School's back! It's official! And if I'm totally honest, I'm glad. Of course, that's hardly much of a surprise to the people that know me. Of course I enjoy school!
The events of the day started out interesting very early on. It was only about 20 past six in the morning. Only twenty-five minutes after I was awake, I was on my way to the bus stop, a fair ten minute walk from my house. It's a new year, and I've never had to go to this stop before. So imagine my surprise when a bus pulls out of a street in front of me and heads down towards the stop. It's a good twelve minutes early, but it's first day. Anything is possible. One year, my shuttle that was supposed to take me from the hub to my school came to the hub, dropped off its load at the hub, and left before anyone could get on.
So I sprinted after the bus. I had a hunch I could catch up with it because a) it was a slow street and b) I was pretty confident the bus would make a loop, based on the routes of previous years. I sprinted a good couple of minutes before my legs started to say "enough." The bus stopped at the corner of my stop, then continued in a direction that was not part of the loop.
Of course, it was twelve minutes early. So I went to the stop and waited, and right on schedule, another bus came and grabbed me and a potential disaster was averted!
The bussing system was actually pretty bare today. For most school, the only kids with class were 6th graders and 9th graders. (11-12 year olds and 14-15 year olds) My school is small, and so they ignored this consensus and had all their students come. But because of the decreased number of students going to school, there were very few people on the bus. After giving it some thought, this is good not only for schools doing orientation for their younger students, but it's good for the busses. As I mentioned before, there have been many a tale of woe as far as the busses are concerned on the first day of school. By having fewer students buzzing around on the first day, I imagine it's easier to sort out the "kinks" in the system and make sure everything goes as planned on the first day with all the students.
Okay. That's the bus ride taken care of. Once we got to school, everybody was busy reuniting with people they hadn't seen in a while. Sure, some of us have hung out a little over the summer, but most of the people there I hadn't seen since June.
At 7:40 all students at our school were directed towards the fitness room (basically a bare-bone gym) for an assembly in which our principal droned out a speech about some of the changes, providing some introductions. after her piece, some of the teachers talked. While our principal had received some mild applause after speaking, out of kindness, when our teachers started talking, the applause was greater. Mr. Passes said no more than "hello" before the students proceeded to cheer. And when Mr. Begley, the teacher who used to teach all of SST's life sciences, came forward to explain his now severely limited role in the school, the applause was tremendous, even before he had a chance to reach the microphone.
It was shortly after this that my expectations for the day were rocked. Normally, we have an all-day orientation for all the students on the first day, but this was not the case. After an hour-forty of introduction-based activities, we jumped into a schedule of EIGHT periods, each one a half-an-hour. Eight! Okay, two of those periods are supposed to be study halls, at least for most people, like me. But still. We have half an hour in each class. I don't particularly like that. In a way, it makes the day feel like forever. Even now, writing this, it seems like school must have started many days ago just because of how long the day's been.
But of course, that's me nitpicking. Besides, I like school. Why wouldn't I want it to feel like forever? After all, the longer school lasts, the longer it is until I have to go to college.
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