Global Exchange in Spain!

Julianne, Senior Boarder from Westborough, Massachusetts

As much as I miss the cold, dreary winters of New England, I must say that I am thoroughly enjoying being on an exchange program in Seville, Spain. When I arrived in Seville on Friday, January 6 and learned that my luggage had been lost, I began to fear that this might be a sign for the rest of my ten-week stay. However after waking up from a long 8-hour nap, Cristina Garcia took me out and showed me the beautiful city of Seville, and as we sat at little outside a restaurant, drank diet cokes, and talked about all that we would do after the next two months, I began to get the feeling that despite the loss of luggage this trip would turn out just okay.

Over the next few days I would shop in the Spanish version of Black Friday, eat delicious Spanish cuisine, attend an impressive young people’s orchestra concert, and see the entire city of Seville, and, after three long days, I would finally receive my luggage. It had been a whirlwind couple of days, and I was certainly a little nervous about my first day of school in Spain. The school I attend here in Seville is a co-ed, catholic day school, and much different from what I am used to Westover.  I am taking all of my classes in Spanish, including Economics, Religion, Philosophy, and even French.  Now, you are all probably wondering why I am studying French in Spanish when I don’t even understand all of Spanish, and let me tell you I am not sure why either, but we will see how this goes.  School has been exciting and challenging for me, and the Spanish students are finally beginning to warm up to the American girl, and now ask me if school in America is really like High School Musical and Gossip Girl.

The past couple of weeks have certainly been overwhelming and exciting, and the Spanish language has definitely been a challenge, but slowly but surely I am catching on. I am so enjoying learning and discovering new things everyday. I have met so many new and different people, I have been sailing, I have eaten delicious Spanish food, I have been shopping, and I watched my favorite American T.V. shows in Spanish. Although it’s been difficult, I have enjoyed every minute of living in Spain and exploring a new culture, and I truly look forward to seeing what the next month and a half bring me.

 

Junior Year

Sunah, Junior Boarder from Seoul, Korea

I was so nervous to begin my junior year in September 2011 as I heard so many scary things happening to juniors such as having to take SATs and ACTs, starting to plan for colleges, and much more work to do for some AP courses.

However, as a current junior, I am loving this year so far. I, of course, have more difficult assignments. Yet, the challenging classes inspire me to fully understand the lessons.

For example, AP Calculus BC, a course taught by Mrs. Ann Pollina, is one of my favorite classes. Although I have been receiving fairly good grades in math, I have never enjoyed learning math because I thought all the difficult and complicated equations and graphs were of no use in real life.

One day, I was just starting to learn about Derivatives. But instead of doing board work, Mrs. Pollina provided each student with a blank notecard and a pair of scissors and said, “Make a box the largest possible because the bigger the box is, the more m&m chocolates you can fill it with and have for yourself.” I first did not know what derivatives had to do with the box, but I continued making a box. Each classmate had different sized boxes, varying by length, width, and depth. After filling the boxes with chocolates, she explained how derivatives can be applied to finding out the maximum size of box. She added that the concept of derivatives is used everywhere in daily life to find the maximum profit by businessmen, gardeners, and box makers.

I was truly amazed by the wide application of math that since then, I was motivated to wholly understand each concepts. Math, a class that was formerly seemed difficult, became so inspiring!

I found similar enlightenments not only in math, but also in other subjects. Although the classes are more in-depth, I certainly believe that they bring more interesting and striking discoveries. Junior year courses, therefore, allows you to adventure more and find hidden interests of you!

Dorcas Fair

Addis, Junior Boarder from New York City

This past weekend was a very busy one for the junior class who on Sunday revealed their class project, the Dorcas Fair. The Dorcas Fair is a Westover tradition where the junior class creates a fair in the winter whose profits are all donated to charity. The money comes from selling things over the course of the year, silent auction baskets, and ameneties offered at the fair itself. The theme of the fair is kept a secret until the day of, and this year’s theme was Mario, as in the popular video game franchise! Creating the fair was a long process led by our three student Dorcas heads. The heads led meetings of the entire class every two weeks so we could paint posters, set the fair up, etc. I really enjoyed being a part of the Dorcas fair, even though it was very tiring. I cannot wait until we decide as a class which charities to donate the money to. Seeing our hard work go to a great cause would be so incredible.