School Begins

School at the Evanjelicke Lyceum began on Thursday, September 2, with a worship service at the Big Church. Now, that stands some explanation, but only a little. When the Hapsburgs allowed the Protestants to build churches again (actually, that stands some explanation as well, but you'll have to look it up yourself), the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession (the Lutherans) built a big church and a little church. The Little Church is used for the English, German, and Hungarian services, and the big one for Slovak. Anyway, faculty, students, and parents, including the primary and secondary, gathered for a worship service in Slovak. One of the hymns was the Slovak version of "Tryggere den ingen vare," or "Children of the Heavenly Father," which (of course) is a Norwegian hymn. Or maybe Swedish, depending on your point of view.

Then the students all went off to meet with their class teachers, who shepherd them through all of their years in the Lyceum. On Friday, the English teachers (but not the librarian) had to proctor a placement exam for English and German. Many students had no German at all, and stared at their tests. Classes met for the first time on Monday.

So what do we do? We walk out of the apartment to the bus stop. Then we take the number 80 bus to the second stop and walk to the school. When we get there we go in, go up to the second floor, and sign in. Paula's office is right there (the "English Office" or the "Fifth Year Office"), but the English Library is on the other side of the building where, incidentally, most of the English language classes are taught. I have been trying to parallel the hours for the library with Paula's hours for teaching which, although she has the same students each day, vary from day to day as the schedulers fit in math, sciences, informatics (computers), and so forth. To us it is no wonder that, at the end of the first week of school, there is yet no permanent schedule of classes.

According to Paula, classes went very well for the first two days. We will write more about that in future entries. Jim is learning his way around the library, still unconvinced about the Dewey Decimal System and beginning the process of shelf reading. Without question, the students are very smart. They wouldn't be in this school if they were not. Some of them are more mature and ambitious than others, but that holds true around the world, we suspect. Certainly it holds true in the US of A. More on students, and our continuing social life, in future posts.