SJC students hold open day

There are open days and there are open days. Today was the day Saint John’s College’s students did their best to impress their teachers, parents and potential future students. Presentation subjects ranged from biology to business to a bike that rides on water. The students say being teachers for a day made them a little nervous, but at least they sounded like they knew what they were doing.

Janelle Chanona, Reporting

Their audience came from schools all over the city, eager to soak up information and for the boys in blue, playing host was a lot of hard work, a lot of memorizing and even a little fun. It even made some of them promise to be good boys in class.

Leon Guild

“When it’s our turn to be teaching something, then we feel what the teachers feel and that kind of makes us more mature in the way we behave in class.”

Carlo Keith

“It’s a bit strange in times to be put in the role of the teacher, cause sometimes you get nervous in front of them, but they ask interesting questions and sometimes you learn from them.”

The students could have chosen any topic. These guys thought the reef deserved center stage.

Devin Simmons

“It helps the children that come here to learn more about Belize and the barrier reef and what it does.”

While that group was neck deep in coral, their counterparts were drowning themselves in numbers. Looking professional in their ties, they say they’ve been analyzing the economy and decided to highlight inflation. And they offer at least one solution.

Ernesto Middleton

“Belize suffers from a 2% inflationary rate presently. That rate is not constant. Sometimes it goes from 12% to 6% to 2%.”

“There are many ways in which a person or a country can control inflation. Basically what people want to do, is limit the amount of supply of money in an economy.”

These young inventors decided to really work with water, but that didn’t mean their project was any less challenging.

Leonel Olivera

“The school gave us some strings and so we started to build it.”

Janelle Chanona

“What exactly is the concept supposed to be, ride on water?”

Leonel Olivera

“Yeah, it’s suppose to float. Eight buckets suppose to float it. But first we only had two drums but drums weren’t working so we made the buckets made it float.”

Despite the fact the bike was experiencing some technical difficulties, we were impressed by their efforts. Headmaster Andrew Lopez says he’s happy the boys are having found and hope that will make potential students start planning their presentation for next year’s open day.

Andrew Lopez, Headmaster, SJC High School

“We want to inform them about the opportunities that are here at Saint Johns and that is why we have established open day, every year, it’s an annual event. To showcase what we are all about so that prospective student and their parents can come for themselves and find out what we are all about. And if they like what they see and what they hear after talking to the students, talking to the teachers, talking to school officials, we want them to enroll.”