The Great 9-Week Experiment - Day 18

Yeah, believe it or not, we still have to go to school during the holidays. I nearly screamed when I found out we were 'required' to be in school during office hours, read: 8 to 5. So far, we've been to school twice these past two days, and have we been keeping to the strict office hours? Here's a secret: No.

On Monday, we actually reached school grounds at approximately 9 am (we were able to negotiate the time down to a 9-to-around-4 schedule). We walked miserably over to the staff room, and drum roll please... The staff room was locked. We couldn't enter. So we went over to the office and asked around, and apparently they can't give us the key, so we ended up in the dusty, stuffy old library. The aim of this 2-week torture during the school holidays is for us to complete/get started on our 'school project'. I ended up catching up on my Reflections (yeah, we have to keep some sort of journal-like record of all our doings every day) and a lesson plan that I didn't manage to prepare. Then I spent the rest of the time playing Minesweeper (on that note, I actually broke my previous record - now it's 133 seconds on Expert level). Then we were informed that the staff room was now open, and that we could go there now. That was about 11 am. So we went down, heavy laptop bags and all, and went into the staff room. We sat there until about 12.30 pm. Then it was time for lunch (Malaysian lunch hours are from 11 am to 3 pm, so we're actually pretty good to last till 12.30 pm), and we drove over to the Singapore Chicken Rice branch (one of my favourite places to eat, I'm sure I'll blog about it one day in the near future) near the Sunday Market area and I had my usual salad chicken rice and ice lemon tea. We reached back to school at about 1.30 pm (see how diligent we are, not following the 'real' Malaysian lunch hour time at all). We managed to surf the Internet on one of their computers there, trying to research our school project (we've decided to do something on students' perceptions on the importance of extracurricular activities) and suddenly, the impression that we were really wasting our time over there finally reached its peak. We decided to go home. So we packed up and left the school at about 2.45 pm. I reached back home around 3.15 pm. I was really so happy just to have that extra 45 minutes of time.

Then yesterday (Tuesday), we set feet on school grounds at 10.30 am. I know most of you are wondering "Hey! I thought they're supposed to be there at 9 am?", but please try to understand our predicament. We felt on Monday that since the staff room only opens at 11 something, might as well just go there around that time too, instead of waiting around for 2 hours doing nothing. So we were there at 10.30 am. We entered the staff room, I played a few rounds of Minesweeper, and suddenly someone came up to us and said they were closing up the staff room, could we please find somewhere else to do our project? So we took our stuff (heavy laptops and all) and trudged all the way up to the same old dusty, stuffy old library. We worked on the questionnaires that we were going to distribute, and after completing that, we decided it was time for lunch. This was at around noon time. So we went to the same old SCR restaurant (I told you it's really one of my favourite places) and I had the exact same thing I had yesterday, and then we decided to go home. Yeah, that's right. We decided that was it, enough of wasting time, we might as well go home and be happy. So we did, and yes, we were very happy.

So here I am, it's 9.22 am on a beautiful Wednesday morning, and I'm just about to get ready to go off to school for another boring day. Today, we've decided to hand out the questionnaires and leave the school by noon. See how dedicated and hardworking we teachers-of-the-future are?

Cheers!