On September 28th, Mr. Beno completed a day in the life of a Padua student. For the whole day he was to follow and be the “shadow” of a girl in Padua. It was cycle 3 and he was picked to follow a junior’s schedule. Mr. Beno said that all of his classes that day were fun and enjoyable. He specifically liked the History and Government class because he said that there was a lot of different resources involved such as: videos, speeches, and group work. Even though the class was at the end of the day and the students looked exhausted, they were all still engaged and interested in what they were learning. He also liked the French 4 AP class too. Mr. Beno doesn’t know any French, so he got a chance to really watch and observe the students. He says that it’s a very hard class and for the students to be doing as well as they were, he was impressed. Overall, he said that “all the classes were pretty good and different. I didn’t find one class that was more enjoyable or less enjoyable than one specific class.”

When asked if he would want to be a student again he said it was fun and he would definitely do it again if he chosen. He implied that it was good to get a sense of what a day at Padua was like. He is really proud of how the school runs, and as he quoted “it’s not as bad of a place as we might make it sometimes.” He can see the meaningful relationships made and how students support each other. “The atmosphere was what I thought it would be, supportive and encouraging,” he said.

Being a student again really brought back memories for Mr. Beno. He said “your brains have to shift every subject to subject, so it brought back what it was like to think of say chemistry for an hour or to do math for an hour. You go class to class ‘shifting your brains’. In your brains we all have these certain pockets that we have to navigate to manage them each day.” He added that going from all different aspects of our mind is one of the hardest things we have to do as students. He also said that “we have to change our style of personality to the personality of the teacher because you act one way with one teacher, but another way with another teacher. No teacher is the same.”

Mr. Beno thinks this is a magnificent program for the students to see the teachers try and understand what it’s like in a student’s world, but without actually doing the homework or classwork.  As he stated, “It’s a gesture to the teachers to actually get a sense of the students world.”