I was recently teaching my eighth grade science class a lesson on volcanoes, and we got to talking about Mount Vesuvius when one of my students shot her hand up in the air and said, “Mr. Pope, I used to live near there. I went all the time.”
I smiled. It wasn’t an unusual occurrence among my class of adolescent world travelers. I teach at Zama American Middle-High School, a Department of Defense school in Kanagawa, Japan.
Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) dependent schools are run by the U.S. military for children of members of the armed forces. The schools were recently in the news for their relatively strong performance on what’s known as the Nation’s Report Card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
