just one person doing something silly. Silliness is not just something to be kept, it is something to be shared. Even though Huffman and Radesky shared theirs through silly competition, that’s not how it always has to be.
Sometimes, it takes a team. Sometimes, it can even take months to perfect. The theater is a perfect outlet for group silliness: drilling silliness into a group of people over and over again makes them pretty silly.
For Toula Greenawalt, who played Hermia in CET’s production of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” being a part of theater strengthens her silliness by allowing her to play with how she expresses herself.
“It’s a place where you can experiment with yourself and just have as much fun as possible,” Greenawalt said. “When I’m performing, I try to ham it up and make people laugh.”
But being silly isn’t always easy, especially when you have a team working with you and a crowd to entertain. Although silliness is light-hearted and carefree in essence, obtaining silliness in its concentrated form requires work and dedication. Just like everything in life, effortless silliness is not free. It has to be honed, crafted and given the right place to grow. For us, Community High School is that place.
Where else would you find a place where teachers put Rock’em Sock’em robots in the hallway for people to play with? Where else would you find a school with people who want to stuff their faces full of marshmallows for fun? Where else would you find people who are encouraged to be silly? That is what makes our students and school so truly wonderful.
Captured in this article are five tiny slices of silliness from throughout our school. It may seem like a lot, but no matter how many interviews or photos we take, we can never see more than a slice of the true silliness of school. All we can do here is share snippets of silly stories and hope that they have lessons to teach you. Just like the one CHS freshman Foster Cardoza taught us.
We think silliness means being able to walk into a room and instantly brighten the mood. This doesn’t have to be something big: as Cardoza demonstrates, it can be as simple as wearing a bunch of hats.
“I was going to wear one hat but I just decided, why not wear all of them? There was no real reason,” Cardoza said. “I do it to lighten up the mood, get people to laugh… It’s a good conversation starter. Like, you walk into a room, and you’re just wearing ten hats.”
Cardoza chose to be silly. He had an option between conformity and originality and chose the latter. He didn’t have to wear the hats. They didn’t serve any purpose. But they were silly.
