Two weeks in The Community School: Too fast and too good!

Hi everybody!

Our trip is over now and everything I’m feeling now is “hosthomesick”.

After these two weeks, I can see how I grow up and learned many thing about the American culture and English. I improved my speech and showed to everyone how beautiful is our country. Now we Just have to be prepared to show them closer and in colors how exciting is Brazil in June when they are coming.

To close my posts here, I would like to make comments about the classes and the way the teachers explain their subjects. All the exchange group attended the classes that our host brother/sister does. So we realized that we should talk about our experiences in classroom.

As I said before, Brett attends a seven differents classes: English, History, Geometry, Spanish, Chemistry, Aphelion and Writting Lab. The schedule is very different from the one we have in Brazil. At The Community School, the students have one kind of science each year and Brett has Chemistry this year. It´s the same way with Math.

The English class is pretty interesting. Tim Price, the teacher, is really envolved with what he does and can get the best things from the students. When we were there, he was working with three different kind of material: a book, a movie and a poem, but all of them are talking pratically about the same thing. I really like the way he works because people are different and they may like different things. We may get interested about a historical book because we liked the movie about the some issue.  So I think it´s a good plan tio make the students interested.

Something that caught my attention is the fact that as we make at ESEM they have others subjects that talk about the same thing. So we also have the interdisciplinarity there. At some time, three teachers of History, English and “Law and Literature” got together and started to talk about the war that happened in Vietnan. It was something really interesting to see.

The Geometry class is really amazing! I feel a little guilty for talking about it (I like Geometry) but it was my favorite one. Willy is a nice teacher. He likes kidding with his students and his classes are funny. When I was there, they were studying areas of geometric forms. We saw a great movie about 2D and 3D. The students made many problems and a test. The way He works is pretty similar to the way we have at ESEM. After the test, they always correct the test and take all the doubts off.

The Spanish class is exciting too. Pilar is always smiling and playing with his students. The way she teachs is also similar to our English classes. There we have fun, we learn, we play games, we smile! The whole thing is so funny! The most amazing thing? SHE HAS A “SLATE”!!! And she uses it in the class when she makes the games. A important thing that she does is the massive studying of Grammar. Just as in Portuguese, Spanish has many hard rules and the student has to learn all of them. So Pilar tries to teach in funniest way!

The Chemistry class is teached by Jen. She is really nice! They were studying Polimers. The second year students haven’t seen the issue before so it´s something new but not so hard. I had some problems because of all the technical terms of Chemistry in English, but I learned many things about Molecular Bond and Polarity last year, so it became something easy in time. This trimester, they are studying everything about Smells.

As you already know, Aphelion is a class but works as a kind of workshop. The students make a magazine and try to sell it to the other ones. Ryan, the teacher, is really criative but she always tries to get the Best ideas from the students. They create things to promote the magazine like dancings, vídeos, papers. In the class, there were three of us: Me, Jordy and Raísa. We took part of one of those presentations. We made a flash-mob that was presented on stage at the Assembly and it was really good and funny.

These are the classes I attended to during these two weeks. I would like to say that I compared sometimes the way that the two schools work, but just to make what I was saying clear. They have similar and different things at the same time from Escola SESC. I think the most important thing is that they are amazing and excellent schools.

Finally, I would like to thank everyone who was envolved in the Exchange Program and belived in our work. Once more, I would like to thank everybody from The Community School for being so kind and recieving us so well and especially the families for hosting us. And of course, I couldn’t forget to thank you guys for following our blog that was carefully made for you. Thank you!

                                                                Brett (my host brother) and Me

See you!

Weell xD’