When Did Everything Change?

It is 7:00A.M., the ring bells like every morning and the class starts, the forty minutes of the period begin and they seem to be longer every day, and the homework seems to be harder, but now I realize that school has changed and the way I see it has changed too.

Since I was three years old I had been in the school called “Colegio Internacional de Guatemala”; I have seen the same buildings for thirteen years.. My school is divided in six different buildings of one level and secondary school is separated from primary school. The buildings have from nine to ten classes and two bathrooms, one for girls and one for boys; the classes have three big windows, four walls from which three are made of blocks and the other one is made of bricks, the high ceiling made out of wood. My school also has a soccer field, a library, and a playground for the children.  It sounds like a typical school and it is, but when I was just a three year old girl the school wasn’t so boring, it was a world of adventures and fun.

I remember that when I was younger I used to play at every moment with my best friends Marisa and Ana Sofia. We imagined that we were in a magic wonderland of different creatures, some of them were good and others were bad. Each of us had a magic pet and our job was to feed them, so we imagined that in the switches was the food and every time we fed them, someone or something gave us points; these points help us to advance levels. We imagined that the levels were the brick rows from the walls and the highest rows were unreachable. Now I don´t even care about the walls, but when I am remembering my childhood I always remember those walls.

One of the most important places for me was the recess. When you are a children you don´t care with who you are playing, if is a boy or a girl. I remember one of my favorite games that we created that was called spider. We played this game in a kind of web that was in the playground, it was a four column structure. The columns were fastened with ropes, a lot of ropes that created a kind of spider´s web. The game consisted that a group of children get in the web and a child was outside of it, he or she had to touch one of the persons that were inside the web but through the holes the ropes created. We spent our whole recess playing this kind of games, but now in the recess when there are quizzes I spent my time studying or reading, or I try to make my homework. (The stories I have described before happened when I was between six and ten years old.) But as I grew, the views of school changed physically too, because old structures and our favorite games were taken and new buildings were constructed. I remember when the library´s building was being constructed. My whole class made different hypothesis and imagined for what the building was going to be. It was very funny when we imagined the different things that happened in the school.

But the rest of the years even though we weren’t children we had fun. I remember that when we were at sixth grade we had a teacher that gave us from five to eight minutes to write in a journal. She always entered to the class, put her stereo on the table and let us write about everything we wanted. I remember that I wrote about what happened in the day before, but in those minutes my class transformed in a world that I created. In that moment my mind used to fly and show what I really think.

Now I am Fifteen years old and the school in some ways is just a building more, that sometimes seems more like a jail than a school; but when you see the places in a positive way it changes the way you think and feel. I feel good among my classmates and with my teachers, and I really love to learn new things. Sometimes I thought that places really didn’t influenced people, but now I realize that it is not true, I really like my school and I think that it is part of me.