Bend principal spends day as an eighth-grader
Cascade Middle School Principal Stephanie Bennett was challenged to spend a day as an eighth-grader, and found it to be quite a lesson.
She followed eighth-grader Logan Robertson through a typical Wednesday.
At 9 a.m., it was time for physical education, and Bennett was there among among all the young people. She wasn’t teaching the class — she was one of the students.
“PE wasn’t that easy,” Bennett said afterward.
Next, it was time for Spanish. Bennett sat with the other students, trying to translate the sentences that the teacher had written on the board. The teacher helped Bennett, just as she would for any other eighth-grader.
“She doesn’t know any Spanish, really,” Logan said later, “so that was cool to teach her and see how she is learning other languages, like we do in class.”
It was all about learning what it’s like to be an eighth-grader.
The next class: math.
Bennett read the question in the book aloud: “How much of the lake’s surface will be covered with the plant by the end of the year?”
She sat with a group of kids, trying to figure out the problem.
“Oh, it’s double?” Bennett asked another student.
“By me putting myself in their shoes, I see the amount of workload they have every day, as well as what happens in the halls in between,” Bennett said. “I learned that it’s easy to be tardy. I’ve been tardy twice today already.”
The bell rang, signaling lunchtime.
“What do you have for lunch?” Bennett asked another student in the cafeteria, while unpacking her homemade meal.
“She always sees us in the halls, but she doesn’t really know what we’re doing,” Logan said. “She doesn’t really know what class we had before, what we are doing. I think it can affect her, by knowing what kids are actually being taught in her school.”
Bennett liked her day as an eighth-grader so much, she wants to challenge teachers at Cascade Middle School to do the same thing.
“It’s a really valuable experience,” she said. “You may change the way you plan your lessons.”
