cowane1

For our last day of orientation, they wanted to familiarize us with the school, teacher, and class we would be teaching for the next 4 weeks. Those of us who are elementary (or primary as it is called here) teachers began our day at Morayfield East State School. We were taught how to sign in in the visitors book and given a packet of information about the school. We were then sent with our teachers to our respective classrooms. My teacher, Miss Kyryn Wright was much younger than I had expected her to be! She can't be older than 25 years old. And though she comes across as very serious with her class, she is very very friendly and I can see that she will be wonderful to teach alongside. I later learned from the principal of the school that she was a phenomenal aboriginal student who received a scholarship that helped her with much of her schooling and that they are lucky to have her. (The aboriginals are similar to our Native Americans in the fact that there is the stereotype of "not worth anything"). I was nervous to meet my class because this was a portion of the email the that Kyryn had sent me previously about them:

In this class we have 26 students with only about 8 girls so we are very boy heavy, I have 6 students that have special needs and they range from Autism, Aspergers, Intellectually Impaired, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Hearing Impairment as well as a 2 behaviour 'problem' children. I have had a few of these kids try to jump out of windows of my demountable classroom, be aggressive towards myself and other staff or calling me a variety of names using'colourful' language. So this is a hard class but in general we have worked really hard together to build up a reportoire with myself and the students so they do know their boundaries. They will try to push you to see how far you will go but you need to be firm with them and let them know that you mean business.

I was PLEASED to find out that she had done a GREAT job with behavior management and became particularly excited to teach such a well behaved group of year 3 students! I also was pleased with how very active Kyryn made me in the classroom; even though I was only in there for a few short hours she had me take roll, lead a small group guided reading session, and give a spelling test. A vocabulary word that I think you might find different was that they call their water fountains, bubblers! :) After this we were brought back to QUT for some concluding orientation things. We were again asked about our homestays. Thankfully the girls who said they weren't being fed enough admitted that their homestay mom had lightened up and was feeding them well now. We ate a "good luck" lunch of pizza, tim-tams and fruit. The pizza here is VERY different. If you ordered a pizza with just meat on it, it would likely have BBQ sauce as the sauce and not regular pizza sauce. And any other pizza we've had has had about a MILLION different toppings on it. Needless to say, I've gone OUT of my comfort range and eaten several different types of pizza while being here. All of the MN students say that they could REALLY go for a regular pepperoni pizza however. After lunch we were given a description of what our final presentation was to be like, and then sent home for the day.

After orientation, Tina and I went shopping for some much needed stuff. I wound up buying a $20 bottle of contact solution, that I could buy for 6 dollars at Target in the US! We then ate supper at Nan and Pops' (Tina's parents) and finished the night by playing Rummy-O as well as some other card games for money. Sad to say, I think I lost a good chunk of Australian money that night! :( ha ha!

I've also found that even in normal conversations with my homestay family, certain words, phrases, or ideas will come up as different and neither of us are afraid to ask about it. This just goes to show that, yes life IS very different here in Australia! Even the most common things may be different. Something that I learned this day was that here in Australia, if a couple is living together for 6 months, the relationship is considered "defacto" and that they now have the rights to half of the other's property. So if someone was buying a house, and they had their mate move in, but then they broke up after 6 or 7 months, even if the mate hadn't paid a cent towards the house he/she had rights to half of the house! Unbelievable!