Week Four Term Three

Professional learning meeting all day Friday.

Australian custard apple.

Week Four Term Three

Monday was a whole day rain event with indoor recess and most of lunch, although they did get out for the last half. We had an excursion booked for all the grade 3/4's at a track and field complex for Tuesday, but cancelled it because they were calling for another rainy day. But guess what... yup, sunny and warm all day. Good old Murphy.

When the Vice Principal was promoted earlier in the year a number of teachers applied for the acting VP role and Leora won out over Libby. Leora put her heart into it and did a great job but recently the Principal interviewed for the full time position and hired someone from outside the school that she had worked with previously. That has created some bad feelings. But realistically the original position was posted as temporary, so it shouldn't have come as a surprise.

I was given a period to go and observe another teacher. I decided to go and watch a dynamic young pregnant teacher and her grade 5/6 class. When I got there they were just getting organized to go into the main building to the library and computer lab. As she lead the class out of the building in the rain to the other building there was one male student who was having an emotional problem and laying on the floor and would not join the class. She tried to get him to come but no. I told her to go and I would stay with the boy. I tried talking to him but he would not listen or respond, but after about 5 minutes he got up and without acknowledging me went to join the class. The idea was that the grade 6's would work on an on going project on the computers while the teacher started a novel study with the grade 5's, and then they would switch. However, most of the computers weren't working and the 6's were interrupting the reading so much that the teacher decided to go back to the BER building. This building houses all the grade 5 and 6 classes in an open concept, that is although they have individual rooms they have a large common area too where the students can work and where their lockers are. When they got there she again told the 6's to work on the computers that are spread out around the building and she started again with the reading group. There were so many kids from other classes wandering about and talking that again hearing the reading was difficult. Plus the music teacher came down and told her he had the computers booked for another class for this period. So she had to ask the 6's to double up on the computers and she took the 5's into their own room where they could read in a more quiet environment. However, because of all the disruptions she did not get to finish the chapter or get to the post reading activity. All this made me thankful that I have a straight grade and that I have my own little kingdom where I can close the door and we are not bothered too much by other classes. I would go mental in the BER building. I now understand part of why Matt left mid year.

On Friday we had a full day of First Step Writing instruction from a instructional leader. It turned out to be more of an examination of the NAPLAN (standardized test) and how the governments demand of letter grade marks don't always jive with the reality. Caulfield Junior College has a socioeconomic makeup of 1% in the bottom quarter and 76% in the top quarter of wage earners. In other words our community is entitled and privileged and from families of professional parents. She explained that if someone had been working at the school for a long time or this was the only school they had worked at they would think our kids were average when in fact they are above average. She said that as a result we tend to mark our kids fairly hard and other teachers is other schools who have less entitled and lower kids tend to mark them up to make the school look better and the kids feel better about themselves. So she raised the point of how valid is this type of marking and reporting... Reminds me of what Ian used to say: "This is not rocket science!"

Another part of the day was talking about differentiated instruction, teaching kids of different levels different topics. They were telling the same thing to first year teachers and experienced teachers of twenty-five years or more. So, as usual the presenter never models what they are preaching.

This week I was introduced to an new fruit called the Australian custard apple, which resembles a pineapple on the inside, but is cream coloured and custard textured with really hard seeds about the size of a kidney bean. It tasted like cross betweeen a creamy apple and pineapple.