Matador Mondays Revisited
Leadership’s Matador Recognition commission revives Matador Mondays project to celebrate the school year during shelter in place
April 10, 2020
In an effort to get people to reminisce about the 2019-20 school year, Leadership’s Matador Recognition commission (Mat Rec) has decided to re-open their Matador Mondays project, a series of posts every Monday celebrating different groups, including classes and clubs. Although Matador Mondays were originally designed to celebrate various students and faculty members with video clips of friends and peers, Mat Rec wanted to change the theme in order to give students something to celebrate at home.
“With school being canceled, we were looking for a way to make students feel better about it,” Mat Rec commissioner and junior Kayla Israni said. “And so we were thinking about all the events that had been canceled or given as much recognition as they usually would have. So then we were like, ‘Oh, let’s just do a little flashback reel of everything,’ so we can recognize people.”
The first groups that Mat Rec chose were the Bollywood dance groups: Bhangra, Raas and Andaaz. Mat Rec commissioner and junior Akash Dubey, who is a part of Andaaz, reached out to members of each of the groups, compiling various clips and photos from the year to use. The videos were then posted on the Mat Rec Instagram account (@mvmatrec).
According to Mat Rec commissioner and senior Trudie Ngo, finding ways to represent individuals on a digital platform has posed certain challenges.
“[Shelter in place hasn’t affected] the planning process, but [rather] how we create the projects,” Ngo said. “We can only do things on social media, and we can’t make food or gifts to give out to people anymore, so the crafty aspect is not part of it anymore, which makes me kind of sad.”
Although Matador Mondays has been on hiatus since Dec. 2, 2019, the commissioners believe that the overall public reception has been positive, with each post garnering an average of 370 views. However, after evaluating the videos during the Leadership period, Dubey says that there are a few issues that Mat Rec is looking to improve.
“We are making the videos more consistent [because] we posted three videos and they were all three different lengths,” Dubey said. “Also, [we want] more promo on the posts themselves because only [Mat Rec] commissioners and then MVHS official Instagram shouted out the posts and not very many people saw them at first.
