Huelga Day Thursday

Quite frequently, I have days of school off for no particular reason. The day after Halloween there was no school, there have been several examples of "world pride days" that excuse us from class (the last being a two day fair with booths representing countries around the world), and every so often many students choose to participate in something called a "huelga". Huelgas are protests against government decisions, some of them just for students or just for workers or just for teachers, but most of them are for the general public. While there is, of course, meaning behind these days, they're mostly used as an excuse for students to not go to school.
The day that I write this is a day of unofficial student Huelga. There are only 7 of us in my classes that are normally upwards of 30. This particular huelga is currently the subject of a grand debate between teachers and students. See, because it's "unofficial" many teachers argue that the students shouldn't be allowed to attend the protest and still have their absence excused from school, especially because they know that most students who miss school on huelga days are at the beach or going shopping or studying as opposed to taking part in the protest.
What makes a huelga official? That I do not know. To be honest, this whole protest-whenever-something-goes-wrong method the Spanish have adapted when dealing with problems confuses me to bits. I was raised to address a problem head-on; not shout at it for a couple hours every couple of weeks. But that's another story. The point is, I don't understand huelgas, but I do know that they're insanely popular. Turn on the Spanish news at nearly any time of day and there's guaranteed to be a story on a huelga in some part of the country. This seems to be the Spanish solution to things they disagree with in the government. Of course, someone always disagrees with a choice the government has made, so there's always a huelga in action.
I've never actually been to a huelga, which I think you should know before I try to describe one. In Malaga, my host families didn't approve the exchange student participating in them, so every huelga day was yet another day I went to school. Here I don't have to go if I know for a fact that practically no one will be in class, but the actual protest itself is an hour away by train. That said, I watch the news enough to have at least an idea of what a huelga looks like.
For starters, it looks a lot like American protests, only the signs are in Spanish and they're much more frequent. People coordinate what they're going to yell through the megaphone to spread the message or whatever. The ones I've seen in person at night that workers take part in consist of a parade-type-thing and a lot of loud people. Their signs are all the same colors and designs, and they'll probably be reused in a week and a half. In bigger cities, like Madrid and Barcelona, they can get out of hand and grow to be several days of breaking glass and lighting things on fire. To my knowledge, these huelgas have not influenced the Spanish government to do anything besides send the police force to control some of the more rowdy protesters.
I'm not going to give my opinion on this practice, though I've subconsciously made it painfully evident already. I didn't make this exchange blog so I could write down my obnoxiously opinionated views on some of the differences I've seen between America and Spain. So, I'm going to leave it at this. This has been an educational entry about the Spanish protests, or "huelga's". Have a nice day, wherever in the world you are.