New High School Adjustments

While many kids are going back to school today, Marissa has already been at Eagle Ridge Academy one week. What an amazing week it's been!

Her first night she came home with a passage she had to read and answer questions about. The passage? "The Apology" by Plato, written about Socrates' trial and sentence, as translated from ancient Greek. It starts like this:

How you have felt, O men of Athens, at hearing the speeches of my accusers, I cannot tell; but I know that their persuasive words almost made me forget who I was - such was the effect of them; and yet they have hardly spoken a word of truth. 

Ummmm....yeah, sure.

For a girl who does not love to read and is often quite literal in her interpretation of writings, this was going to be a challenge. I read it aloud to her over several nights, paraphrasing what each section meant so she could make sense of it and answer the questions. If a person is unaccustomed to reading this kind of writing, it is incredibly difficult to understand. But with practice, it gets easier. By the end of the week she was starting "The Iliad" by Homer and was having no problem reading and comprehending the stanzas on her own. Wow, okay...

Some observations about her school that she appreciates:

1. She is loving wearing uniforms. So far she can't tell who the "popular" kids are in her class because everyone is dressed the same, there are no brands to distinguish between the "haves" and the "have nots."

2. The class sizes!! Her largest class is Humanities with 16 students, her smallest is Spanish with six. She is one of very few freshman in her Spanish II class and has a native Spanish speaker as a teacher, which she is super excited about.

3. School lunch is delicious! She brought a lunch the first day but after that has been eating the lunch at the school. It is freshly made there at the school, not shipped in and warmed like her lunches at Lake Harriet, and there is always a salad bar option.

4. They pipe in classical music to the lunchroom during lunch time. It is a classical education school, after all! There is plenty of room, there are even a few empty tables in the area, and she eats with the entire 9th through 12th grade students. Lunch is at a reasonable hour, because they don't need to stagger lunches due to class size. (Her lunch at her middle school started at 1:40.)

In a small group in her Humanities class they were discussing Achilles, which Marissa pronounced "Ah-CHILL-ease" having never encountered the name before. A boy in her group teased her about not being able to pronounce it. Shortly after he said, "myu-SAY" for muse, and she teased him back. The rest of the class they gave each other a hard time and intentionally mispronounced things to see who could say it the silliest.

She has already made many friends, both girls and boys, and has mixed grades in many of her classes — many are helping her get accustomed to the new things she's studying. Most everyone in school is engaged and ready to learn. She often gets frustrated and annoyed at students who talk or whisper while the teacher is talking, especially because with her ADHD she has a really hard time tuning out distractions. That is less of a problem at Eagle Ridge than at her last school.

I'm so excited for her to be at this school and for the opportunities she will have there.