WEST NEW YORK – It’s September, and another school year has begun. Children are out of neighborhood parks and playgrounds and are now occupying classrooms instead. They have new teachers, new peers, new schedules and new bookbags. As exciting as all these changes may seem, some students can find them to be equally terrifying. The following are a few comments made by West New York students after school this week.
Helen Cardenas, 13, eighth grade, P.S. 5: “School’s all right. I have six classes now that we switch rooms, so that’s hard, but they’re just preparing us for high school. The day goes faster that way, but we get too much homework, because the teachers don’t know how much our other teachers are assigning us. Things are so different this year. We’re going to have a yearbook video, and we’re getting ID cards.”
Barbara Calderon, 13, eighth grade, P.S. 5, “It’s fun, because I have a lot of my friends in my classes this year. Even though we now switch classes, they put all the Gifted and Talented people in the same classes together, so I’m with my friends. The only thing that’s bad is that when we forget something in one of our classes, we can’t go get it. So if we forget our homework in another class, we have to get a ‘0’ anyway.”
Keila Viant, 9, fourth grade, St. Augustin: “It was okay. I got a new teacher, and I have different classes now. In the third grade, we didn’t switch classes, and now we have to switch classes for spelling, math, science, English, and social studies. It’s fun to travel between classes. But now it’s getting harder, because we starting to do real work again.”
Alberto Gayol, 11, sixth grade, P.S. 5: “I love school. But I already got detention, because some kid tried to hit me and I went to hit him back, but we were just playing around. We already have homework though, but I always do my homework.”
Heyser Caraballa, 13, sixth grade, P.S. 5: “School’s fun. We learned new stuff like outlining a chapter. I got to meet new teachers. I got to see my friends again. I got to meet new girls, especially one in particular. She’ll soon be my girlfriend. I even got in trouble for looking at her too much in class.”
Rexcy Santos, 7, third grade, P.S. 5: “The first week was fine. They’re teaching us science, how to do fractions and how to multiply. My teacher’s nice; she doesn’t scream like my teacher last year. But sometimes I get a lot of homework, and I have to carry a lot of books home. My book bag is too heavy for my size, that’s why I have the kind of book bag I have.”
Helen Cardenas
Barbara Calderone
Keila Viant
Alberto Gayol
Heyser Caraballa
Rexcy Santos