Gluing and Pockets

I have now been teaching at Maroochydore State High School for one week. It was clear before the exchange started that it was going to be different. It is. I am actually surprised at how much there is to learn when on an exchange. The differences are so many that it is like being a first year teacher again.

Maroochydore is a good school with a visionary leader. The students are good kids, the facilities are very good, and my colleagues are helpful and supportive. One would think that this would be an easy transition. It isn’t.

After a week I have started to learn how to manage an Aussie classroom. My Canadian tricks did not seem to work well and as a result I have applied different strategies. Planning has changed for me as well. Collaboration is a big part of planning over here. This is, of course, a great thing. However, for someone who is not used to it, it represents something else that needs to be learned. The best thing about doing an exchange is how much you learn – even if you are a very experienced teacher. I can’t imagine how hard it would be for someone who was not lucky enough to have the support I’ve had.

There are also the day to day things that need to be learned. For example, paper is not hole punched here. Instead, when a handout is given, students will pull out their scissors, cut off the boarder, and glue it in their scribblers. Yes, that’s right. They use glue sticks to permanently stick all handouts. This represents a problem when I photocopy two sided. They must glue only a small part of the handout – the side, fix that into their books, and then flip it like a page to access the other side. The other option is to keep handouts in plastic pockets that can be fastened into two ring binders. I wondered if it was possible to punch holes in paper to fix them directly into such a binder. No such punches exist. They have their ways and they work well.

The students wear uniforms and they must meet very specific standards. The shoes must be black leather, the socks must be white, etc. Facial piercings are forbidden. It is hard for an experienced Canadian teacher to enforce rules that have never been important in the past.

The best thing about teaching here is that I finally get to teach the way that I have always wanted to. I get to do far more experiments. There are two full time lab technicians (tekies) who will set up any lab you want and then clean up when you are finished. If you would like to do a lab that they have never done before, you simply hand them a description with a day or two of notice and it will be done. They will purchase what is needed and then set it up for you the next day. The summative assessment of Science by having students design their own experiments, perform them, and then write up reports is decades ahead of Alberta. We try to have students perform authentic tasks, but I now see that we don’t really know how and that so many things prevent us from accomplishing this, most notably our heavy program of studies. It is amazing how much easier it is to teach concepts when the context is there in the form of an authentic task. This experience has convinced me that we can do this back home… with some work.

Tomorrow I will start my Grade 8’s on their first “prac”. Their task is to design a lab that will determine which material is ideal for a Science lab coat, perform it, and do a write up which I will have to mark.  May the force be with me!