My classroom!

 Ever wonder what 85 students in a classroom looks like? Well, here it is. This is my 5e class (about 7th grade level), there are 85 students aged 14-18 crammed onto 28 benches (3 per bench!) for 5 hours straight every day. Here, students stay in the same room all day while teachers move from class to class. I teach math for 5 hours every week and I have to admit, they're kind of my favorite class. I think I just like that they're younger and that there is less pressure with the younger grades, but they're pretty cute, too :)  You'll also notice that students wear uniforms, at my school boys where all khaki and girls wear a blue plaid/checkered shirt with a navy skirt or pants. 

Copying notes from the board.

As for resources available for me and my 85 students, there isn't much.  My school is lucky enough to have textbooks for every student, but many of the books are full of holes from termite damage. There isn't a teacher's manual, so for each subject I teach, I asked for a student's notebook from the previous year. That way, I can compare the notebook to the textbook and hopefully get an understanding of what topics need more explanation or which topics I can skip if we get into a time crunch.

All of the textbooks are from the early 1990s, and while the curriculum for each class has changed some, the textbooks don't reflect that. In math and physics/chemistry the books are ok, but I know that the biology books aren't used at all. There are some locally printed biology books that are pretty good (because they actually reflect the curriculum), but because they aren't the official textbook students (and teachers) have to buy them with their own money.

While this isn't an ideal situation for any school, we make it work. The other P/C teacher and I work together to plan experiments and buy (or make!) needed materials ourselves. The one resource I have in abundance is time, so I also schedule extra sessions with my classes to prep for tests (or for 3e, the test year, to simply get through all the material).

Side note: Notice how the classroom has a drop down ceiling? It's really nice for cutting down noise when it's raining, and it helps keep the room cooler (barely), but the space between the ceiling and the roof is a nice place for rats/bats to hang out.  I can often hear them scrambling around up there and it kinda smells, haha.