Keewaydin is a late start school, so class doesn’t beign until 9:40.  This means that it goes until 4:10 in the afternoon, but I think this is a good tradeoff.  As a teacher and student, I feel more alert at 9:40 than I do at the ungodly hour of 7:45 that my high school started at.  I can imagine that many of the students feel the same way.  In middle school and high school especially, students need a lot of sleep, and many of them have a poor habit of going to bed early.  I always tried to get a good amount of sleep in high school, and first hour was still always a blow off.  The late start time lets students get a few more hours of sleep so that they’re more awake and ready to learn.   Of course, this means that parents need to find appropriate transportation for their kid in the morning much later than most jobs start, but the benefits outweigh this problem.

And if it snows like it did on my last friday there, there is much more time for the roads to be plowed before school starts

I did all of my field experience in three all day long visits at Keewaydin Community school.  I worked with Mr. Homan, who teaches 7th and 8th grade English.  I’ll divide my posts into topical sections on what I observed.

My first day at Keewaydin was the last day of their first quarter.  Most of the day was spent collecting student works and making sure they had everything in.  Like normal, there were students who turned in 25 assignments, all hastily done the night before, and expected there teachers to grade them.  Mr. Homan said that this was pretty normal, and that every semester no matter how much he pleaded there were always students who didn’t turn their work in at the last minute.  He said that they didn’t really punish them, because at least they did the work.  If there was a punishment they wouldn’t bother doing it at all next semester.  I don’t know how much I agree with this mentality, but it makes a little bit of sense.  Most of the work that he was doing seemed to be not teaching them English but teaching them how to be students.

I was shocked by how little some of the students cared about their grades.  I knew that there were students who checked out of school and didn’t care, but the sheer number who were receiving failing or near failing grades and had no intention of raising them surprised me.  Mr. Homan seemed unable to convince them that this was important too.  Is it just because they’re in 8th grade, and that they will care about their future once they hit high school, or does this not bode well for them?