A school day begins. Students are shuffling through the halls and taking a seat at their wooden desks with no Chromebooks in sight. Chalk begins to lightly flow onto the board as the teacher begins class. The year is 1917.
The high school has been around since then and has grown exponentially. Furthermore, the time in between the growth now and the past is extremely important for a school. It is history.
Each part of a school’s building, rules, people, and activities change the way it is viewed throughout history. Safety is a major concern that changes throughout a school’s lifetime and Coach Jeremy Gillmore, who began working here in 1999, shared his experience.
“Students were not as well mannered or mature as they are now…discipline is better,” Gillmore said. “All outside doors were unlocked in the mornings, so anyone [could] come and go as they pleased.”
How many students attend a certain school can drastically change the outcome of the school’s life. For our school, we have continued to gain more and more students over a long period of time.
There were “definitely a lot fewer students then and the classes were smaller,“ English teacher Michael Nichols, who began working here in 2002 or 2003, said. “The classrooms are a lot larger now and we have a much more complex school when it comes to the subject we are teaching and the student population.”
The number of students is not the only increase or change. The amount of teachers here and the exact people fulfilling those roles are going to change over time. This especially includes the people in leadership positions of each individual school, the administrators.
“Most [of the colleagues who have influenced me] do not work here anymore,” Gillmore said. “I have always leaned on and respected all the coaches I have worked with over the years. Many have come through here, but all have shared advice that has been beneficial. I really also enjoyed working for both Mr. Mick Cochran and Coach Jerry Coshow, both [who] were principals here. They helped me many times.”
The way most assignments are currently graded is through submitting it on Google Classroom, AP Collegeboard, or Brightspace and for the grade to eventually be posted to Skyward. As stated previously, different elements of schools change over time and this includes the grading system as well as how people are treated in such systems.
“Grading through Google Classroom is awesome compared to what we used to have to do as teachers,” Gillmore said. “Paper assignments were the norm, meaning we had to go through each paper assignment individually. Grading through Classroom now is much more efficient, giving kids immediate feedback.”
History, in a school point of view, has grown a massive amount and continues to expand as time goes on. The way school is functioning and how a school is treating the students attending there changes and improves. A school is a place for students to learn and develop and allowing students to do this grants the school to do the same.
“Education is continuing to evolve and English has become much more diversified with the different kinds of courses and everything to offer, but it has its consequences both good and bad,” Nichols said. “It feels similar as we still reward those who do well and let them stand out, while we still accommodate those who have difficulties in dealing with academic subjects in a classroom.”
