Just One Week Left (Of School)

This week was the second to last week of school this school year here (as of Tuesday). The reason that is will take quite some time for me to explain, so that’s what the primary purpose of this blog entry will be.

First of all, during the week that Eric and Nathaniel were gone in Italy (as I previously mentioned) I read 100 pages further in my assigned book than Eric expected me too and I did a weeks-worth of science in an hour as well. That put me well ahead of where Eric expected I’d be by the end of their “mid quarter” trip. Then, I got extremely far ahead of what Eric expected in the development of the Dashboard widget version of my Blackjack game. In fact, I got so far ahead that it’s already on it’s second public release 2 weeks before the first public release was supposed to go online for public download. When it comes to German class, we’re immersed in german daily so we barely need a class in school for it anyway at this point. In Geography we’re (I think) at the point where cutting off a week of school won’t hurt. That leaves us with Math, both Nathaniel and I could very much use the week that was cut off the calendar for Math, however, we’ve decided to do Math daily by replacing Javascript (/Art for Nathaniel) by Math to gain back that other week.

That’s how we’ve managed to cut an entire week off of the school year. Now here are the reasons for doing this in the first place.

First of all, as mentioned in the above paragraph, we hardly have the coursework for more than one more week of school. Secondly, school ended around here over two weeks ago and that has seeped it’s way into our morning routines. First off, when Eric and I walk down to get semmels in the morning we used to see crowds and crowds of students (mostly high school age) on the streets and in the bakery and grocery store. Now that school is over there are none in the streets, we only see the adults heading off to work. Also due to the lack of students the grocery stores are starting to open later and that hinders our ability to get back sooner. We also have been visibly waking up later each morning and though that does help with the grocery stores being open, it doesn’t help with the time that school begins (that’s also how we’ve been managing to skip German classes). The third and less direct reason that we decided to try and cut the last week of school off is that Mary will be spending all day from Monday to Thursday two weeks from now at an international conference (that’s luckily here in Vienna) and therefore won’t be able to cook dinner (lunch) those days. Plus, we simply want to have more time that’s pure vacation here and with cutting that week off we’ll end up with more time as normal vacation (our normal 3 weeks) than if we did that last week of school.

So, the final school schedule for the rest of 9th grade is as follows: Monday=(Geography, Math, Physics, Literacy), Tuesday=(German, Math, Physics, Study Hall), Wednesday=(Geography, Math, German, Literacy), Thursday=(German, Math, Study Hall/ Math, Study Hall), and Friday=(Geography, Math, Physics, Literacy). Then on the following Friday when Mary can cook again will be the final exams. Enjoy, Alex.