The Good and the Bad

I do appear to be using this blog rather well as a reflective journal at the moment, although it’s definitely deviated from the subject of teaching…. I have a fair amount of time on my hands right now, what with no classes and bugger-all to do in the city (this will change next week, thankfully), so I am writing rather regularly. Unfortunately, EB means my writing is not always super-coherent and it is often riddled with errors, but, oh well; it’s my blog and I’ll do what I like with it :D

Today I’m going to talk about things that are really good for me right now, and things that suck:

Things that are really good:

·        My school; it’s totally awesome. I am really looking forward to teaching again next Monday, despite the shared-school situation. I am actually feeling quite proud that we have taken on another school, from the east, and will be ‘housing’ them, so to speak. It’s a cool thing to do, given the horrendousness of the situation (although I am aware that it's also just bloody good luck that my school was so unaffected). We can’t have teachers teaching and students learning in tents, or even prefabs; students need to do Science in a lab, Drama in a drama room, and English in an English room. That’s not to say that I think that sharing school premises is something we should aspire to in New Zealand - I believe that education systems should be as well-resourced as they possibly can be (spend, spend, spend, you stingy government(s)!!!) Anyway, things seem really well organised and the teachers seem pretty onto-it (despite the ever-pervasive EB - at least everybody’s got it, so no-one in particular is at a disadvantage there, heh). I think things should go relatively smoothly once we all get back into it. Can’t wait! I also have some lovely friends on staff – not a lot, but some - and I’m constantly meeting and getting to know more people. Yay for cool teachers! Yay for my school!

·        All our neighbours are in a very similar situation to us. This is actually a bad thing I guess, but when you walk across the road to collect water from the artesian well, neighbours pop out of nowhere to grumble with you about the lack of water, the damage to their house or how crap the council are. I never knew anyone on our street before this quake; yay for neighbours and communities coming together!

Things that suck:

·        No water. Still. It came and then went again. Pretty much all the mains pipes up our street are munted somewhere. I can see now that it’s gonna take ages to repair all the leaks. I wrote a huge post about it but I won’t bother posting it. Instead, to summarise, I will say that it’s truly depressing (as well as annoyingly time-consuming) not having running water in your own home.

·        Every single café and restaurant that I used to go to regularly has gone. Last night we had fish ‘n’ chips for dinner, which was really yummy, but it just wasn’t the same as sitting in lovely Topkapi and having a glass of wine as you wait for your deliciously enormous kebab to arrive. Oak Tree has been red-stickered. C1 is down. Osaka-ya in the CBD is probably down. Under the Red Veranda - down…so many businesses are simply going to disappear, never to be seen again.

·        We’ve had no visitors from the other side(s) town since the quake. I guess this is because the streets are pretty munted in the east right now and people have been warned to stay off the roads. Not that anyone is actually obeying that request… also, it’s a dumb request when services are barely functional in 50% of the city; we do still have to live, Mr Mayor. I guess the lack of visitors is also because there is practically nothing left this side of town (goodbye lovely QEII pool- I miss you so much already), and well, we can hardly cook a meal for anyone without water. My concern wider concern is that east Christchurch has been quite isolated from the rest of the city since the quake; this is worrying me a lot. What is in store for the future of east Christchurch?

Teaching and Learning (or lack thereof) in Christchurch

It’s been almost two weeks since I saw my students, and it will be another one before I see them again. Some schools, which were largely unaffected by the quake, started back today but mine won’t start until next Monday. This is because my school is being used as a Civil Defence emergency centre and Civil Defence won’t be out of the premises until mid this week.

And that’s fine…except to make matters even more interesting, when we begin classes again next Monday we will be sharing our premises with a school that was hit really badly by the quake. So, I am now a ‘morning school’ teacher, teaching from 8am-1pm, and then the other school runs from 1pm until sometime in the late afternoon. This means that periods will be shortened, as will breaks, and consequently, more learning time will be lost. For both schools.

