Tag: humanities

A.P. World History

Daphne PsaledakisLeave a comment

For those of you who go to the Ojai Valley School, you will have heard of Mr. Alvarez. For those of you don’t, Fred Alvarez is the Humanities, A.P. World History, World History, and Journalism teacher.

The double faced mug sitting on the bookshelf in the corner of his classroom, printed with both “Mr. Muffin” and “Mr. Evil,” says it all. Mr. Alvarez’s classes are among the hardest.

Last year, I was in the Freshman Humanities class. He tortured us, assigning a reading journal almost every night. Extra Credit was rare, and when it did come along, it was in the form of fishing or writing a song.

Humanities is that class you talk about, complain about, go to sleep thinking about, and secretly love.

A.P. World History is very similar. At the beginning of the year, Mr. Alvarez warned us of the insurmountable amounts of reading we would have as homework.

He was not kidding.

The majority of class stopped reading after Chapter 4. We are now on Chapter 12. Every Wednesday is “Essay Day”, where we assigned a prompt and given a little over an hour to complete an essay, which will then be picked apart, criticized, and graded by the class. Public humiliation at it’s finest.

Despite the ridiculous amounts of reading and essay writing, I learn the most from those classes. I walk in the door excited about the next 45 minutes, and I have fun. A.P. World History challenges me to do the best I can.

The Last Blog

yrreskrapLeave a comment

This is my last blog of the year-the last blog as a junior.

So should I write about?

Well, I can write about almost anything. About how my friends are leaving in a eight days, or how maybe I found out that I became president. I could write about how I will be going to Chicago this summer for a medicine forum. Or I could talk about unicorns and how much I ABHOR butterflies. Ick.


But, I feel like my last blog should be more substantial than my usual potpourri. My final blog should be more.

This blog (my last blog) is a tribute to a very special person. A teacher to be more specific.

I have had him teach me in a subject every single year that I have been here at Ojai Valley School Upper Campus.

The greatest thing about this man is that he knows when and how to push me to my greatest potential. I don’t think I have learned more about my own limits than I have when I was learning from this teacher.

He has an interesting way of teaching. History, which is the subject he teaches, happens to be the subject I hate the most. But, when I learned it from him, it was my favorite subject. It was because of his humorous way of teaching that engaged all of his students and made everybody love taking his class. But this teacher is not just jokes but he knows when to be serious and knows motivate his students to do their best.

Mr. Alvarez, you are not only my favorite teacher, but you are my coach and one of the people I look up to. You are great and I am happy that I was fortunate enough to take your classes every year. Thank you for being such an excellent teacher and for motivating me to always do my best. I can’t wait for journalism next year, during my senior year. Haha hopefully, you will be able to put up with my major college stress and senioritis.