Classes!
Finally, the first day of school. Well, that’s an interesting one. I went to meet some of my professors a couple days before classes started with my host family so I recognized a few familiar faces! Even so, the school system here is really strange compared to what I’m used to at home... During high school I attended a self-directed school; this means that we had to teach our self all of our subjects, and were responsible to make our own work/test schedules. This kind of flexibility was crazy weird at first, but I grew to love it once I got into the groove of things. I got so used to doing things at my own pace, taking the much-needed Tim’s break every now and then, and determining how much time I felt I wanted to take for each individual subject. It took a lot of self-discipline to be successful, but I managed to find what worked best for me personally and graduated before I left! Here they take 16 subjects over the course of a year, with 8 classes per day. They have a total of one 15 minute lunch break and are expected to attend every class; after a certain amount of un-excused absences, they can face expulsion. I’m not very fond of this rigid structure, I feel like it doesn’t allow for students to perform their best academically. That said, I think it’s a good experience to be thrown into something so different and have to adapt quickly. Considering that I can barely grasp what’s going on in class, i’m really happy that this year isn’t counting academically for me. It’s really weird at times because I don’t know what’s going on; I want to understand and I try to pay attention but I just don’t get it. Lately I’ve been doing school Carroll style, bringing in my croatian/english dictionary to practice basic vocabulary and learn step-by-step. That said, some of the teachers really do go out of their way to make sure I can involve myself in their classes! The math teacher does her best to help me during breaks and the biology teacher even translated me a printout so that I could follow along! While I find myself mingling within larger groups, sometimes the language barriers make it difficult to understand whats going on. I’ve decided that the most accurate comparison to this is being left out of an inside joke. Trying to figure out how to explain just exactly what’s going on can be fun though, and anyone that knows me also knows that I’m always up for a challenge! This week I talked to the musical history teacher that also is the director for their school choir! I’m going to try to get involved with choir once again so I can maintain and improve my musical abilities, while getting to know more people. Keeping myself busy and on the go really helps keep me focused and my mind off of being homesick. Establishing a routine and finding ways to make myself feel at home are helping me to really start loving it over here. I’ve been so busy that I haven’t even had much time to feed my coffee addiction! Maybe that’s a good thing? Probably not, the coffee over here is delicious!