The First FULL Week of School

Friday, September 5, 2008

We've finished our first full five-day week here at Schutz and at the same time have entered the season of Ramadan. Monday, Sept. 1st was the beginning of the lunar month and thus the beginning of the month-long cycle of fasting. It has been interesting for me to observe the consequences of this within the classroom.
During Ramadan the children who are fasting must eat their first meal of the day before the sun rises, which is at about 6:00 a.m., I believe. During the day they may not eat or drink anything, and so by the time lunch recess ends, the soccer-playing boys are VERY hot and thirsty after zipping around in 85-90 degree temperatures. It becomes a bit difficult to do much textbook reading.
Out of my class of 19 students, I'd say that perhaps 10-12 of them are seriously fasting. The other part of this is that, when they go home after school, they still may not eat anything until after sunset. The days are getting shorter, but yet the sun does not go down until about 6:20 p.m. Many of them will stay up very late, some until after midnight, and then wake up again just a few hours later. The Egyptian public schools, therefore, are not beginning the school year until October.
Anyway, it's been interesting to go through an entire week of school to see how it "feels". The students at the Grade 5 and 6 levels have the following specials during the week: P.E., Music, Art, Foreign Language, Library, Technology/Computer. P.E and Foreign Language classes are held two or three times a week. That depends on which weekly cycle we're in. The other specials are held just once a week. They do have a 45-50 minute block of time for each special. On the days when they have Foreign Language and P.E., those two specials are back-to-back. The students first go to language at about 10:00, and by the time they finish P.E., it's lunchtime. It makes for a nice teacher prep time.
It's strange, after 5 years at SVDP, to see students in the room without uniforms. Apparently that has been proposed in the past, but as right now, the children can pretty much come to school dressed as they wish.
One of my students is Greek; she was born here, but her parents have Greek heritage. Her father is the manager of a Greek restaurant in Alexandria, and this evening Kris and I are going to try it out as we are lovers of all thing Greek.
In fact there used to be many people with ties to Greece, Italy, and other countries whose families had lived in this city for generations. It is so close to the southern coastline of Europe, and many of these folks started businesses here and prospered. After the revolution of 1952 quite a few of them returned to their ancestral homes, but there remain some. In fact one of the administrators at the school has ties to Italy, but he was born here.
This morning, it being the weekend, I worked out in the exercise room. This room has lots of nifty equipment. I tend to use the stair-climbing machine and the bike. Afterwards I went for a cooling swim outside, Even at 7:30 in the morning the temp was about 80 degrees outside.
Friday is our day for washing clothes, and so I did that first.
That's all for this week......