Terms and Timetables (Updated)

As I stood teaching Grade 8A this morning, I wondered what people back home would be doing right now. Then I figured that people back home have probably thought “hey, I wonder what Mark is doing right now in South America”. Well…

School Time

Natually, school time makes up the bulk of my time in Guyana. There are 3 terms:

– The Christmas term is 15 weeks from September 3rd to December 14th.
– The Easter term is 11 weeks from January 7th to March 22nd.
– The summer term is 13 weeks from April 8th to June 5th.

There are no half term breaks, so my year in Guyana is made up of exactly 39 school weeks and 12 free weeks (1 when we arrived, 3 at Christmas, 2 at Easter and 6 at the end of it all).

For the Easter term (the 2nd one), my daily timetable looks like this:

For the 1st term, it looked like this:

G.A. is the general assembly, which I have to take charge of every 5th week.

Guyana is in GMT-4, so with the above you can get a pretty good idea of what I’m up to most of the time.

Free Time

All work and no play would make this a very long year, so we’re making the most of our free time. I’ve mentioned bits of this elsewhere, so I’ll keep it brief:

– The first free week when we arrived has its own blog post – go read it!
– The three weeks off for Christmas will be split between Tobago (for Christmas) and Suriname (for New Year)
– The two weeks off at Easter will.include a trip to the Lethem Rodeo, plus whatever else we can plan between now and then
– The final five free weeks aren’t really planned yet (they’re still 8 months away), but our general intention is to see as much of South America as possible – expect some awesome blog posts from all over the place!

That’s about all, really – if you were interested in what I’m up to you should now have a pretty good idea, and if you weren’t then you probably stopped reading this page way before this bit.