School Visit

To pretend that my year of playing has some professionalism to it, and to remind myself what classrooms look like, I've tried to visit schools in the countries I've been in. Today I had two quick tours of some West Auckland public elementary schools. It was Friday afternoon when I visited the schools, so I didn't expect to see a whole lot of serious teaching or learning going on, but that's fine with. One can get a pretty good idea of a school just by looking at the walls.

At the first school the main impression that I got was that the staff was ridiculously young. I like to pretend that I am still one of the young teachers, but in reality I've moved into the older bracket. Such is life. But at this school I didn't see anyone who looked over 30, and I don't think it is just that Kiwis age well. It made me wonder about teacher turnover. (Which at times is non-existent at my school. They know a good thing when they see it!)

The second school, which has a huge emphasis on technology so there were a dozen computers and laptops in every room, is only 7 years old, in a new building that has water issues. Serious water issues... like many of the classrooms had huge poles in the middle of them supporting the ceiling so it wouldn't collapse. Bummer! I noticed that the dress code at that school was pretty lax. More lax than my school used to be before Dress Code Drucilla came into existence. One guy (a sub) was wearing a black t-shirt and shorts, a camo hat, and had a mohawk/mullet hairdo peeking out from underneath. Wow. That's about all I could say. Wow.

I was chatting with the deputy principal and asking various questions. I asked about how often the teacher teams got to meet. (At my school we are required to have one team meeting a week, but on my team it was more like two or three formal ones, and myriad informal ones.) The woman proudly said that the teams had one whole day per TERM that the teachers had to meet and plan, and then pointed to the staff room behind me as an example. In it were four teachers, all sitting at separate tables, all working independently on their laptops. Good teaming! (I am hoping that the one day per term that they had to meet was just when they were released from class for the day, and not the ONLY time that these teachers met.)

It was fun to visit the schools though, to remind myself that there is a reason that people from all over the world visited our school.