Two places to pay attention | Editorial

Published 1:30 am Tuesday, May 19, 2026

At the cell phone forum at Vashon High School last week, I found myself sitting in the back of a cafeteria, lifting my phone to take a photo of the PowerPoint slide on the wall.

Almost immediately, I thought back to all the times I did the same thing in high school — snapping a photo of a homework assignment, a due date, a teacher’s notes. I thought about listening to podcasts with friends in art classes, about the quiet ways phones slipped into the school day, useful one minute and distracting the next.

Phones are not just toys, and they are not just tools. For students, they are both.

A phone can help a student remember an assignment, contact a parent, translate a word or document a lesson. It can also pull them away from the people sitting right beside them.

That same week, at Ober Park, I sat in the audience for Friends of Mukai’s annual Day of Exile program, marking 84 years since 111 Nikkei islanders were forced from Vashon under Executive Order 9066.

I was brought to tears listening to artist Miya Sukune speak about the people her new sculpture, “Remember,” was made to honor. She did not talk about them as figures in a history book. She talked about neighbors. Mothers. Daughters. Sons. Fellow islanders.

She talked about children leaving home with suitcases, not knowing where they were going or whether they would return. She talked about families whose lives were uprooted not somewhere far away, but here — at Ober Park, on Vashon Island.

It was a reminder that remembering is not passive. It asks something of us.

In the same week, this job meant sitting in the back of a classroom, thinking about what students need now, and sitting in Ober Park, listening as an island remembered who was taken from it.

— Aspen Anderson, Editor