Inside Dallas ISD

A spider has appeared in Mrs. Arellano’s second-grade classroom at Arthur Kramer Elementary School, and her students are freaking out. After the spider is dealt with, the panic quickly turns into questions or, as they are called in the International Baccalaureate-candidate school, “wonders,” about the spider. “Where does the spider live?” “What does the spider eat?” “How long does a spider live?” Because Arthur Kramer Elementary is involved in the IB program, which helps put students in charge of their own learning, Mrs. Arellano encourages the students’ “wonders” about the arachnid. (For the record: Spiders live almost every habitat on earth;…

In an effort to fill bilingual teaching positions that can help meet students’ needs, Dallas ISD has recruited approximately 50 teachers from Spain. Marco Antonio Iglesias Rodriguez, a fourth-grade teacher at Herbert Marcus Elementary, is one of those teachers. Watch the above video to learn how teaching in Dallas ISD differs from teaching in Spain, why he was drawn to teach in the district, and how Dallas as a city is different from North Spain.

Damien Gonzalez, an automotive student at W.H. Adamson High School, is standing in front of a Lamborghini Diablo, and he really wants the car. Gonzalez was one of about 45 automotive students from Adamson who went to a Mecum Auction held Sept. 17 at the Dallas Convention Center. The Dallas ISD students attended the auction thanks to donated tickets from Mecum Auctions, which bills itself as the world’s largest collector car auction. Timmy Martin, the automotive instructor at Adamson, said the event taught students about the car restoration process and gave them an inside look at a car auction. Students from…

Seventeen-year-old Alison Geason is a determined young woman who knows where she’s going and isn’t wasting time getting there. Geason, a senior at the School of Health Professions at Yvonne A. Ewell Townview Center, says she’s known since pre-school that she wanted to become a doctor. After serving a traditional internship with a local physician, she decided she was ready for the next level – a more intensive, hands-on medical internship. So she did what any resourceful, technology-savvy young person might do to find that opportunity: she did an Internet search and found a medical internship program halfway around the…