Tales from junior high 2

This one is a ripper.

One day last week the teacher delivers another stern lecture to the class: apparently some students are under the misapprehension that lunchtime is for playing. (We’re talking about the tiny bit of lunchtime that’s left after everyone’s finished eating in the classroom and packing their things away; about ten or fifteen minutes.) Lunchtime is most certainly not about playing. What remains of the luncheon period is for getting your books ready for the next lesson. If you have any spare time, you may wish to read a book quietly in the school library, but there is to be NO PLAYING.

So there you have it: from eight in the morning until four-thirty in the afternoon, zere vill be no free time, no fun, no chatting idly with friends. Who needs friends anyway? School is for studying, and nothing else.

No wonder that bullying is such a problem in this country.

The other day I had a dream, of a crazy fantasy world where students go to school from, oh, 8:30 or so in the morning and finish at maybe 3:30; where every day they have both recess and lunch breaks to spend as they please; where they can choose different after-school activities every day or even just go home if they want; where the classes are varied and stimulating and even make use of modern technology such as computers; where school, in short, is a place that you like going to… oh wait, that’d be Australia. And probably most other civilized countries.

We came here to experience a different culture, and I’m loving it all… except for the draconian education system. I desperately want to be proven wrong about this. I would love to be able to retract this piece sometime. But at the moment, this is what I see and it seems so terribly unfair.

There, that feels better already.