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.

P.E. Stands for Partial Exertion

2 days a week I Have gym class. Everyone wears their special gym uniform made of light fabrics. I love these days simply because the uniform involves shorts instead of the usual jeans in 35 degrees. At home we wear special clothes for gym too, but we only wear them for gym class, not all day as is the case here. In Canada we even have showers, you can shower and put on clean clothing so you smell/feel good for the next class. Unfortunately, here, they don't seem to understand the purpose of having different clothes for gym. You have to wear the same sweaty uniform all day, and people sweat a LOT in the blistering sun. Some days when we go downstairs and outside for P.E. we do some stretching and a walking lap around the tennis court but mostly the guys run for the soccer ball on the field. Boys and girls do gym separately, the guys are left to themselves to make teams and play soccer. The girls play tennis if it isn't particularly hot that day (maybe once a month?) or just sit in one of the shade tents and talk. Luckily only a few of the guys actually run during soccer so I'm not expected to work too hard. It is still much too hot to even play lazy soccer. When the block is over we go back to our classroom and turn all of the fans on full but the Spanish teacher always turns them off when she comes in and complains about how cold it is. I'm not sure whats wrong with her.