I’ve been having flashbacks to the year I spent in Cordoba, Argentina as an exchange student, where I attended high school in the morning, from 7:30am-12:30pm. This is common practice in South America and various developing countries around the world as there are simply not enough school buildings to go around. So, for my school (which went from Year 1 to Year 13) it was seniors in the morning and juniors in the afternoon. While I was in Argentina I spent about two weeks in a small town called Hernando, staying with a family and their daughter who was my age. She had evening school – the format at her school was seniors in the evening, intermediate in the afternoon, juniors in the morning. I thought that sounded super exciting! Imagine messing around all afternoon and then staying up late just because you had to go to school and then being able to sleep in! Awesome!! However, I am fairly unenthused now about my allocation of morning school. I like teaching at a well-resourced school and starting at 8:30 and finishing at 3.  And at least in Argentina my home had running water…

It is interesting how losing a significant chunk of the school year puts things in perspective. The most important time at school is not the meetings about how to utilise teacher aides, or the extra-curricular sports, or the NCEA moderation meetings…the most important part of school is the contact time; the teaching and learning time in the classroom – you know, that time when teachers facilitate and students learn and where students get practice at using and developing their literacy and critical thinking skills (amongst other useful skills – though these are my preferred two). That’s not to say they don’t get that outside of the classroom, but, well, school is there for a purpose, and the most structured learning will usually take place inside the classroom (unless the teacher is crap, of course).

Anyway, what has to be done has to be done. I am certainly not advocating not sending the students from the badly affected schools to school at all (bad sentence, sorry, EB). I don’t know what the alternatives would be – maybe shipping in a bunch of pre-fab classrooms? That would be undoubtedly more expensive than the current plan. And at least my school wasn't badly affected...how stressful would it be to have to teach or learn in a completely different environment right now?! So it’s cool. Well, cool-ish.

And now, to add my anxiety about the whole situation, the silly Prime Minister has decided to give us Cantabrians a National Memorial Day, where we all get the day off to mourn and remember. On a school day. Um…I think some of us have been mourning and remembering for the last two weeks, and I’d like to stop now and just get on with life, thanks. School students surely don’t need even more time off school, do they? I’d never ever had students email me and ask me for work…until about a week ago. Students are bored. They want to learn. Let’s get on with the learning, I say.

And, as Homer said, “Is there anything useful we can do?”

12 Days Later

I just got back from a community meeting for citizens of Avondale, Avonside, Dallington, Aranui, Linwood and Wainoni. The meeting consisted of about half an hour of listening to officials talk and five to ten minutes of audience questions. There was a lot of waffling by said officials (and use of personal pronouns such as “we” and “us”, surprise surprise). Most people at the meeting were, of course, much worse off than us, and the meeting was mostly useless in terms of getting answers about what is happening to services in this area.

Here were some of the concerns raised:

• EQC never showed up to assess damage from the 4^th September quake so many people are living in houses which have been badly damaged (twice) and they don’t know whether or not they should be there. Many are worried that their houses won’t be assessed by winter.
• Not enough port-a-loos – there are 80-90 year olds using self-dug holes in their gardens as toilets, as well as large families with children.
• Port-a-loos not being maintained – that is, they are full up and therefore unusable.
• Transport: some residents have been told to go to the Welfare Centre in Burnside, but they have no way of getting there.
• No information has been given about primary schools in the area – what the situation is, when they will begin again etc.

The questions from audience members were not publicly addressed because they “ran out of time”. So no specific answers were provided for the above questions. No specific information was given about the restoration of services other than by Orion (who got a big applause). We, like many residents in East Christchurch, have no idea when we will have running water again.

What can I say? Lots of people in East Christchurch are currently living in developing world/3^rd world conditions. And that’s bullshit for a developed/1^st world country.

6.3

I created this blog to reflect on teaching, but the deadly earthquake that struck while I was at school on Tuesday 22^nd September is what I’m going to write about now. This post will hopefully be a cathartic one for me. Counsellors reckon that it’s not good to constantly re-live a traumatic   event, but it’s hard not to, and writing down what happened will help me get it out of my system, if you know what I mean. Please don’t read this if you are feeling traumatised by the quake – there’s nothing horrific in it, but ‘quake stories’ are hardly comforting.

Tuesday began with the PPTA PUM in the Christchurch Town Hall. I saw lots of lovely friends from my last school, yay. Then I went back to school. I had a free period and planned some lessons, had lunch, went on duty…then, about five minutes before 1pm, the start of period 4, I went into my classroom to write out my lesson plan on the whiteboard and set my laptop up. And then the quake hit. I had felt a quake in my classroom before; when I went in to sort some stuff out before the school year started, there was a 4-pointer which felt, well, unpleasant but small. This one started gently, and I thought, “Oh! Another wee one.” But it got bigger very quickly. I heard students screaming in the building. I ran to the door and hung onto the door frame – it was a violent one. The power went off. Once the rocking and swaying stopped I ran outside. Kids everywhere, some excited, some crying, lots of hugging. I was weird, because it felt bad, though not as bad as the 7.1…but then I work in West Christchurch and we live in the East…

I ran outside to the field, the school assembly point, as we had practised earlier this year (though I think that was as a result of a faulty alarm, not an intended practice, and definitely not an earthquake). My form class (Year 9, newbies to high school) came to me. They surrounded me, all chattering about what happened. They are such a great bunch. One of the girls began to cry when the first big after-shock hit - it must have been one of the 5-pointers as it was yukky. I held back tears myself, and then tried hard to not cry twice again as two other students broke down. Many students were upset because they couldn’t get hold of their parents by cellphone – over and over again I explained that Telecom and Vodafone would be experiencing system overload, delays and even might be down.

