Spirit Week is designed as a friendly competition between grades that brings together the MFS community. This year, tensions between grades ultimately caused the week to lose its friendly aspects.

A rift formed between the seniors and juniors on the Wednesday of Spirit Week, after the Juniors defeated the Seniors in both of the boys’ and girls’ Tug-of-War events. A heated war of words ensued on Twitter between the senior and junior classes.

Reflecting on the incident, juniors and seniors had similar opinions of the fight. One anonymous senior, when asked about his feelings toward the fight, claimed, “[The fight] was just a build-up of tension between classes and not as big of a deal as everybody made it out to be.” Junior Scott Abrams,

had a similar opinion, “Tensions between the junior and senior class got to a certain point that they should not have gotten to.” He continued, “I personally believe it was no one’s goal from the junior class to start a twitter fight.”

The popular implication made by many students at MFS is that the school has people spying on them online, but Mike Brunswick, Dean of Upper School students, disproved this statement, saying, “The school finds out about certain information on social media only by students, or parents making the school aware of any problems that may occur on social media.”

Now, with Spirit Week 2013 in the past, one can only question the effects that social media will have on future Spirit Weeks.  Brunswick predicted, “I think [the way social media will be used] could be 50/50, I’d like to see it used properly and that is a possibility, but ultimately, I think social media could hinder the Spirit Week enjoyment more than it could help it.” With an opposing opinion, one anonymous senior thinks that “social media will positively take over all aspects of getting information around about meetings and updates from all grades.”