New school year, one week in.

Before I even talk about the week I had, I wanted to mention what a spectacular first week my kids had.  Our schools are about 3 km. apart, but my school is one of a string of large private schools all within 2 km. of each other, all of which start at 8:30 and dismiss at 3:30.  Imagine really bad city traffic, double it, then add trams.  It easily takes me at least 20 minutes to get between schools at rush hour.  At my school, if a teacher isn't scheduled to teach or be on call to cover another class, you are allowed to leave campus.  I don't teach last period on Tuesdays, which is the only day I can make it to pick up my kids on time, because I avoid the traffic scrum at dismissal.  Every other evening, I am late.  The kids don't get out until 3:45 Monday - Thursday, so I have a bit of a cushion, but meetings are Mondays until 5 and Fridays my kids get out at 3:30 as well, so there's the problem of leaving them unsupervised for potentially long chunks of time.

To overcome this difficulty, I arranged for a year 9 student to watch them Mondays after school until 5:15 on campus, swim lessons on Wednesday, and gymnastics lessons on Friday.  The swim and gymnastics are at the sport centre on campus, their campus is fenced, and there are guards at the gates, so it seemed pretty safe, but I wasn't sure my kids had the maturity to meet up after class, get themselves to the sport centre, change into the required clothes, and get to their lessons on time.  

Can I just brag a bit and say how proud I am of them?  They had a different plan every afternoon, but still they got themselves to their lessons, they did not fight, they were not late.  Ruth cried a little bit when I had to drop them off early in the morning because last year I waited with her until she went into the class, but Isaac put his arm around her and said, "I'll take care of her, mom,"   and he actually took care of her.  To me, seeing how competent they are, and how able to handle the responsibility of getting to where they need to be, keeping an eye on the time, was just the best part of the week.  

And what a busy week it has been!  At my school, we've already had an assembly, a mass, three schedule changes, a cricket match Friday that started before lunch (causing half of my fifth period after lunch to be late to class - "Sorry Miss, I was watching the cricket."), and an end of the week, after-school cocktail party in the teacher's lounge.  No, not a typo.

First off, my classes.  I have four preparations - year 9 accelerated (like G/T), year 9 mainstream, year 10 mainstream, and year 11 further maths, which is the maths boys who need one more year of maths to get into the university program they want take, but they aren't really interested in the subject.

My year 9 classes are gorgeous.  The accelerated class learned operations with irrational numbers this week, and after three 45 minute lessons they could simplify, multiply, divide, and rationalize fractions in their heads faster than I could do it. They are amazing.  The year 9 mainstream dove right into the rounding project we had, wrote massive paragraphs when I asked them to analyze whether or not rounding made a difference in the long run when shopping, paragraphs that showed coherent thought and had no spelling errors.  "Miss, I ran out of room on the front of the sheet.  Is it okay if I continue my writing on the back?"  Why yes, I think that would be fine. 

Year 10 told me everything I did wrong on the first day.  They were the ones who told me "variable" should be "pronumeral" and that I made my x's wrong.   I wasn't sure about them after the first day, but since then they've proven themselves to be cooperative, hard workers, who were really well trained in year 9.  Most remembered how to factor (here - factorise) well, and those who forgot were helped along by classmates.  They have good mental maths skills, although they are hesitant to use the calculator (a TI-Nspire) for much.

My year 11 class is where I will earn my money.  A few boys deliberately stepped down a level in maths for this year, not at all because they are dumb, but I think because they didn't want to work as hard to get their last maths credit.  A couple are just annoying and refuse to do any work.  Even after one week, I can sense the smarter ones getting impatient with the annoying ones.  Today we practiced solving two-step equations as part of review, and even though we did it as a game,  about a third of the boys couldn't handle the structure of the game.  We played Jeopardy earlier in the week, and they seemed to like that.  There is no Jeopardy game in Australia, so I showed them a YouTube video of a jeopardy game before we played; they caught on right away.  I'm going to have to play a game a couple times a week to keep them cooperative.

Friday afternoon there was a social hour (or social hours) in the staff room.  There was all this:

Sushi, chicken nuggets, party pies, sausage rolls, and fancy cheese and crackers.  Yum.

VB beer, white wine, champagne and mixers.  One of the teachers was walking around with a bottle of the VB offering top-offs.  Very Australian. They looked at me strangely when I said I was only drinking water on the 35 degree day.

 When I expressed surprise at the grog, one of my new colleagues said, "Americans are such Puritans!"  Can't argue with that.  This sort of get-together with the fancy food is not typical every Friday, although the beer and wine is.  There is a new Senior School head, and I think he wanted to start the year off with something really nice for the teachers.  And he did.  The party was scheduled to go from 3:30 - 6.  I left at 4:15 to get the kids from gymnastics, and I was one of the first to leave.

So, one week down, seven weeks to go on this contract.   I think I will make it through.  It's so interesting to see the differences in how schools are run that sometimes I forget it's a job and see it more as a sociological study.  I am so appreciative of my school for paying me to learn the differences, and for being truly warm and welcoming.