Thanksgiving.

[sister_luck]

For those who celebrate: Have a lovely holiday!

After the snow on Sunday and Monday, we're back to monochrome November. The world outside seems stripped of colour - with the sky a dirty grey, even the few coloured leaves left on the trees look dull. The ground is still wet and the kids playing hide and seek among the shrubbery in the school grounds take copious amounts of dark mud into the classrooms. It's lodged in the soles of their shoes and when it dries it falls out. At the end of lessons, it looks like you could start a vegetable patch under most of the chairs. The kids who sweep the floors have got a difficult job right now.

I'm quietly grateful for a lot of things today.

Comments

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

We should have our pupils sweep the floors too!

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

We've got quite the list of chores for them to do: We've got two pupils on board cleaning duty and two pupils sweeping the floors. And once in every four weeks we also sweep the corridor - we share that with the other three forms in the same hallway. The forms who have got flowerpots on the window-sills usually have a plant-watering duty, too. The board and floor duties rotate every week, but the flower duty usually stays with one or two pupils.

I'm just glad that we don't have carpets, like we did in my old school. All that mud would make a terrible mess!

I think in Japan they don't have cleaning personnel in the schools, and instead the students wash the floors every week.

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

We used to have "duty" as well: a group of two or three students would sweep and clean the blackboard at the end of every day. There was a rotation system where you were responsible for one week.

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

I can't remember whether we had to do any chores at primary school except for putting the chairs on the desks after lessons, but I think most of our pupils had chores at primary school, too. Sometimes the whole system generates conflict ("Miss, Soandso ran away after school and didn't help me!") but most of the time it works well. The kids also have to pick up rubbish in the school grounds every couple of weeks.