Happy Friday

Happy Friday! Or Thursday in the USA…that still is so weird to me. I’ve dealt with time difference before, but talking to someone who is living a totally different day just is odd to me-sometimes I feel like I’m in a time warp. After I wrote my first blog, I realized there were so many other things I could include about schools in New Zealand that I have observed so far, so I guess this is an extension of that…after my first week of classes I’ve noticed many differences.

First, schools in New Zealand seem to be much more laid back than schools in the United States. I came here equipped with my nice skirts and sweater vests and am definitely an odd ball. Today I came to school in board shorts, a fleece, and flip-flops. Though it was a planning day for me, but I still felt a little odd…but I’ll definitely be dressing down in the following weeks. The students in my class are required to wear uniforms, though the students in the lower grades do not.

The school itself is also not like I’ve seen before. Instead of having all the classrooms connected like the schools we have in the United States, there are classrooms all over the school grounds. For example, our classroom is connected to the computer lab and the library. Then to get to the office or staff room which are connected, we have to go outside and around the corner. One of the playgrounds is out one of our other windows and there are classrooms on the other sides of it. The school has the equivalent of grades K-8…and they are dispersed all over. This has its advantages and disadvantages. First, to some extent they are able to separate ages groups into different areas of the school. I’ve seen this done by putting different levels on different floors of the school, but this is just horizontally spread out. I suppose this would also help with noise from other classrooms, but I also see students always peering out their windows to see the traffic between these segments. It is nice that all the classes have many windows this way and a door outside to get in a fresh breeze.

The day gets off to a later start than previous schools I’ve been at and the first bell rings in at 9am. That has been great for me to get to sleep in a bit and still get in a morning run. Being five minutes from school also helps with this as there isn’t the Marquette Interchange to fight with anymore. The day is divided into three blocks of time. In the morning we do spelling, handwriting, reading, etc. Then around 11ish we have “morning tea.” This is a 40 minute break where the kids can go out and play and eat a snack and teachers normally stroll in and out of the staff room for tea, coffee, and to chat. Then we resume classes till a little after 1pm when they get another 40 minutes for lunch. Then we have our third block of time from 2-3pm. It definitely makes the day go by quickly. On Tuesdays my class gets on a bus at about 10am and we go to another school for their “tech”- this is where the students spend six weeks in each of the following areas: sewing, cooking, metals, music, woodworking, and art. That means Tuesdays are a day for planning for teachers in our age group as the students spend the large part of the day at this school.

Today I got to do some planning with my cooperating teacher, which also gets me excited about teaching (of course it would take organizing things to get me pumped!). We are going to be starting a Persuasive unit next week till the remainder of the year (the end of the school year is December 20^th) and will also be looking at advertising with that. That seems like something totally up my alley…with wanting at one point in life to go into that and hopefully the three years I spent at the advertising agency will have done me some good!! So next week I start by doing all the morning activities and then Wednesday I will launch into advertising. I’m just a little nervous about this group of boys who must have Senior-itis or something. If I get them engaged in what I’m doing it will be amazing!

Now I’m off to have dinner with my host family!! Have a good weekend!!