I had left my cellphone in the building, and was, eventually, allowed to go in and retrieve it. The building I teach in is fairly new and obviously very well built as there was no damage. In fact, I don’t think there was much damage to the school at all. At one point, while the whole school was on the field, a helicopter flew over us, headed towards the city centre, and all the students waved. That was a strange moment. I felt like crying then too, even though it was kind of lovely that so many people were obviously safe and well and able to wave at a helicopter. I tried to imagine what that would look like to the people in the helicopter. Then I heard a rumour that people had died in the city centre. That was a shock, and I didn’t really want to believe it. After all, rumours are always rife in emergency situations.

We spent two hours on the field on that overcast, rather chilly, slightly spitty day. I stayed at school until every single student from my form class had been picked up by a family member; I finally left about 3:30pm.

Along the way home it became apparent that things were bad. I saw huge, grey volcanoes of liquefaction on the road side…and that was in west Christchurch. The traffic crawled across the northern roads. I got to Burwood at about 4:20pm and then I ditched my car in a side street and walked, because the traffic was so terrible and I just wanted to get home as soon as possible. I ran across Avondale bridge, fearing a quake would hit as I crossed the already-ravaged-bridge, and walked down Avonside Drive, avoiding, on the way, the huge cracks, including ones that had swallowed cars. Avonside Drive is ten times worse than it was in the 7.1, which is scary, ‘cos it was munted then.

Two blocks away from our house, I came across flood water. Realising that flooding was a major issue, I wandered around the area for a while, trying to find a way in to my street. Finally, I took my sandals off, put them in my laptop case, rolled up my trousers, and waded up Wainoni Road to our street. The water was knee high and was that strange-but-oh-so-distinguishable grey-brown. I went very slowly, as the silty sand is incredibly slippery. There were hot and cold spots, just like when you go swimming in the sea, and some parts were very squelchy under my feet. I got to the corner of our street and peered around. The whole street was under water. So scary. There was one car parked in the street and not a person in sight. I made my way to the car, and then very cautiously shuffled from the car, across the street, to a lamppost near our fence. It was so disconcerting not being able to see the curb or grass verges on the side of the road. I walked along the fence line and opened the gate. Bubbles were rising up from the water where our drive would be. I heard Z open the front door and I called out, “What are the bubbles?” “Liquefaction,” he called back. That was comforting…I thought there was some sort of earthquake-bubble-monster under our property.

Z got home before me, although it took him 3 hours to get across town. He cleaned up the mess inside, which was much worse than last time, and found Gusto cowering behind a chair in the lounge. Finally, he found Grillz under the deck, perched on some rubble, surrounded by flood water. He put a plank across the water and, after a lot of coaxing, Grillz walked to safety.  I am so grateful to him for sorting all that out before I got home.

In the end, we had to make a decision: stay or go. We decided to go. The flood waters on our property were very distressing. We both thought our place would be OK after the 6.3 – it was pretty OK last time. The cats got shut into a bedroom, with plenty of food and water and a litter tray. Wading through a kilometre of water carrying them was not an option as they were very stressed. Just as well we didn’t too, because I lost my sandals in the squelchy, quicksand-like mud as we walked to the car. We drove to our friend’s and stayed with him for the night. I’m so grateful to him too. Hardly slept though, due to aftershocks and worrying about the cats…

And that was my 22^nd February 2011. We are so lucky.

The challenges that lie ahead.

So, I have a student in my year 9 class who is working at curriculum level 1. Just to put that into context, students should, ideally, be at curriculum level 4 by the beginning of year 9; curriculum level 1 is where a 5-6 year old should be working at. This student is 13 years old.

I have had a lot of professional development in literacy over the last few years, which gives me *some* confidence that I can actually make a difference to this student. I've also taught a lot of really challenging classes over the years with some students working at really low levels. And I certainly wouldn't want to see this student held back and in a class with much younger students. I do believe that a 13 year old should be learning with other 13 year olds, no matter how different they might be in terms of needs and ability.

Anyway, this year is going to be a challenge (as is every year...)

