The new job!

Whooo!

I have been working for three weeks at my new job - one week of PD and two weeks with students.  And could I have picked two more disparate schools to work at if I tried?  No, I don't think so.

The main plaza between the Year 7/8/9 building on the left and the year 10 building on the right.  The science building is at the top of the plaza behind the flagpoles.  Gymnasium is to the left of the science building (not pictured)

The entrance into the Senior School (Years 11 and 12) building.  This is where my office is, and where I teach two of my five classes.

My office is through that window.  When I have time to look up, I get to see the pretty flowering trees.  And this is winter!

For those of you new to the blog, my first school, X, is a boys’ Jesuit school, year PreK – 12 over three large campuses.  There are about 2,500 students total.  My new school, K, is also pre-K to 12, but it’s co-ed and all on one campus.  There are about 700 students, concentrated mostly in the middle and senior school.  K doesn’t have any Saturday sport, and teachers aren’t obligated to coach.  Instead of sport, K’s big focus is student wellness.  There are weekly wellness sessions, and weekly assemblies emphasizing various wellness topics from mental health to organizing study time so students don’t feel stressed.

Lunchtime soccer game.

K is associated with the Uniting Church (a recent combination of Australian Presbyterian and Church of England), which is much more liberal.  I haven’t seen any evidence of church practices in day-to-day activities, and there is definitely no praying before each class like at X!  At K, the Year 11 and Year 12 students don’t need to wear uniforms, and the younger girls who must wear the uniform have the option of wearing really cute pinstriped pants instead of the schoolgirl skirt I’ve seen at every other school. 

The campus is much more modern than my previous school.  They have an almost-new science building and lots of outdoor areas for the students to hang out in during breaks.  There are no bells.  Students just show up when they’re meant to, and ask me if it’s time to leave when it’s time to leave.  Years 11 and 12 have their own building with cozy tables and a kitchenette for them to keep their lunches in the fridge, warm it up in the microwave, use the sandwich press, or get boiling water for their tea or cup-o-noodles.  Year 10s have their own kitchenette too.  Younger years don’t get that privilege. 

Now for the big news – apparently I am now a science teacher.  I was supposed to be teaching 0.8 maths and 0.2 Lego Mindstorm programming.  A last-minute resignation on their end made the programming class unavailable to me so they asked what else I could teach so I could continue to be full-time.  I rejected drama, but thought science might be workable.  Everyone at the school assured me it would be fine.  It is workable, but only because I have incredible Year 8 science co-workers, a phenomenal lab technician who sets up all labs, and said she’d even do demos for me, and fairly easy topics to cover this semester (energy – very mathy, rocks, and reproduction).  Still, I’m doing about three hours of prep for every hour with the students, just to make sure I understand every aspect of what they need to learn, and I have trouble sleeping the night before each lab.  And some more new vocabulary  Prac = lab.  As in “practical application” but Australians never use full words when an abbreviation will do.

The Physics Lab.  I also float into the Chem and Bio labs depending on the day.  

 

Some of my students (in my SCIENCE class, y'all!)  testing the efficiency of bouncing balls in a prac.

The science gig is an interesting development.   American schools really try to avoid putting non-science teachers in science classrooms.  In every school I've ever worked at, it would simply never happen.  At NT, they wouldn't even put a Bio teacher in a Chem class.  Admittedly, K was desperate, but I was surprised how cool everyone seemed with the idea of trusting someone who hadn't had lab methods courses in a room with innocent children and potentially caustic chemicals and flammable gases.  If this is to be a regular thing, I'm going back to school to at least get a science methods class under my belt.

The students at K are really nice.  In my Year 11 classes (I teach General, which is financial maths at the moment, and Math Methods, where we just finished circular functions and are starting calculus), the students are very much self-starters.  I’ll teach a new topic, then they have a set of pre-picked problems that they do on their own and ask questions as needed.  General is trickier because I have both students who are pretty weak in maths, and those who are taking it at the same time as the Methods class, so there’s more differentiation needed.  I've got advanced kids in there making Excel graphs comparing flat and compound interest rates, then I have others who are too afraid to touch their calculators to put numbers into the compound interest formula.

