Second Trimester Confusion

Students never really know when they are supposed to come back from inter-trimester break, so we usually lose the first week of the new term waiting for the word to spread that classes are back in session. This trimester was no exception, with the added effect of a collective community hangover from Esater celebrations. On multiple occasions during the first week we were the only teachers doing any teaching on the entire campus. To add to the confusion the school rearranged everyone’s schedule to accommodate a national literacy/numeracy campaign, which killed the second week of the term as well and put all of our colleagues in a bad mood as the administration had to keep drawing up new versions each time a teacher found he was assigned to two different classrooms during the same period. We had to reconfigure our youth group meeting schedule, so now all of our young activists are confused and showing up for theater practice while we’re stuck in the classroom. Our group’s sub-par May 1 performances celebrating Workers’ Day reflected this commotion. Luckily standards here are pretty low, so no one really cared that our girls flubbed the words to their poems or started giggling when they forgot the second verse of their song. So now in the third week of the trimester, classes are just beginning to normalize and we have one week to get our kids ready for the first midterm exam.