I need to embed differentiation into my planning and teaching (somehow...yikes!), as this will allow me to cater for the wide variety of needs in this class, including this particular student, as well as the ones sitting at the 'top' of the class who are working at curriculum level 4. This is something I will probably reflect on again in this blog. Hopefully at some point (soon) this year I will be able to say,  "I taught a cool lesson that was differentiated to meet my students needs and they all learned something and enjoyed the experience". I'm very worried that I might not though...

Teaching rocks, but the workload sucks.

I, like many of my fellow teacher-friends and colleagues, have spent most of this weekend doing schoolwork. I marked, I planned, I marked and I planned...and I still didn't get nearly as much done as I would have liked. This is not because I have silly - as opposed to smart - work habits, nor is it because I am a procrastinator. It is because the workload for the average secondary school teacher is simply too big.

Secondary school teachers teach five classes each (unless they have middle-management responsibilities, which certainly does not reduce the workload in any way). That's 20 teaching hours per week. This is the best part of my job, in my opinion. I love being in the classroom, interacting and guiding the kids in their learning, and feeling a sense of accomplishment when students 'get it'.


I also enjoy the planning. And the better you plan, the better your lesson, I reckon. As a responsible teacher, you have to take into account your students' needs, and then create lessons to fit those students which will engage and facilitate learning. NB: There are a lot of demands on teachers in terms of planning today, compared to, say, 15-20 years ago when I was at high school. No longer can a teacher get away with seating a class in alphabetical order and make them copy in silence from a blackboard for an ENTIRE YEAR (yes, Mrs Whatever-your-name-was who took me for Third Form Economics, your 'teaching' sucked). This is a good thing - in the end, teachers are there to teach, not to be a big scary authority figure. However, it means we need more time to plan - how else can we cater for students from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, who speak a variety of first languages, who learn in a variety of different ways, working at a variety of curriculum levels? The PPTA has won teachers more non-contact hours in the past which rocks...but still, the workload is a killer.


Ah, the marking. It's great seeing your students improve in their assessment results. It's awesome when a student gets an Achieved with Excellence. But the marking is constant, and while I fully support NCEA (in the sense that it's a much more democratic way of assessing senior students) it has caused major workload issues. For teachers and students. I can only imagine how stressful it would be having to sit assessment after assessment all year, and then having to sit a whopping final exam too. Probably almost as stressful as marking up to 30 (or more, depending on the school) assessments every week...

Teachers also attend form time and duty, which are essential in managing the general well-being of the students in any school. During form time and duty we interact constantly with students. During parent-teacher evenings (of which the average teacher would do at least 2 a year) we interact constantly with parents. We also interact with parents through via student reports, which take a loooooong time to write, and which we have to do at least twice a year. And we phone home. Yet nothing other than the 20 hours of teaching is considered 'contact' time.


And lets not forget all the extra-curricular activities that teachers are expected to do. Actually, it's usually in their contract. And extra-curricular activities are heaps of fun. But it's yet another thing that teachers have to do.

I'm sure I haven't even covered all of the things teachers do. But that wasn't my aim. My point stands; the workload is too big. 

Many teachers work all weekend, most weekends. Some teachers work all school holidays. And that's not good enough. We need a reduced workload. More non-contacts. More respect wouldn't go amiss either (please don't feel the need to remind us that we have "good holidays" or "decent pay"). 

I would like to see education, teachers and students valued once again by society. I'd like to see students getting the most out of lessons, not just what the teacher managed to whip up in the small amount of time they had to plan for that lesson. I both hope for and look forward to it.

And I'd like to have a weekend in which I can read a book or watch a movie and hang out with friends...





 

Trying do justice to an awesome text

I am now 4 days down in the teaching year and 10 days down at my new school. Things are going very well so far (I think) and I am feeling quite settled already, despite leaving so many teacher-friends behind at my last school. 


I began teaching my Year 13s the novel today (<3 The Great Gatsby <3). I'm trying really hard to scaffold the reading and teach it better than I did last year (which didn't go badly, I don't think). I do think that the activities a teacher uses during the reading of a text is really fundamental to students having a really thorough understanding of it. Today we did some pre-reading activities, read the first section of chapter one (which is only about a page and a half long) and then did a bit of work on it, mostly deciphering the complexities of what Nick is saying about his non-judgmental nature (haha, he cracks me up) via a cloze and paraphrasing task. Hopefully this will improve my students' understanding of the narrator and his attitudes and values, thus improving their analysis of the text, as well as their ability to write perceptive essays...which I will no doubt find out soon enough...