School giblets

Today is R's last day of school! (School goes on until July, but she is finished.) She has had her last get togethers with her friends, done all of her class presentations (with some pretty interesting questions about America from her class), and gotten everyone's email address. Yesterday she received a Swiss mug from one of her teachers and today her class presented her with a cake and a card signed by everyone. This was S's last half day. Her best friends took her out for an awesome pizza lunch and she had her classmates sign her memory book. Later the girls went down to the strandbad to swim for a few hours. They will miss being able to do things on their own.

As R says, it was a long year with many adventures. We have been keeping a list of some of the strangest things involving school:

1. R's week long school hiking trip with insanely treacherous hikes, dirty hotel, food shortages, and a mysterious visit from the police. No permission slip required, no information provided.  Later, S had one, too, with only a couple days' notice. No police, but enough snow in late May that they had to stay inside one day.

2. The mandatory party at R's school which ran until one a.m. She was required to perform the Charleston and kids were being served alcohol. Roller skating in the classrooms and poker games in the school basement.

3. The fight at S's school, complete with kids in a circle yelling, "Fight, fight" after which the principal called the parents of the girl who got slugged for a conference then sent her home from school.

4. R found out one morning that after school the kids in her class were expected to go grocery shopping then go to her teacher's house and prepare a spaghetti dinner. It would end around 10 p.m. -on a school night- at which time she would have to make her way home from a seedy Zurich train station.

5. I told R that her school did things so strange to me that I often couldn't believe they were real until they were over. She replied, "It's the teachers. They're all so strange. It's like they are all Music teachers!"

6. The schedules! S had two different start times and three different end times a week. I never figured out R's schedule. It often changed with no notice. She left for school at 6:45, sometimes a little later, and would come home any time between 1:15 and 6:15, usually on the late side.

7. S had swimming lessons. That's more awesome than weird. They met at the town pool in the morning and walked to school afterwards. The noteworthy part was that swimming was taught by the classroom teacher (so was gym). The other swimming teacher wore speedos, which S did not appreciate.

8. No one is allowed to wear shoes in S's school. The kids had to bring a pair of slippers and change into them.

9. R's Geography teacher actually asked the class whether the earth is flat or round. Then he became agitated and frustrated when R gave the right answer. She thinks he is a flat-Earther.

10. R had to compare the English and German versions of 99 Red Balloons for her German as a second language class. The presentation came to a halt when no one, including the teacher, knew who Captain Kirk is. R spent the rest of the class trying to explain Star Trek in German without any space vocabulary.

11. Halfway through the year R's gym teacher quit that and started teaching German. He continued to assign push-ups for bad behavior and wrong answers. A girl with a broken arm accrued a huge push-up debt. R can do more push-ups now than when he taught gym.

12. S's German as a second language teacher brought the kids on a field trip one day to the grocery store. They just up and left school and walked down into town. There was no notice at all. S doesn't know if it was planned or just spontaneous.

13. One Saturday S and I were walking to the train. Her English teacher pulled over and got out of her car to talk to us. The teachers at school had been discussing S's bout with the flu and she wanted to recommend her doctor. S had been better for a while, but it seemed like they thought she was sick too long. As we now know, a doctor would have loaded her up with medicines which would have gotten rid of her symptoms.

14. S's teacher conference was conducted in German. She surprised her teacher and second language teacher by suddenly displaying way more German than they thought she knew. She perfectly translated all the positive comments for me and was able to paraphrase the rest.

15. R went to school one morning and had her hair spray painted pink on the way in. It was some sort of senior fun day. The seniors roamed the halls and interrupted every class wearing costumes, putting on skits, making teachers dance, spraying hair, throwing confetti, etc. They tried to interrupt R's gym class by roller skating through R's handball game, but the game was too rough for them.

16. R had open campus. Imagine twelve year olds being allowed to take off and go anywhere in Zurich for lunch. They also had to take a tram to another school for gym class. It's going to be hard to go back to the US and drive the girls everywhere. I trust R and S, but not the people around them. Maybe it's because everyone walks and takes trains and it is densely populated here - it would be much harder to scoop up a kid unnoticed.

p.s. R wants to set the record straight. She is not in love with the infamous Colombian boy!