Short Update (Written 6/30/06)

Today was an interesting day at school because there were quite a few things happening that were different from the norm. First of all, today was Friday and on Friday's we have electives – kind of like after school projects for the kids to do around the school (there's at least singing and agriculture that I know of, I don't know all the electives). So because of that Father Kevin changed the schedule for today where all the classes were 40 minutes instead of their usual 45 minutes – what a difference 5 minutes makes, the day just felt like it was flying by which is definitely a good thing. Another change in the day was the fact that St Mary's was holding their inter-house competition on our field during the school day. In essence, it didn't disturb our school day at all – the kids were definitely drawn to watching what was going on down there. So it was kind of hard to keep the kids honest and coming to class instead of just going down to the field – I loss quite a few kids to that. During my break from classes I went down there and talk to Candice and Sara for a bit. Sara reminded me that in a previous blog I talked about my electrical problems with the labs – well that problem is now fixed *knock on wood*. Father Kevin had the electricians come in the next day and rewire the labs so that we wouldn't have an overload problem. Hopefully they fixed the problem but we won't know until we get the next shipment of computers in and have them all running at one time – one lab will have 26 computers in it, so it should be fun to see if we're going to have an overload or not. Now back to the school day – the electives usually occur during our 7^th period but Kevin changed it to 8^th period today (the loss of 5 minutes from class time resulted in an extra 40 minutes at the end of the day). Well the kids were all convinced that we were still having electives during period 7 so a lot of them began to wonder out of their classrooms during period 7 and we had to herd them all back. My year 12 class was so adamant that I was wrong about when electives were I had to send a student to come read the board with me to prove that electives were taking place during period 8 – it was quite funny. Overall, it was another hot day in the tropics – can't really complain. I think I'm finally getting use to the 6 classes a day schedule but it requires me to talk a lot (there are points where I could be talking about computers for 2:15 minutes – that's a lot of time for someone who doesn't like to talk a lot) which I'm still not use to. I don't know how college professors do it – even I get bored listening to myself. Ah well, 1 more month down, 2 more months before the next holiday – but who's counting?! L8r.