The Year 10 students were recently re-streamed to Advanced, Mainstream, and Low, but we're calling the lows "Applications". This was done to allow the highest students to proceed at a faster pace to get ready for the highest level Year 11 classes, which are pretty difficult.  I asked if I could teach the Applications class.  We’ll be doing all sorts of TI-Nspire CAS-driven probability, statistics, and geometry rather than the algebra that would prep students for Methods.   Definitely some high-needs kids in there, but we all seem to be enjoying each other and the maths so far.  And there are only 11 students in the class.  Yay Applications!

Some of my Year 8s are pretty weak mathematically if you compare them to US year 8 students, but there's a lot of variation in ability because they don't start streaming in maths until year 9.  About half my class still isn’t sure of their times tables, and when I went to teach solving two-step equations, which is the first section in their book on solving equations, more than half the class had no idea how to solve one-step, which forced me to re-adjust my objectives quickly.  Still, pretty great kids.  They play games, they make posters, they work collaboratively, they work alone.  Love middle school!  I caught two of them copying their weekly "MathsMate", called them out, then privately later said to one of them, "Who was copying, you or Riley?"  "It was me, Miss.  Sorry."  Just too cute.

And all of them say "thanks" at the end of the lesson, and rush to open doors for me (both the boys and the girls).  One even said, "Thanks, Miss.  That was a really well-planned lesson."  Seriously adorable.

My colleagues at the new school are warm, welcoming and very smart.  Almost all of them teach more than one topic.  The departments are grouped; “Discoveries” is maths, science, and IT.  “Journeys” is PE, well-being, health and civics, “Cultures” is English, foreign languages (abbreviated LOTE, or languages other than English), and “Explorations” is visual and performing arts.

Although the atmosphere at K is more relaxed, I am definitely working harder.  At X, a full load was considered 40 periods out of 60 in a fortnight.  I taught four classes (four different preparations), plus extras (covering other peoples' classes).  At K, I'm teaching five classes (five different preparations), plus two extras, plus random recess and lunch duties that add up to 45 hours.  Plus, there are two wellness sessions and two assemblies each fortnight that I'm expected to attend, but they don't count towards my load.   Five different preparations is a little insane, but many if not a majority of the teachers do this.  It's such a small school, and in the middle and senior school they only have three classes in each year level, so you have to be flexible.   My timetable is unbalanced.  I have three days out of ten when I teach or attend assemblies every period, then three days where I only teach two or three periods a day.  Still, with a 15 minute all-school recess and a 45 minute lunch break, it's not as daunting as a similar schedule would be in the U.S.

The only thing that I actively dislike is our Monday staff meetings.  They are LOOONNNG.  100 minutes long.  Wednesday is compulsory collaborative planning, but that so far has been great.  IT experts are available for consult, and there is this gorgeous thing in the planning room, along with a teacher who was a barista in a past life.

Afternoon tea.  Planning time is VERY productive.

After only two weeks with students, there have already been a couple exceptional programs.  The first week we had a traveling inflatable planetarium in our gym.  The presentation they gave was extraordinary.  We explored the earth rotating, the sun, zoomed in on all the planets in our solar system then went into deep space to see the sphere out to which our radio signals had gone and all the planetary systems included in that sphere, then out further to see different galaxies.  The entire show used NASA images, so it was real, not some animated nonsense.  The kids loved it.  The other exciting program was a guest speaker - a Sudanese refugee named Abe whom one of the year 12 students had met in a lyrics-writing workshop earlier in the year.  Abe freestyled about his experiences applying for asylum and adjusting to Australia for the year 11s and 12s in a weekly assembly.   No one could take their eyes off him.

On the practical side, the school is an easy 7 minute drive from our house.  On days I drop the kids off, I can get there in 18 minutes from their school, because I'm traveling away from the city, so there's no traffic.  They dismiss 45 minutes before my kids' school, so on days I don't have meetings I can pick up on time.  It's two block from Aldi.  Overall, I think it will be a great place to teach for the semester.  No idea if they'll have anything more permanent after that, but at the moment I'm happy to be working and gaining more experience.  In a way, these temporary contracts are nice because I get to learn more about the Australian school system and different ways different schools can work within the parameters the state lays out.