Wednesday, 6 September 2006

Yes, School's Started... Kind of

See how influential you can be, just by leaving a comment on my blog? My little sister asked "Have you started back at school yet? How's it going??"
So here's my answer...

The school year officially started yesterday (Monday), but most schools had an 'Inset Day' a pupil free day with professional development stuff - same as the start of year back home. Also the same as NSW, only year 7, 12 and 13 started today. Technically, I have year 7 first period on Tuesdays, but since they had all their welcome-to-school-stuff, the ONLY thing I had to do today was a department meeting. Oh, and I had to hand in my lesson plans for the first 2 weeks of school, but I'd finished them on Sunday. Yeah, we have to do full-on lesson plans - there's a lot more paperwork involved in teaching here and one of the other new Aussie teachers and I had a very interesting (to us, anyway) conversation about how they are trying to make people more professional by being more accountable, but in a way, they make you feel much less professional by constantly checking up on you and doing things we haven't experienced since our first teaching pracs.

So the short of it is, I spent most of yesterday in training sessions and talking to other teachers. I spent today trying to get my classroom into some sort of order. Its pretty cool having a classroom(/workshop) of my own, but it has been a bit neglected and has needed some serious cleaning, clearing and organising to get it to be a nice teaching/learning environment.

Tomorrow, the students come in with their parents for Review Day, where we go over their report and they set goals for themselves to improve their performance. They don't do anything else, other than go home again. I have 23 kids that I am supposed to see throughout the day, for 10 minutes each. Most of them probably won't show up. In between, another teacher and I will be working on making examples of the project we're going to do with our GCSE Resistant Materials classes. And hopefully I'll actually get my room fully sorted.

Lessons? They finally start on Thursday.

6 comments:

  1. I'm glad that you got your lesson plans finished and I hope that when you finally start teaching that the rest of your year will be fun.

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  2. I rule. Go my influence, lol.

    Good to see that it's almost fun. Hope your teaching day is good tomorrow and that the kids aren't too shitty

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  3. Hope you enjoy teaching over there. Actually I take it back. I hope you think it's crap and decide to come home sooner!! Just kidding. Glad to hear we have influence - maybe I should start leaving comments more!!

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  4. How was your first week - no actually I should ask that this time next week, when you have had a weeks worth of classes. Any way hope your week was good.

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  5. Ok you have been at school for 2 weeks now with a week of full lessons - how is it going

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  6. Ground control to Major Tom! (Do you get this ref or am I just showing my age!!) Hello are you there Kate. Have been keeping my eye on your webpage and blog and nothing is changing. How is teaching etc? How is the change of seasons going? Thinking of you and wanting to see how influential I am?!!

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