Yesterday in Santa Cruz, students from colegios from all over the Island gathered in front of the Government building of the Canaries to raise awareness and express their situation in the strike of the teachers. As the teachers have been on strike for quite some time now (the past few years, allegedly), the students are starting to reap the disadvantages of their refusing to work. The teachers are refusing to give the grades of their students, and as it is necessary for the students of the Segundo bacheratto, or the Spanish senior year, to have their grades in order to take the PAU tests (the exams that determine your placement in the university) my fellow classmates are suffering from the threat that if they do not have their grades, they will not be able to take the test. For this it arranged that a group of us would participate in the santa cruz protesting, although in the end, only four of us followed through with the plan.
I took the guagua up to Santa Cruz with a group of 1 bacherattos, and there I met up with my other three classmates. I went mostly because I have always wanted to participate in a strike, and it seemed an issue worth resolving. In Santa Cruz, the parade of students marched to the canaries government building where we cheered and shouted, made noise, sat for a bit and held up banners. It was more or less a laid back strike, there wasnt any dangerous craziness, violence or anything too exciting; that and as the protest was strictly students, we didn’t have the size, experience, patience, organization, or passion to really make a really strong strike. The group lost interest quickly, and not an hour and a half after arriving, many people already started to leave and things got boring. We left to get lunch and I rode back to the south in the car with my classmates. I wonder if the effort helped at all.
That night my host family and I went to a small planet observatory in the hotel that my host moms friend directs. We looked at moon craters and Saturn through his telescope and received a lesson on the planets and stars. It is incredible to know that you are looking at an object so faaaar far away. When we finished with in the observatory, we went outside to watch with our naked eyes, the rare reflection of a special satellite that is only visible for a few short seconds of a certain hour of the night.
