School Sweet School

Because the weather hasn’t been as delightful as it usual, I decided I should do another blog post. Quite a few people have been asking me about what the school looks like, to which I’ve always thought, Well, you know how a school looks? It looks something like that. Instead of leaving it at that, I decided to take a few pictures and give the grand tour via blog. Onward!

Here’s a picture of the outside of the building. For those of you who have been watching my Facebook uploads, the front of the building is this bright, happy yellow color with white trim. The building is actually U-shaped, and the yellow side is the side which faces the street; this portion of the building is actually offices, the ACN staff has told me, and these offices aren’t affiliated with the college at all. The brick side of the building is our half. Don’t mind the scaffolding—some construction people are replacing old or cracked bricks all along the building. This makes it hard to keep the students’ attention sometimes, since there are people walking along the windows of the                                                                                       classroom.

Here is a picture of the student area of the college. Most times, when I’m walking out of the building to go home and make lunch, there are students hanging out here on the two couches in this area. There are two computers for the students to use, and those two computers are connected to the printer to the left of the computer screens. Because the students don’t have any printing options in the dorms (unless they brought printers of their own), there always seems to be a mad rush before my Composition classes to print everything.

Between the two “Staff Only” doors, we have a small library. This is mostly composed of old textbooks from previous semesters. ACN used to buy all the textbooks for the classes and sell them to the students, but it is now the students’ responsibility to get their own textbooks for whatever classes they take. There are plenty of travel books here, as well, for both students and lecturers to utilize and plan trips throughout the semester. The pennants above the bookshelf are from ACN’s sister-schools: Adelphi University (in New York, I believe), University of North Dakota, and West Chester University in Pennsylvania.

This vending machine is also in the student area. It seems rather small to my ‘Murican brain, but with a school this small (approximately 80 students), it doesn’t seem necessary to have a whopping machine. The writing on the outside of the machine promises “fresh fruit” and “sweet greens,” but the inside of the machine is crammed with candy and soda (which is awesome for me). If you find this vending machine, do not press #5. Those are my Cokes.

Here’s a picture of the “big” library (but again, no need for a four-story Chester Fritz library for 80 students). Once more, this is mostly composed of textbooks from previous classes, but ACN has separated the books by topic in the case that a student might want to write a paper on sociology issues, or what have you. The door to ACN’s administrator is just outside the left frame of this picture. The historic part of the building is on the other side of the glass door; also on the other side of the glass door, there’s a statue of a samurai (I think, I haven’t been up close to it yet), which is absolutely terrifying to walk past at midnight, since it always looks like someone is staring at you as you walk past. Walking up the stairs takes you to the classrooms and the other offices.

A couple of these doors are just for storage, but again, we have two classrooms and three offices. All the offices are on the left of the hall: first, the International Student Advisor’s office; second, my office that I share with Burt (or Burt’s office that he shares with me); finally, the Activity Coordinator’s office. At the end of the hall is Classroom #1, and Classroom #2 is to the right.

The classrooms are fairly standard, like you would find at any other college. This classroom has a simple podium at the front of the class. The cool part of the room is the technology used—I’m pretty sure that these are “smart-boards,” where a teacher can pick up a stylus and interact with the image from the projector. I haven’t really used it much, but I have shown a Powerpoint presentation. This room has two projectors, and with some fancy technology magic (or so I think), the same Powerpoint can be shown on the two projectors simultaneously. (Don’t judge—this is magic to me.) This is the room where I have all my Composition classes, since the                                                                                                 Composition classes all have more students than my                                                                                     literature course.

This classroom is only about half the size of the other room, and it still has the same projector system. It’s quite the setup, honestly. The ACN staff told me that literature courses are very hard to sell to students, as many of the students want to go into international politics or international business of some sort. This is the room where I have my Arthurian legends course.

This college’s goal is to allow Norwegian students to adapt to the American college system. While studying here, students will start to learn what the American university system is like by taking classes from (mostly) American teachers. As they study here for a year with the intention of transferring to a school in the U.S., they meet with the International Student Advisor to plan out what schools they would like to apply to, though the ACN staff said that a great many students go straight for UND or the other sister-schools. More and more students have been looking toward California schools, however, no doubt because the weather is far better there than in North Dakota. Overall, it’s a really interesting program. And that’s the school (for now)!