I miss the school summer holidays a lot, in here they are 3 months long (from the 10-15th of June to the 10-15th of September). On the other hand, I went to school also on Saturday for all the middle and high school, and I don't miss it at all...
Anyway, I really can't imagine how it could be to go to school until late July, or to restart the new school year in August
Returning to the main topic, I have the strong impression that our school calendars are made for avoiding heat problems: schools just remain closed all over the summer. Of course AC are completely unheard in all our schools, from kindergarten up to universities.
Kindergartens have a little longer school year, from the beginning of September to the end of June, but I've never heard about problems about excessive heat neither in those cases. I remember that I passed practically all my Junes at kindergarten playing in the school yard, it was probably the funniest period of the year!
About primary schools I don't have much to say, I just wanted to show you the weird "uniforms" that some of us have to wear: the "grembiule" (I tried to look for a translation, and I found "smock").
A picture
In practice children are often asked to wear that stuff over regular clothes, so that they can't ruin their clothes. Once they were much more common and every school children wore them, nowadays instead it is common to see only really young children wearing them (kindergarten and first years of elementary school). Every single person I know hated them as a child, in particular when summer was approaching and you just wanted to wear a Tshirt and shorts.
Anyway, in general the period in which the hot temperatures can be more troublesome are the final exam at the end of middle and high school, that are made in the second half of June (the high school exam often finishes at the beginning of July).
I remember that when I did the written tests for my final exam at the high school, which are something like 6 hours long. We were allowed to keep a bottle of water with us and something to eat (a little snack), and the teachers also put a fan in the room we were in. That fan is the only alternative to the open windows I've ever seen in an Italian school. About that exam, I also remember that the day I had the oral part it was particularly hot, but in that case the high temperatures actually helped me because I was talking about global warming & co, and the teachers looked more interested than usual in what I was saying
In general the most of the problems I had with hot days were not at school, but at the university.
We have a quite strange calendar at university, in practice the only periods in which we are sure to don't have lessons nor exams are August, the Christmas period and the Easter week. In general we nearly always end with exams all over June and July, for example this year my last exam will be the 28th of July
This means that we can have exams in really warm days, for example I remember an exam I did last summer in the middle of July. There were something like 36°C in Turin (not joking, last July was terrible in here) and I and four other students had an oral exam. The teacher that examined us was really old, I would say no less than 70 years old, and he took all the afternoon to listen the all of us. And of course there wasn't any AC. We were quite worried that he could have an heart attack or something similar, that afternoon was really impossible to remain in those classrooms...
talking about exams, it is better if I return to my spectra...
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