Time to visit school

Tuesday is a "school visits" day. Since our school district is in the middle of its Spring Break, we have made arrangements to visit a neighboring district's buildings. It's also raining rather hard; I'm glad we are going to be mostly indoors today.

We start with Fort Zumwalt West Middle School, where we are greeted by the principal and the head of the guidance department. She gives us some information brochures about the school district, and shows us around; included are quick visits to the school library, a science class, and groups meeting in the Industrial Tech, FACS and art classrooms. A final stop to see some classes in the gym (playing ping-pong, and working on rotation exercise stations), then we head for the car and our next stop.

Fort Zumwalt West High School has some special activities - a short performance by the school's select choir, visits to science and math classes, and an advanced level business accounting class, and a quick view of computer drafting and some of the music classrooms. Then we head for lunch in the school cafeteria. We take our trays to the career center office, where we find a string quartet waiting to offer incidental music for our listening enjoyment (and they are quite good!).

After we eat, there is time for a question and answer session with the school principal and other staff members; we also get to talk with several students for a few minutes, to get a "feel" for what life is like in American schools. Fort Zumwalt has provided an excellent tour experience for our teacher partners, and we thank them profusely.

Our next stop is another favorite activity for the teachers - we head for Bookmark, a teacher supply store in Saint Charles. Japanese teachers have told us previously that there are no stores in Japan that carry primarily teaching materials and supplies (such as bulletin board creation materials, lesson plan reproducibles, and various charts and posters for classroom walls), and they have always been quite excited to see the array of items available for teachers in this store; today's group is no exception. An hour or two (and plenty of purchases) later, we head for the car.

Originally we had planned to go on down to Main Street for more shopping and sightseeing, but the rain is coming down harder than ever, and the temperature has dropped considerably - it's not freezing (thank goodness!), but it's very cold and not at all comfortable to be in. The group decides to head back to the hotel, where our partners will have a free evening, and Joy and I will head back to our houses.