School Visit 6

April 30, 2010

This was my first extended visit to the Bat Cave. The first class that I was there for took place in the library. It was Law Day, and Mrs. Qwerty had gotten the Chief Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court, the President Elect of the Rhode Island Bar Association, and a lawyer to come and talk to the students. These three people talked about laws, especially cyber bullying. They talked at length about the girl from Massachusetts who recently committed suicide because of bullying. At the end of their presentation, they offered all of the student’s free legal advice. The students (all 8th graders) asked different question about family court, and how long people go to prison for different offences. One student asked how hard it was to go to law school, and another asked how much money the Chief Justice made.
After this class disbanded, it was back to Mrs. Qwerty’s room for the 7th grade classes. I was there for the rest of the morning, and for the two afternoon classes that I am usually there for, the only difference being that it was a Friday, and not a Wednesday (when I am usually there). The students were given book work, and a work sheet that they needed to complete.
In one of the classes that I had never been in before, a student, “Columbus” would not stop talking to me and do his work. He wanted to know everything about me, where I went to school, where I worked, what I was going to do in the summer, what I was going to do when I graduate… the questions never stopped. After a little while, he decided that he wanted to give me a verbal tour of the city. He told me about every street, and which streets connect to which streets, and how to get to different sections of the city, and then where to go to get the best ice cream (a woman with a cart, and it’s actually Italian ice). I thought that this student might be ADHD, or have something wrong with him, but within the last 10 minutes of class, he sat quietly, on his own accord, finished all of the work for the day, and had plenty of time to spare. He told me that at his old school he was in the gifted program, but when he transferred in, there was no room in the classes that late in the semester. He told me that all of the work that he was doing was too easy, and he is bored in class all of the time. He then asked Mrs. Qwerty if he could look at his grades in the grade book, then found his average out to five decimal placed to show me that he was smart. He was rather proud of how intelligent he was.
One student that I was working with “Spike” would not stop talking about God. I would get him on task, and within five minutes, he would tell me “there is not God but Jehovah.” The child who kept saying this was Asian, and Mrs. Qwerty asked him “isn’t your family Buddhist?” he replied that the whole family was, and then went off about Jehovah again… It was a very weird conversation.
In another class, I walked through the Declaration of Independence and Common Sense with a student. This was a case where they would copy what they read in the book, and did not think about the information. When I went through it with them, they would ask questions, and offer opinions, and get a much better understanding of what it was that they were learning.