The Ringing of the Bells

As I have mentioned, we just moved to a new school building across the street from the old school. It is huge, has smart-boards in every classroom, advanced labs and finally an intercom system that works! This is a wonderful change compared to the last school where messages were only passed on written pieces of paper (in Arabic) by cleaning ladies in the school. The bells were always an issue in the old school. They were not automated so the office staff was responsible for ringing them and thus, they were almost never on time. This can be a real issue when the teachers have to move classrooms because some teachers pay attention to the bells, while others to their watches.

In the new school we thought the bell system would be better. We were wrong. Not only is it not any better, it's also really strange now. The first day at school there were no bells. The second day there were announcements at the end of (some) of the 9 periods in the day, entirely in Arabic, of course. This made it difficult to know if it was an announcement or if it was the end of class, and lord knows you can't trust the students to tell you the truth. These kids would hack off their right arm to get out of the classroom 2 minutes early. The following day they added some broken English to the end of class announcements. Something along the lines of: "The period 2 is now the end and is period 3." Not perfect, granted, but they are trying and it gets the point across. Finally, we all thought.

Those announcements were not quite fun enough apparently, because the next day they started using some sort of Arabic song to change the classes over. I liked it and it was kind of jazzy, definitely made me feel like I was jamming out in a Middle Eastern school. They let that run for a few days but I guess it was TOO fun, because the girls apparently started singing and dancing to it in the hallways which is entirely HARAAM! (against Allah/ forbidden) so they cut that too. I have to admit I was relieved when they stopped putting on the terrifyingly loud call to prayer that would come on out of nowhere and scare us in the staff room. As a colleague (who shall remain nameless) exclaimed, "That call to prayer was so loud it scared the be-Jesus out of me and made me a Muslim!" No harm intended for those who are religious, just a damn good line in my opinion!

So, can you guess what bell they have decided to use now? I bet you will never guess! Okay, fine, I will tell you.

Birds.

Chirping birds.

I cannot possibly guess or explain why, but at the end of every class, happy little chirping birds come on over the intercom to signal the change. I suppose it is organic and much less jarring then a bell sound, but it can be hard to heard chirping birds when you've got 27 chirping little girls in your class all talking at once. I can only imagine what may come next!