S: It is March 29, 2005, and I am here at Eastside High School with Mr. Thorne. Mr.
 Thorne, how did you get started in education?

T: Well, I was influenced by my mother, who has been a teacher for over thirty-five
 years. [She's] retired now, but that was a big influence; helping students, helping
 other kids. When I was in college I taught at a private school, so it's sort of
 genetic; it just followed me. This is all I've ever been involved in. I love it.

S: How does Eastside compare to your last school?

T: My last school was Sebastian River Middle School in Indian River County. I also
 worked at the Vero Beach High School in that same county for five years. I was
 at Sebastian just one year as principle. The alike things are, students are alike
 everywhere. They're just fabulous, and they also bring in all that baggage from
 home and their outside interests. It's neat that we can influence them all to do
 what's right and to work hard in their classrooms and to do what's right to mold to
 great people. The differences here is that Eastside is such a melting pot. It's
 really close to the real world. There's students from forty-eight different nations
 here, including students who, on the socio-economic screen, are low income
 also. It's really about the real world here, where everybody gets together and
 brings all their influences from the outside and they all act as one. That's how we
 try to treat them. It's amazing how it works.

S: In light of all the magnet programs circulating around the county, what types of
 students are brought to Eastside, especially since you have the IB program
 here?

T: We have several different types of students. We have the exceptional ed
 students [ESE]-a large percentage of exceptional ed students-which include
 gifted, but it also includes physically impaired and everything in the middle. We
 have major program students. That's students like Mr. Thorne was in high
 school, just your average guys that work hard to try to do well and maintain a 2.0
 GPA, and anything above that is super. Then we have our IB students, which are
 really students who love the challenge of academics and seem to push the
 envelope. You can just really tell that they are students who really strive to do
 really well in their classes-not that the others don't-but they just have a lot of
 advantages and they are just really unbelievable to see.

S: Implemented in 1998, the FCAT became the leading assessment test in Florida.
 What methods does the state require the school go through in order to prepare
 for the exam?

T: Well, here's how we feel. That the FCAT test basically follows the Sunshine State
 Standards. That's our opinion, meaning that if teachers teach by the Sunshine
 Standards, they're going to cover a lot of the FCAT material from day one. We