A typical school day... The basics

School starts everyday at 7:30am sharp.  When we teachers arrive, the students have already been in their classrooms for 20 minutes waiting for us.  The day consists of 8, 50 minute periods.  In a change up from the American system I am used to, students here don't change classrooms, instead it is the teachers who rotate and they just show up at the classroom of the class they are teaching at the correct time. The kids have a 20 minute break in the morning, a 1 hour lunch break, and a 30 minute break in the afternoon between classes officially ending for the day and the mandatory afternoon activities beginning, which include a one hour study hall 3 times a week, clubs once a week, and sports once a week. Everyone is dismissed at 5pm to go home. Fir that schedule is not at testimate to how rigorously and seriously education is taken is taken here, then I don't what is. I am teaching Senior 1A, 1B, and Senior 2A English, with 5 classes of English a week for 15 "hours" of teaching, plus some super visions periods.  What's Senior in this case means that they are in "high school" the title senior seems to refer to people in secondary school, Senior 1 kids being "freshman" Seniors 2s being sophomores in High School and so on with the letter (A or B) denoting which class for each grade you are in. One bug difference though (and it's one I keep forgetting) is that the youngest kids here are like 11! I keep treating them like adults, like I would treat high schoolers in the US, easily forgetting how young some of these kids are. The photo is a picture of the first classroom I taught in, my S1A Englsih class.