Four Students Experience “large school” Life

May 10, 2010 • Victoria Harshaw, Sam Riley, Kylie Miller, Christa Hill  
Filed under Features, News

Assigned to visit Seaman High School for the day, we stepped into the unfamiliar territory with wondrous eyes and unknown people. It was like the first day of preschool with only the hope of making new friends. But, instead of seeing crayons and mixtures of colors, we saw security cameras, police, and a high tech office. Stares followed us from across the cafeteria as we fill out our visitors’ passes.

“Our school isn’t that much different from yours; we just have a little more of the good, the bad and the ugly,” Ron Vinduska, principal said.

The total number of kids at Seaman is around 1,250 and each class has about 250-300 kids in it. One grade almost equals our whole school! That would make it difficult to meet new friends and then have a good chance of those people being in your class.

“It was very intimidating because the school was so big,” Christa Hill, sophomore journalist, said. “At break everyone has their spot where they stand everyday and being a ‘new student’ I didn’t know what to do other than just stand there and wait to go back to class.”

“Going to Seaman made me realize how much I like Holton, walking through the hall ways was like walking through a crowd of hyenas,” Victoria Harshaw, sophomore journalist, said. “The rooms were all open; it made me feel like I was in middle school again.”

Besides the apparent fact of their school being a giant compared to Holton, we found many more differences. While our classes are alternated everyday, they have all classes every Monday and then the rest of the week they alternate days. The principal is very strict on NO cell phones. It’s either put away and shut off or taken away and put into the office where a parent must come pick it up and the student gets a detention. They have four different lunches for 25 minutes instead of just two. Another huge difference was how the rooms were built. In most halls the rooms would sit right next to each other, with just one measly wall separating them and no door or complete wall to close in the class. In most of the classes a student could just look over the wall and peek into the next class.

“It was really hard to concentrate because I could hear a louder teacher in the room next to me talking to his class,” Sam Riley, sophomore journalist, said. “Every time somebody walked by I would look up to see who it was, even though I hardly knew anyone from there.”

Seaman high school was different from Holton High School on the inside and also in the classes it contained as well.

One of the main differences was the large variety of opportunities students get to choose from. They have specialized classes like zoology, orchestra, pottery class, foreign languages like Chinese, French, Spanish, and a lot more. Talking to other students at lunch, we found that they have all the way up to Spanish 5, while our school only reaches to Spanish 2.

“I really liked how the kids had so many choices to choose from, that was probably my favorite part of the school,” Kylie Miller, sophomore journalist, said. “If I did go there it would be so overwhelming, but in a good way.”

One major course at Seaman is marching band. There are around 70 students in their Middle school band and they have 168 people in their high school marching band. In order to fit all of the middle school students in one room for band practice they have to bus them from the Middle school to the high school where they have a room big enough.

The Multimedia Department has a set studio where they have daily broadcasts telling students and teachers about the weather and upcoming activities in their school by television. Every class has a television so in the morning students can watch some of the kids in their school inform everyone what’s happening that day.

One thing that really stands out at Seaman was that they have a student- run bank right in their school. The bank was established in 1927. It is actually part of their business and documents class. There is only one other school in the area that has a bank in their school and they only have it because the former principal at Seaman high is now the principal at that school.

Seaman has more opportunities in the sports area also. They have all of the same sports as our school, except they have more to choose from such as soccer, swimming, tennis and even bowling!

When we were first thinking about writing this story we just wanted to visit a bigger school and figure out the difference between our school and theirs. After going through with it we ended up finding out what it’s like to be a new student, in a new school, not knowing anybody but each other. Overall, however, it was a great experience and we would all do it again.

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