by Abby S. (9th Grade)

Geography Class this year has been… exciting, and I volunteered to remind you all that, yes, we do actually do schoolwork and we don’t just sit around writing articles about funny experiences we have had in Bulgaria. Obviously our hard work here at the Upper School has been noticed, because us students were hand picked by ACME Gears as potential agents. ACME Gears is, as far as the general public can know, a fictitious organisation created to trick us into creativity.*

At the beginning of the school year, which seems an impossibly long time ago, we spent Geography Class deciphering codes, reading cursive, and instructing our Geography teacher how to get to his childhood home. Before Christmas break we were given our first official assignments as ACME agents, which was to study and report on South America.

Each student has a leather journal, graciously provided by our Geography teacher, in which we jot down notes about our assigned country of the week. These notes are supposed to include lots of colourful and interesting drawings, but those do not seem to be regarded as priorities by most of the students. Usually we cover the history, languages and dialects, foods, traditions, and economy of the areas we study.

Of course, all of this vital work, for which we are not compensated (but neither is our teacher), is entrusted to us by ACME Gears, whose head director looks over the notes and reports we write and gives us incapacitating, themed word searches in return. So far we have studied South America, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean islands, Iceland and Greenland, and Europe.

We are about to start work on Asia, and if any of you can help us figure out what Vietnam’s flag is, please let us know!

*For more on ACME Gears, go to www.acmegears.org.