HMSA Students Participate in the Super Spectacular “Superhero Week”
Superhero Week, held October 17 through October 21, was a calling to all HMSA comic book and nerd/geek culture fanatics. Throughout the first four days of the week, students were able to enter a raffle to win prizes from the famous San Diego Comic Con held this past summer. Ms. Enger provided the prizes and was generous to raffle off the items to students.
Entering the raffle was fairly simple. To get a ticket, students had to show Ms. Enger a valid public library card or check a book out from the HMSA library. With every ticket submission, the students kept half of their ticket (to know what their number was) and chose a Comic Con bookmark to keep. There were multiple bookmarks to choose from, and they all had pictures of various “Marvel” and “DC” comics superheroes encouraging reading. There were multiple prizes to be given out, but Ms. Enger wanted to keep the actual prizes a secret; she kept them in a large, black bag in the corner of the library.
After school on Friday, I attended the raffle drawing in the library. Despite it being a Friday, there was quite a few students patiently waiting in the library for the raffle to commence. I also wanted to win some of the prizes, so I checked out two books from the library and received two tickets. I put the tickets in the semi-full jar and picked two bookmarks from the table. At about 3:15 p.m., Ms. Enger made the announcement that she was going to start pulling out tickets. The room fell silent as all the students surrounding me optimistically grasped their tickets, in hopes of winning a prize. Ms. Enger announced each prize individually, and then announced the winning ticket right after. The prizes started off small, then progressively got bigger and more valuable. With every prize announcement, the whole library erupted in yelling, “I want that” or “That’s so cool.” Many times, the winning ticket belonged to a person who was not in the room. It was not mandatory for any person who entered the raffle to be present for the actual drawing; Ms. Enger saved that person’s prize. After multiple items including t-shirts, decorative bags, and novelty items were given away, Ms. Enger announced that the only prizes remaining were the grand prizes. The grand prizes were from the Star Trek franchise, including “Spock” ears and multiple Blu-Ray DVD’s of the Star Trek movies. Unfortunately, the winners were not present to claim their prize directly, but I’m positive they were content with their winnings.
I spoke with some of the winners and attendees of the event. I asked Junior Sharleen B. what she thought of the event: “Overall, I thought that the raffle and Superhero week was pretty cool since you could win prizes by doing simple things like showing your library card or borrowing a book from the library. I did not win a prize, but I still enjoyed being at the raffle ticket drawing.” Another Junior, Awele A., who did not attend the event, but won a “Justice League” recyclable bag said that she “at first didn’t know what to do with the bag because it was so big, but then remembered about ‘superhero’ day for spirit week. [She] decided to wear it for that day.”
Overall, Superhero Week was a great experience and a great amount of gratitude goes out to Ms. Enger for organizing this event and offering all the special items to HMSA students.
