Today is Monday, September 27th, and I write this sitting in the Corpus Christi Library, at 9.01am.
School started back in the first week of September, and this semester is actually a lot of fun!
My schedule is a lot easier (and more enjoyable) than last semester:
Period One –Spare
Period Two –Challenge and Change
Period Three –Advanced Functions
LUNCH
Period Four –Writers Craft.
Having a spare in Period One, is pretty good.Even though my Challenge and Change Class doesn’t start until 9.40 I still have to be at school by 8.45, because Julie (my host mom) drops me off on her way to work. I generally use this time to write emails, or blogs, and finish any work I hadn’t completed. Wow, this makes me sound incredibly diligent. Really, I use a lot of this time walking to Tim Hortons down the road, going up and and down the stairs to my locker or reading. Right now I am reading ‘The girl who played with fire’ by Steig Larsson. It’s a great book!
My Period Two class starts at 9.40 and finishes at 11. That is one thing I really find noticeable about the schooling here – the classes are very, very long. Each one runs for 1hour and 20minutes. Challenge and Change is a Social Studies class, looking at basic aspects of Anthropology, Psychology and Sociology. We are in a tiny classroom, and there we have to work on tables, as there aren’t enough desks in the school!
Period Three: Advanced Functions. This, my friends, is Maths. Or as they say in Canada – Math. It’s a second level math class, looking at algebra, graphs, geometry : functions. I really enjoy it! Its quite difficult, as I obviously didn’t take the first level course, so there are a few basic things that I don’t understand, but on a whole I am getting the hang of it (I hope). Like most of the classes in this school, they use blackboards. This bugs me, because the sound of chalk freaks me out a bit (a lot). It’s peculiar, about 80% of the classrooms here use blackboards, and the other 20% use smartboards! I don’t know what happened to the whiteboards…
Then, I have lunch. Lunch goes from 12.20 to 1pm. I sit with a similar group of friends to lasts semester, but it has expanded. Lunch times here are very different to lunchtimes at Howick College. The most noticeable difference is that we all eat in the cafeteria. They have a legitimate cafeteria, filled with tables, where most of the school sits and eats lunch. You can choose to bring your lunch, as I do most days, or buy it – where you can buy meals such as curry, stirfry, tortillas… it varies on a day to day basis. And then there are the standard burgers, sandwhiches, cookies, etc. No Pies :O It is impossible to buy a meat pie here.
But obviously the entire school is not going to fit into this cafeteria… which brings me to my second major difference (It now sounds like I am writing a debating speech!) – There are three lunch times.
This, I do not like. You can either have Lunch A, Lunch B, or Lunch C. Thankfully I have Lunch C, because that is from 12.20 -1. Lunch A, starts at 11, which I would find far too early! Because of these separated lunch times however, it means the chance of you getting to sit with all of your friends is slim, and this semester there are a few of my friends with different lunch times.
Also – we have no morning tea time! Whenever I mention it, it is a guarantee that at least two people will laugh, and say “do you actually drink tea?!”. At which point I sound stupid trying to explain that no, we don’t drink tea. “Then it’s just like recess, that we had when we were five?”. Yeaah, I guess so. But it’s better, cause you get it all your life!
Writers Craft, Period Four, is probably my favourite class. I sit next to Kenzie Bender, a rebound who just got back from an Exchange in Australia, so we talk a lot more than we actually do work. But, the work we do do is fun! We get to write all sorts of different pieces, and then we get to edit each others. I wish Howick College offered a class like this, because it is a lot of fun. This one class where I don’t notice the time, in fact the 1 hour and 20minutes seems to fly by every day!
Well, it is now 9.26am, and in 14minutes I have to head down to the first floor for my challenge and change class. My locker is on the third floor, and my classes are on the first, third and second floor, which makes for a lot of going up and down stairs. But surely that’s good for my legs, right?
Lots of Love,
Sarah.
P.S – As terrified as I am by this thought, I thought I should let you know that I have 3 months and 10 days left…
