Cameraman Jenn wrote:Beorn, quit blushing and get to posting! Good for you! Congrats! That's so totally cool.
Hi...
Beorn Wagner May 23, 2007
When I stop to think about the last few years here at the Alachua Learning Center I really find it hard to believe that it hasn’t been a lifetime. It seems hard to remember a time when I wasn’t traveling two hundred miles a week to be with such a great bunch of people. It seems like it has been forever that I’ve been in a place with such caring teachers, administration and staff.
Take Mother Ramadevi, for instance, who cooks such wonderful meals and who has always been nice to me since the day I arrived. She tells me I am one of the nicest students at school, and I believe if we were neighbors that we would go on to remain friends, even though we no longer saw each other everyday here at ALC.
The teachers here also go the extra mile for you. I appreciate all the effort KB went through to keep me, and my
mom, extremely happy, even when it meant laborious copying of resources and assignments. Of course a few free moments to read the comics and watch
Dr. Who helped round off the edges of my keen intellect as well.
Even when I struggled, no one let me flounder for long. I am particularly grateful to Coach Ragu for helping me find a team sport I can enjoy in P.E.: Dodge Ball. Without his enthusiasm I probably would still avoid physical activity like the plague. Now I can look back and see how Coach helped me to gain more confidence in sports overall.
I’ve always enjoyed learning, so academics were not something I worried much about. But here the teachers always pushed me to work at things I used to think were merely fun.
Thanks a lot. No, really, thank you. Without a careful balance of assignments and free time for my reading pleasure, I doubt that I could have done as well as I have.
These same drives have given me a tremendous track record of improvement in Art, which I still find frustrating, and I owe Ms. Dorothy credit for that. I would never have pursued the subject without steady encouragement.
But I suppose the single most consistent memory I have is the car pool with the Chavez family. After all I spent more time in the car than in any single subject most days. Whether it was blinding fog in the rosy-fingered dawn or storms of love bugs in the sweltering afternoons, I knew I could count on one thing, day in and day out:
adults complaining about gas prices! It was this kind of consistency my parents wanted for me, particularly my father, who went to five different schools in two hemispheres during fourth through eighth grade. He always grumbled about money, but deep down he was pleased I had a certain stability in my middle school years.
So it is difficult, having forgotten much of what came before, to conceive of what comes after graduation. I know I will miss the time I spent here at ALC, even as I am excited to go somewhere else, somewhere perhaps a bit
closer. But I doubt very much that I will find as close-knit a group of teachers and staff, or ones as interested in my progress and well-being, as I enter the world of institutional educational systems.
A final word here must go to my fellow students. I don’t always pay much attention to the details of the social world, and I even forget the names sometimes of people I have known for years. Still, nothing can shake my conviction that the students I have known are essentially good-hearted individuals even when they take the trouble to push me out of line or tease me for being different. After three years I am proud to have known you and will continue to think of you as my friends.
Yeesh! Now have someone to hire if I need a speech written!
