Mathematics

This class has the one teacher that the students actually listen to. I'm not sure why but when he walks into the classroom everyone stops assaulting the fans with balls of paper and sits down to do their work. This teacher also eats lunch in the cafeteria with the kids (I don't know where the others go, the teachers lounge is not very nice) and he plays tennis against any one that wants to. Somehow this gives him an unquestioned command over everyone. His teaching abilities aren't anything special, he just explains how to do something then relies on the smart kids that probably already knew how to explain it to everyone else. Over all the math here is more advanced than at home but I think they reached this level by skipping the basics (multiplication timestables, addition/subtraction in your head, long division). All the students use calculators even for the simplest of computations. The end of the year exam didn't allow calculators, no problem for me, but all of the other kids panicked. Every 2 months we have a math test that requires a practice test first. We have these at home and the teacher prints out a class set of the practice test and hands them out, no big deal. Here the teacher gets 5 people's emails and between those 5 people they have to get everyone else's emails. This creates an email tree that gets everyone the practice test in digital form, it is then up to the students to get their own test printed individually on their own time and bring it to school the next day. Most people (including me) do not have a printer in their home here so they have to drive to a printing/computer business to have it done. I have done this 4 times so far and each time it isn't even emailed to me until about 9 at night. Then my mom ad I have to go through the almost hour long ordeal of running out to the printing place in the dark. I think it's quite possible that there isn't a printer in this school.