Hello from a former student of the basic school in Dub nad Moravou!
I have read all the letters written by Swedish students because my mum is an English teacher there and introduced me to your blog. As I could see, some of her students tried to comment but their entries were very short and simple. Let me describe here a few flashbacks from the time I was a student there.
I had to get up for the school very early because the bus taking kids to school used to go at 6:50 from our village. I got to school at 7:15 and the lessons started at 7:30. It was too early and the only advantage was that we finished at 1 p.m. and had a whole long afternoon free. The school bus took us home at 1:15. Once a week we had afternooon lessons and in this case we finished "very late" which was at 3 p.m.! As my mum says, it is similar nowadays. During warmer months many students went to school by bikes as it was not very far to get there and it was more comfortable than a bus.
Oldest students have 30 lessons per week, each lasts 45 minutes and is followed by a short break, only 10 minutes long. During this break you only can take your things like a school bag or a bottle with your drink and to move to another classroom, because students there have each lesson in a different classroom. The only longer break is after the second lesson and this one takes 20 minutes. Students are not allowed to go out so they just sit or walk in corridors, talk or write SMS ! When I was there, we didn´t have any opportunity to buy snacks or drinks at school.Nowadays there is a Coca-Cola selling machine and kids can order and buy a small carton of flavoured milk every day. Some schools in the city have school canteens selling snacks but the school in Dub has been too small to afford that.
After the last lesson we went for lunch to the school eatery. We couldn´t choose our meal, they cooked only one kind every day but it was always very tasty. In comparison to my next experience gained at higher school levels, the eatery in Dub was simply great and the meals delicious! I liked sweet dumplings there, various kinds of sauces, fruit pies and soups which were regular part of each daily menu. According to my mum, the eating habbits are the same as they used to be ten years ago and students like the same meals as we did. It just seems they stopped being friends with soup because older kids feel eating soup like a shame, maybe it is because in some families soup isn´t as frequent meal as it used to be in the past.
When I’m thinking about what to write more about the school in Dub nad Moravou, my memories are connected with my ex-class mates. I met very good friends there and I’m still in contact with some of them and we meet very often. My memories are also connected with very good teachers. Some people think that countryside schools are very bad, but it’s not true, in my opinion. Teachers I had were very well-qualified and we had really great relationships with many of them. It was like a big family as all students knew each other and teachers remembered names of all of their students and they even knew children they didn’t teach.! And it’s still the same nowadays. I left this school after seventh grade and passed entrance exams to a bilingual school so it allows me to compare those two schools. The second one was in Olomouc, a very big institution and it’s told that this school is the best one in Olomouc. There were more than one thousand students, and about eighty teachers, so we hardly knew everyone there. I missed „the family atmosphere“ in Dub so much!
My mum is complaining often about low ambitious of her students. I hope that your project will help to show students in Dub nad Moravou the advantages of studying English and the necessity to know this language very well to be successful in their future.
Hana Buchtova, a student of Botany ( Plant biology ) at Masarykova University in Brno, Czech Republic.
