Swear Your Soul

Every Monday we have a "flag ceremony" that involves a large amount of saluting, looking orderly and pretty, chanting and patriotism. Instead of first block everyone is herded out onto the soccer field and creates a blob around the outside of the 18 yard box. The teachers move through the crowd and in about 15 minutes manage to form each class into two lines of girls and two lines of boys, from shortest to tallest. They play a really bad recording (for a couple months the speakers were broken and this part was silent) of some sort of army drumming and a group of 8 kids march in formation in a pattern around sort of a figure 8. Everyone salutes with their forearm horizontally across their chest. Next comes singing the national anthem, another tremendously bad recording. I sort of hum along or sing "Oh Canada," sometimes I sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. To the best of my knowledge most other kids are doing something like me, everyone makes noise, no one sings the song. For the third part you hold your right hand straight out from your body. The Directora (sort of like a pricipal but way more powerful and scary) reads out an oath to either the flag, country or government. I'm not sure which one it is but you are swearing allegiance to something. I usually mumble this as well because I'm not 100% sure what they are saying. The class with the highest average grade for the last week gets the task of reading out a bunch of mixed up points ranging from school anouncments to happy birthdays to historical happenings on the next few days. When this is over the marching with the flag is redone, in reverse and everyone salutes on their chest. At this point each class is dismissed one by one. throughout the whole thing some teachers circulate through the ranks and tell random kids to tuck their shirt in tighter, stand straighter, stay looking ahead, put more energy into their salutes etc...

When you go back to class there is still 20 minutes left but the teacher doesn't even try to make anyone do anything.