End of (school) days

We are pretty much done with school here now; technically the last day is tomorrow, but exams are over, grades are in, and nobody's having class. The students show up tomorrow at 10 am to get their report cards from their homeroom and that's it.

The faculty had their end-of-year party Tuesday night after all the exams were done, and I understand it went until they closed the restaurant at 2am. I don't have the stamina for that sort of thing right now, not with Ella getting us up at 7 am, so I took off around 11pm, when we hadn't even gotten to dessert yet after four hours.

My exams went well -- my students got the grades they deserved and made me look pretty good in the process. I was also the examiner for another set of students at another school in town, and that went off without a hitch as well.

One nice thing: I got an extra honorarium for my work with those students; it's nice here that if you do extra work that's not a part of your job -- covering someone else's classes, grading exams -- you actually get paid for your time.

So I filled out the form documenting the hours I'd worked as an examiner and noticed that if I'd been out on strike, I'd have gotten paid time and a half since I wouldn't have had the usual two weeks to prepare the exam. The teacher whose students I examined had been out on strike, so I couldn't prepare without him, but he gets extra pay because he had to put the exam together in a hurry and I don't even though his striking put me in the exact same situation. Unfair, I say!

But hey, in the States I wouldn't have gotten paid at all, so I should probably keep my mouth shut.