A Girl Walks into a Room

This is my first week at school and it's been a very interesting experience. At my school, the first two weeks are a day by day affair. Each day the schedule is different, a new schedule is posted for the next day around 11:00am about what classes they will have the next day. Thus today, I can tell you that I know what I am doing tomorrow (well, sort of), but after that it's complete mystery. When the schedule is ready one is posted in the cancelaria (teacher's lounge). Here is a typical scene when the schedule is posted.

The diriginte (form teacher) is then responsible for disseminating the schedule to students. There is usually a line of students outside the cancelaria, who ask teachers to help them learn their schedule. Here is a sample of what a schedule looks like. As a teacher, you have to look for your last name each hour. Then the number above the column signifies which class you are teaching.

Right now there are only four classes per day, but when we have the normal schedule we will have six classes each day.

Tuesday, only one of the classes that I will be helping to teach was meeting so I went to school for only a couple hours. I first went to the room that is to be my classroom, to put some chalk I bought in the cupboard (here teachers have to pay for their own chalk, papers, and xeroxes - these are not reimbursable). Anyway, I walked my classroom and it smelled pretty bad. I looked around the room and saw that in the wall behind the teacher's desk there is hole about 4 feet tall and a foot wide. The hole was not there last week when I was in the room. I should note that I did see some water damage on the paint, but the wall has been there every time I've stopped into school the past month. I didn't have time to think much of this and I walked over to go to the room of my counterpart where we have been meeting the classes before we divide them in the coming weeks.

I asked my counterpart about the wall in my classroom and she didn't know anything about it. After class we went to the building with the administration offices in it inquired about the hole the director, he didn't know about it, but he did inform her that I will not have that room. Instead I will have a classroom in another building. I guess they gave the room I had set-up to the new religion teacher, this was news to both of us.

As of today, I think I know which classroom I will have. The good news is that it is in the same building as the other language classrooms (the other one was in the math building). However, we haven't been able to locate the keys so I have not actually seen the inside of the room. I hope tomorrow we can find the teacher who used to have the room because we think she has the keys. I just hope when I go inside all the walls will be intact!