Wednesday

Blog March 29, 2011 It’s been a busy few days. On Monday we went to Waikato University, and I enjoyed it. We were able to attend a mass lecture as well as a tutorial, and then visit all the resource areas of the university. These included a new library, a School of Education library, a graduate/lecturers’ resource center, a university bookstore, and a teacher-type store. The lecture reminded me of my own training where we sat in large lecture rooms to receive information, but the tutorials were a little different. In my day, we spent our time in tutorials discussing what had been taught in the large lecture. At Waikato, it was more a mini-lesson about an aspect of the lecture. The tutorial I attended was about guided reading and was quite informative. Waikato University has recently been ranked alongside Columbia University, and the lecturers expressed feelings of pressure they faced in order to meet the research demands placed on them, ultimately by the Ministry of Education. I was interested to hear that the government puts a cap on how many students can be in any one program, so they have recently been turning away approximately 1 in 4 applicants for the School of Education. Waikato seems well resourced, and certainly it is a very pretty campus with ponds and ducks, trees and pathways. It also seemed very large, especially when one tried to walk from one end of it to another with a very painful back! We drove back to Auckland at the end of the day, doing a “short” detour to Cambridge where we had dinner. (The short detour took us about 100km out of our way! Oops!). We arrived back in Auckland not long after nine pm, and I can tell you I was exhausted. I’m finding that driving is really rather stressful, especially because so much has changed and I have to keep focusing on staying on the left side of the road – not to mention some of the road rules are different from the USA, so I’m trying to compartmentalize my driving thinking! Anyway, on Tuesday we went to Bruce McLaren Intermediate. This is a relatively small school of about 300. Not too many years ago it had a roll of 600 but there has been rather an exodus to a couple of the more middle class (read: white) schools in the area. A big pity really because the school itself is a pretty nice little school with really good leaders. The principal seemed particularly intelligent, forward thinking, and analytical to me. The school is about one third Maori, one third Pasifika, and one third Pakeha (white). There are quite a few other nationalities represented too. More than half of the Pasifika students are from Samoa. They have the standard classes as well as technicraft (woodwork, metalwork/electronics, food, clothing, art, and craft). There are also two “independent learning” classes which comprise children who are self-directed. The idea, I believe, is to extend these students. There is an ESOL class (where they also learn French), and a special needs class (very low level learners) that moves back and forth from mainstream classes depending on the subject (usually PE and technicraft). It seems as if the NZ government is not going to fun these classes past the end of this year. I watched one interesting class whereby the teacher had played the students a song by an Australian singer/writer about the First World War. They then had to develop “freeze frames” around the lyrics. First, they were given some metaphorical examples from the text and had to freeze frame these (e.g. “living the life of a rover”), then they got themselves into groups and had to freeze frame the story in sequence, focusing only on the main points. The students really seemed to enjoy this; a lot of talking was going on, and certainly a lot of text checking also. After school, there was a staff meeting which I also found interesting. They had a person speak to them about a writing program that’s going to be instigated in their school soon. It was interesting to me because some of it sounded like the USA… focusing on the group just below average, having a special teacher come in to the school to show them “how to do it” Today, Wednesday, we went to Kaurilands Primary School. The assistant principal for the senior school (Years 4-6) was a lady I used to work with several years ago, so it was good to catch up. We were able to reminisce a bit! Kaurilands is one of the biggest New Zealand primary schools at about 700. It is a decile 8 school, but it is also somewhat multicultural. The school is on beautiful grounds, and the students have great places to play, including a stream (they're allowed to play beside it and jump over it but not to play IN it - I could well imagine that if there was a stream running through an elementary school in Kentucky, it'd be walled off. Would that be a correct assumption?). There's lots of native trees and bush on the property which is fairly large. All the classrooms lead outside, something that has been common to all the schools we've been to, and this allows students to work outside as well as in. New Zealand students definitely get much more time outdoors than Kentucky students do.