A day in the life of an IST student

It’s six in the morning and still dark outside. No sensible person would consider waking up and in fact nobody would if it wasn’t for the alarm clock.

We all know that young children have a perfect biological clock. They normally sleep when they are tired and wake up when they are fully rested.

But not the IST kid. They wake up because an angry parent shouts “come out of your bed, I've called you fifteen times now!”

With the eyes half closed you sit down on the breakfast table. There is toast, cereal, tea, but the only thing you can force down your throat is a glass of Ribena.

It’s 6:35 now. Dad is already in the car with the engine running. There is great fear for the Selendar bridge traffic jam. If you are 5 minutes late to leave the house you may be 30 minutes late in school. Why is that? Well, because stupid enough all schools start at the same time and especially traffic around Al Muntazir school on the UN road cause to block that road so badly that everything comes to a grinding halt.

Around 8:00 you start feeling your empty stomach so you quickly finish the snacks that you brought to school, leaving nothing for later.

At one a clock you feel you should have lunch, but you don’t. It is the hottest time of the day and yes: these silly grown-ups want you to play soccer or any other outdoor activity. Who plans this?

Then around three you get home and eat lunch. As you are starving you may eat 5 pancakes or 8 slices of bread.

And at 6 (yes, I guess the smart reader has worked out that this is 3 hours after lunch) you have dinner…

Unfortunately most parents don’t understand that these irregular eating habits are not very healthy and even in last years AGM questions were raised about the large number of overweight kids in our school. Any idea why….

After dinner the parents really start getting nervous. Did you do your homework? No you can’t watch TV. They want to have you in bed by 8 because tomorrow the day starts ridiculously early again…

The parents are frustrated too. They would love to have a social life during the week. Go out for dinner or have some friends over. Or even maybe go out for a drink (the Irish pub seems to be nice), but they don’t. Because they have to get up at 6 (or some of the moms with a complicated make-up job even at 5) so they want to go to bed at 9 too.

And why? School starts at 6 because it gets hot in the classrooms.

Uh, wait a minute. That was 20 years ago when there were no A/C’s in the classrooms. Today we have these nice split A/C units and I would rather be in a classroom at 2 than outside in the hot sun running around on a football field.

So why doesn’t the school change its timetable?

Just shift everything 2 hours:

• No kid would have problems waking up
• at 9 there is no traffic at the selendar bridge
• kids would enjoy a healthy breakfast
• they would also have lunch and dinner at normal times developing healthy eating habits again
• the after school activities would take place at times that the sun is not strong anymore
• kids would be able to do their homework after dinner and still have some time to watch TV
• parents would be able to have a social live again

And for the European and South African parents the time gap would be closed. There is only one hour difference between here and SA and continental Europe in summer, but because our timetable is wrong by 2 hours, in reality the difference is 3 hours. So very time you have visited home, it takes 2 weeks to adjust to that time difference again.