Our school is currently in a little, tiny building. There are no hallways. To get from one place to another you walk through the classrooms. This actually is not as disruptive as it seems. We're quite used to people walking through. And, the second graders know that unless people stop to talk to us, we're to just keep on working. (If they do stop, then the greeter for the day gets up, shakes hands, and welcomes them to second grade.)
But, we've clearly outgrown our school. Classrooms have been divided in half. Temporary, folding walls have been put up between classrooms. And still there is no place to go for some quiet. There is no art room, no music room, no cafeteria, no gym. Everything takes place in the classroom except p.e. We rent a gym in the winter and use the playground when it's warmer.
We've finally been given a new building! Let me just say that the paperwork involved has been reminiscent of my adoption. The fact that we're a foreign school, sponsored by foreign governments, means that we cannot simply buy a new building. We can't just rent one on our own. All sorts of special permissions must be obtained.
Our new building is an old Russian school that is badly in need of repair. It will be very nice once it's finished (maybe in October) with big classrooms and wide hallways (they're loadbearing walls so we have choice but to keep the wide hallways). We won't have a playground, but we will have rooms for all of our specialists and a proper science lab for our MS/HS students.
On our last in-service day we were able to tour the building before demolition begins. It was a little like walking through Pompeii...or an empty history museum. There was writing still on the chalkboards, some books still on desks.
It was a little eerie.
The bottom floor two floors were just filled with trash. We almost didn't go up to the top floor, thinking that there would be nothing there, either. This is what we saw.
On the end were the survival classrooms. Our Russian staff, even the ones in their 20's, say that lessons in how to use gas masks were part of their curriculum. There was a whole closet full of them! And, right next door, under a stained glass window of a soldier with other war-like stained glass inside, was a room set up to look like...different room in which you might need to survive. There were wooden guns lying around. It was a strange feeling.
I asked if this school had any military affiliation and was told this was just a normal, soviet/Russian school.
There's a happier "All the Soviet Peoples" poster near the end. It was
very noticeably different in theme from the other posters on that floor.
Blogger is being cantankerous, and I'm in no mood to wrestle the photo-loading into submission, so just take them as the come. You might notice in the last photo of the hallway that I brought a little bunny along with me. (Her babysitter for the day is in one of the other pictures-taking pictures of her own.)
