First Week of School#
A ton of things happened this week.
I met new teachers with different personalities and styles. I made friends with several of my classmates. I changed my schedule so that I could join the school choir. I familiarized myself with the process of properly getting brunch and lunch. I inquired about the dual enrollment process. And the list goes on and on and on.
However, that isn’t strange at all, since it’s my first week at school and my first school week ever in the U.S. Hopefully, as time goes on, I’ll be able to settle down and do whatever I need to do in an orderly manner.
There are a few things I need to mention, though.
The first is communication. To be honest, there is still some sort of soft barrier between me and the people around me. Sometimes it is related to language, as English is not my mother tongue, but more often than not it is more closely connected to the cultural differences between us. This is best demonstrated by the fact that my previous (I switched to another teacher) U.S. History teacher took it for granted that we should be moderately (if not extremely) familiar with the groundbreaking events in U.S. history. Even if I were a history person, I would not have been able to agree with that assumption if I did not grow up in the U.S. The solution is, of course, to try to break through this soft barrier, get to know the people around me really well, and at least attempt to be familiar with what others are familiar with. Then I will be capable of communicating freely and fearlessly without any sort of cultural barrier.
The second is independence. The teacher will never tell us what exactly to do, nor what is best for each of us. We’ll have to figure that out by ourselves. For instance, our physics teacher did not explain what we needed to do on lab day other than showing us how to use the related sensors and devices. Instead we had to determine what we needed to do only by referring to a few written instructions on a sheet of paper. This, in turn, implies that it has become even more crucial to ask questions if we don’t understand. Otherwise, we won’t understand.
The third and final one is participation. There seems to be a trillion activities and events going on here at Lynbrook High School. There are rallies, advisories, tutorials, spirit weeks, sports events and clubs, just to name a few. And each of them contains subsections and subevents. It’s really hard to keep track all of these, and in the same time try to take part in whichever is suitable for ourselves. Even more difficult is how to keep the time consumption down and highly efficient. I believe the only way to figure it out in this case is to try and see what happens! (which means I’ll probably need some post-mortem debugging 😉)
Anyway, That’s the first week of school, and I’m more than excited to see what’ll happen next week!