We are going to have a quiz tomorrow,” my Biology teacher said on the first day of school. “What’s a quiz?” I whispered to my sister. “I don’t know,” she replied. Many things, including this incident, made my first week in this country a very remarkable and funny experience. The school system was different and even the language was new.
On the first day of school, my sister and I entered the school, not knowing where to go. Fortunately, a man approached us and said, “What’s your name?” he said it so fast that I thought I was in a Chinese school. “Can you say that slower, please?” I said in broken English. “What-is-your-name?” he asked again. With my eyebrows raised, I threw a bewildered glance at my sister. She looked at the man and said, “His name is Nour Aulabi, and mine is Sara Aulabi.” He looked at the list he had and before he left he said, “Go to ESL 07.” It took us 15 minutes to decode ‘ESL 07.’ Eventually, we got to our class. During the first period, we filled out a lot of paper work. After the bell rang, I was ready for my second-period teacher to come in. “Where is everyone going?” I asked my sister. “I don’t know, but let’s just follow them.” She replied. Back home, teachers would go from one
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Back in our country, tests are considered a very major event that everyone needs to prepare for. At the end of the hallway, people split. My chemistry teacher didn’t really call it a quiz; she said it was merely a “reality check. Many teachers offer various extra-credit points, but students wouldn’t earn it simply because they ‘don’t feel like it,’
On that same day, there was a parent-teacher conference. class to another, and students would stay in the same room, but we discovered that the school system is different over here. I couldn’t understand what had happened, but my father explained it later. She cut the silence by saying that we don’t have to worry about the quiz, and that it was not going to affect our grade. After students took the...