New Place, New School, and Old Feelings

Let me start off by saying that I love Oregon. Really, I do. The people, the places, and the coast have all been fantastic, and most of all, I love my current school. This post will be talking about my experience here, what I think about it, the people, the community, and a lot more. Again, I love my current school. But, I will have a critical eye through all of this, and I will try not to be as biased as possible.

Okay, first things first, and I mean that quite literally. My first impressions of the school. Probably the most prominent of these were: This place is big. I've never gone to a school that had this large of a campus. And that campus is really beautiful (when it's not raining constantly). My old school was much smaller than my current school. Its total number of students from 6th to 12th grade was about double the size of the 7th grade. This also another reason why I feel the community here isn't as tight-knit as my old school.

I really love my current school and their priority of community. But with a place with so many people, so many grades, and such a large campus, it's really hard to replicate just how community-based my old school was. When you have, basically, a larger campus, nearly 6 times the number of students, and large families connected to those students, there's a limit just how... interconnected everyone and everything is. my current school's community feels a lot more... airy than my old school, but that's not always a bad thing. Another thing is how advisories are treated at my current school and my old school.

My old school tried to have students matched up with teachers of the same grade. Of course, that doesn't always work, they can't have one teacher for every subject for every grade, so there's definitely some overlap going on. But I was lucky, so I got Kris and Jory. Kris taught two classes of mine, Science, and Math, and Jory taught Humanities, our most prominent class. Because of this, I feel I was much more connected to Kris and Jory than Jeff and Katie, my current advisors. This is probably because they don't teach any classes of mine. And I'm not saying Jeff or Katie are bad people at all, in fact, they're amazing! But I just feel like I'm not as connected with them as my past advisors from Commons.

Going with the topic of teachers, let's keep with that. The teachers at my current school are, at the same time, very similar and different to the teachers at Vermont Commons. At my current school, the teachers are a lot less lenient than Commons. And this isn't always a bad thing. Sometimes, the students and our teacher would keep talking for longer than 20 minutes. At my current school, the teachers are more to the point, let's get this done. I feel this is especially true for Christa and Paul. Don't misunderstand me, Christa and Paul are absolutely wonderful, they just don't get off track as much, which is not a bad thing. Spencer and Dale are the exceptions, and they are awesome as well.

And another thing with the teachers is their bond with the students. At Commons, the students and teachers were mostly on the same level of connectivity, and positively felt they were as big, if not more, than the students and their families in terms of importance. But at my current school, the bond within the school is more with the students themselves than with the teachers and students together. Again, this is probably because there are so many students, and not as much faculty. Another reason for this might be that we had no breaks and a thirty-minute lunch at Commons, as opposed to my current school, where we have a ten-minute break, and a forty-minute lunch, so the students get to socialize more. I'm not sure which I prefer, but both are wonderful.

The last thing I want to talk about is Oregon and Vermont themselves, and how Oregon reminds me so much of my home state. The woods at my current school remind me so much of the place we used to do PE at Commons, The lake I live next to reminds me a lot of Lake Champlain if Lake Champlain was about a hundred times smaller, and my current school, despite the differences, really feels like Commons, and that's fantastic.

Thanks for reading my ramblings about a young boy and his experience with his new school. I really do appreciate it. Thinking that people outside this school will be reading this is both terrifying and exciting at the same time. If you want to visit Vermont Commons website, click here, and if you want to visit Catlin Gabel's website, click here. Again, thank you, and good day.

Vermont Commons Sign image via https://www.vermontcommons.org/mission-guiding-principles/

Catlin Gabel image via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catlin_Gabel_School