Erin

Stress and more stress

Obviously, even at a gifted school, the teachers still had to go through that boring "It's-the-first-day-of-school-so-I-can-talk-for-half-an-hour" speech. Considering I have a tendency to fidget, doodle in class, and basically NOT pay attention, I learned nothing. Except for the fact that this school didn't mess around. I would actually have to study for tests this year, something that I was not used to. Normally I just learned the information in class and remember it, just like that. But the teachers were all serious.

And, oh yeah, Tyler was in all my classes.

I mean, I don't like him or anything. I have a boyfriend.

Anyway, seeing as how Tyler took on the duty of showing me around the school on my first day, I basically had to sit next to him at lunch. It was SO awkward.

I sat at a table with Tyler and a few other people I didn't know. One girl, Madison, had sat next to me in Mr. Palmer's social studies class. I thought she was nice. She had brown hair that she wore in a braid, and greenish brown eyes. She raised her hand for almost every question, while I had sat there, clueless. Social studies was not my thing. Why should I care about stuff that happened 300 years ago?

At lunch, she tried to talk to me. I say tried because, well, it's hard to talk to me.

"So, you transferred here from Central?"

"Yeah."

"How was it?"

"It was ok."

"How do you like school here so far?"

"Good."

"What are you reading?"

"A book."

I'm just BAD at conversations. I never know what to say. Eventually, Madison realized she was getting nowhere, so she just stopped talking. Tyler kept glancing over at me, which creeped me out. I tried to eat my sandwich and read my book, until at long last, lunch period was over. I gladly packed up my things and made my way (with Tyler, of course,) to my next class. Ecology.

I was super excited. Science was my favorite subject as a freshman. Next to math, obviously. But Mrs. Buckley, my science teacher, meant business. When I walked into the room, she had a seating chart up on the board. Assigned seats? But that means I can't sit next to Tyler. Whatever. He was starting to annoy me anyway.

Mrs. Buckley looked like the skeleton that was standing in the corner of the room. She was tall and pale, with white hair that poofed up around her head, making it look like a cloud. "The first thing we are going to learn about this year is the different types of biomes that are found in our biosphere."

Ok, biomes. Like the desert, tundra, forest. Mrs. Buckley handed out a magazine to the class- if you could call it that. The "magazine" (it was actually more of an enlarged pamphlet) had only 12 pages, each of which contained information about what makes up a biosphere. Then she handed out a worksheet, and said, "This worksheet is your assignment for today. If you don't finish, it's homework." Then she proceeded to sit at her desk, on her computer, not teaching. Ok then. My teacher last year, Mrs. Bowen, had actually taught us earth science, not just handed out worksheets. She had made everything interactive- let us play games, study real rocks and minerals, and taught us songs and dances to help us remember what we learned. I couldn't get over how different this method of teaching was then Mrs. Bowen's. If you could even call it teaching.

Finally, the bell rings, waking me from my trance. Luckily, I had my worksheet finished and went to my last class of the day- math! I couldn't wait to get to my favorite class. Unless my math teacher, Miss Stevens, was similar to Mrs. Buckley. That would take away all the hope I had left for this year being any good.

Luckily, Miss Stevens was really cool. She was passionate about math, like Mr. Palmer was about social studies. She was the kind of teacher I wanted to be when I grew up.

The first thing she did was, obviously, give the it's-the-first-day-of-school-so-I-can-talk-for-half-an-hour speech. But the speech was pretty cool. We would be learning a lot in integrated algebra this year, she said, but she would be teaching us these things in really fun ways. She said she taught her students songs, just like Mrs. Bowen did. We would get to do lots of fun projects, like building catapults. As I looked around the room, I saw projects that previous students had made. I would be having a great time in math this year!

After she finished the speech, she showed us this really cool YouTube video called "Doodling in Math Class." It showed how mathematics is found even in art, and I enjoyed it a lot.

And then- Can you believe this? - since we still had time left before class ended, she let the class request YouTube videos.

Really.

So we ended up watching this crazy cartoon of a frog playing soccer until the bell rang, and I was free.

And I knew that as much as my other classes made me feel like I had nothing to look forward to at Florence, I knew that math class would always be there, and nothing could mess that up for me.

I also knew that I was a MASSIVE nerd for thinking that.