Saturday School

Today I'd like to share with you a short fairly long rant about saturdays here in Italy. The average Italian elementary student does not have school on saturday. Same goes with middle school students. In college here school on saturday is unheard of. But what about high school? Yup! "But wait, Mitch! It's only a half-day!" an Italian teacher might point out. Well actually it's only an hour less than normal, technically making it a 5/6 day.


It's not like Italian high school students are going to school for much more time than their American peers. In fact it works out to the same number of hours every week (assuming the American takes a zero period, which I did for all four years of high school thank-you-very-much). 


This single extra day of school changes everything. The number of non-school-nights is cut in half, and I would argue than the overall feel of the weekend is completely killed. If you want to go the movies, go to a bar or disco, or even just hang out with friends late at night, you have only one day a week where it is feasible - saturday. And by the time saturday night comes you've just finished a six day week and honestly sleep sounds like such a better option at that point. 


Also, do you know that feeling of sunday where you can't exactly relax because in the back of your head you know that there's school the next day? Well buddy you'd better get used to that feeling because that's the only day of the weekend you have.


And in the end that's exactly what you do - get used to it. By the end of the first month I was somewhat habituated to the unholy practice of schoool on saturday, but every once and a while it just gets to me. And yes, I do realize this is a relatively insignificant problem in an otherwise incredible experience. Really this entire post could be smacked with a "FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS" tag, but I just needed to get this out of my system.