School started up again for a new year today, and so I joined the hordes of backpack-toting teenagers catching tardy buses all over the place in order to get to our various places of education. Mine is quite far away, so I was in transit for about forty minutes.

The day was, in a word, sweaty. Stiff, potato-sack-esque uniforms, teenage girls and un-air-conditioned classes in forty degree heat make for a rather unpleasant smelling classroom, and today was one of the worst days, in regards to temperature, that I’ve spent at school. No student was exempt from the enormous, disgustingly sticky wet patches forming on the back of dresses, and pooling on the near-melted plastic chairs as we sat through an assembly, two admin periods and two classes. And for once, no-one made even the slightest attempt to hide it, because anyone who called them out on it (providing they had the energy), was a hypocrite.

I can feel a rant building, so I’m going to jump in here and make note of the fact that I have teachers ranging from okay to brilliant, friends in all my classes, and a pretty good timetable. That, and tomorrow, the school dishes out the ugly laptops that they provide yet we pay for, so class is going to become a bit more interesting if only because we now get to watch the more old-fashioned teachers grapple with the implications of having thirty laptop-wielding girls on their hands. At the moment, I’m somewhat opposed to the laptop movement sweeping schools in New South Wales, although to be completely fair, I haven’t really had the chance to experience it for real yet. I think there’s plenty of potential for the laptops to be great for learning and such, but I think we aren’t ready for it, and that they won’t be used to their full potential. Thus far, I’ve had two out of two teachers say, in as many words, that we won’t use the laptops much – just occasionally rather than go to an ICT lab. Convenient as this may be, I don’t think that was the idea.

Enough on the laptops. I’ll blog a bit more about them once I’ve got one, and I’ve experienced the questionable impact they’re supposedly going to make on my learning. It’s rant time now, although quickly, because at any minute I could be thrown off the computer.

As some of you know, I go to a private school, and in the tradition of private schools everywhere, the school fees are enough to make even the most wealthy of parents flinch, if only a little. And they just keep rising, too. I’ll put my two cents in about that another time, but today my problem is with what they are doing with this money. The school is hardly having financial issues – they spend their money on all sorts of ridiculous and semi-necessary things, like interactive whiteboards and laptops. And yet, to this days, only about five of the ninety-something classrooms have air conditioning.

I understand that air conditioning is a blow on the environment, and I fully support it being avoided when possible. We have air conditioning at home, but we only use it on the hottest of days (to put that in perspective, we’ve used it twice this summer, one of those times being this afternoon.) And this summer has been warm enough to warrant use every day, except we’ve made do with wet towels and ceiling fans.

At school, however, the situation is different. Thirty girls in a classroom cooled by two fans, both of which are incredibly weak and, if they even support such a thing as a higher setting, cannot be used on it, because they blow away pages of work and make writing notes tedious. I mean, even more tedious than it already is. This classroom also happens to have windows in the direct path of the afternoon sun, making sixth period English unbearable. Perhaps an interactive whiteboard really does help with our learning. I wouldn’t know, seeing as the majority of the teachers either cannot or choose not to use them. But I honestly don’t think that any amount of brilliant teaching technology will make an iota of difference when the class is too hot to think.

The days of summer in Sydney are far too hot. I can’t wait for Autumn, despite what I wrote a few posts back about the grass always being greener on the other side. Seriously, though. Today was one of those days where if you reply to “How are you?” with “Hot”, no-one even has the energy to laugh or comment on the multiple meanings of that answer. This, I feel, is a travesty, and a brilliant example of exactly why my school needs to get some air-conditioning, pronto.

If you read this and you go to my school – bring this idea up with some teachers, why don’t you? They’ve stopped listening to me… can’t imagine why…