One-Stop Shop for NZ Secondary Teaching
I used this file in a unit on the Israel-Palestine Unit. It wasn’t designed to be self-contained, but acted more as support for a running series of lesson plans. This is why it remains rather unresolved, but it may contain some useful stuff for anyone who is interested.
Contents:
Learning objectives, Glossary, Nine Question Introduction Quiz,Mapping Activity, Current Issues and Neighbouring Countries
Kiwiblog has a couple of debates going on about the reaction to the prospect of “league tables” being published listing school results in national assessments. I’ve gone over my opinion there, so I’ll just briefly summarize it here:
1. I don’t think there is any valid reason to keep the results hidden from public view. It can only harm the public perception of the education system and educators.
2. It is up to the Ministry of Education or the schools themselves to explain the assessment results if the feel that they don’t accurately reflect the performance of individual schools (something that is quite likely, given the multitude of factors that can influence results)
3. As long as there continues to be a sense of mistrust or sense of contradictory goals between the five main groups involved in this – the government, the schools, the teachers, the parents and the students – then education is going to continue to stagnate and be swamped in petty power struggles and blamestorming.
More news as it comes in.
A rejigged blog with a new purpose.
The NZ Herald reports the upswing in the enrolment of male students in teacher training courses this year.
Teaching provided job security and “feedback we’ve had so far suggests that future job security is an influential factor in decision-making,” Dr Rawlins said. “The majority of students we’ve talked to say that teaching is something that they’ve thought about doing in the past, and they now feel that the time is right.”
Don’t you love reporting like this, two sentences attributed to a source, the first raising an interesting fact that you expect the second to expand on and clarify, but instead it is something completely unrelated and the upshot is neither really explain anything in isolation OR paired with each other.
Anyway, job security as a reason for men to go into teaching? That is an added bonus, I would have thought, but I would worry about anyone who was doing it solely for that reason.
A school in South Auckland.
Tell that to people, like me, who aren’t actually from Auckland, and you’ll get that sharp inhale of breath through the teeth and the shake of the head, the culturally accepted way to say “Oh shit, man, that’s gotta suck for you” without having to use words. Tell that to people who live in Auckland, same inhale, same shake of the head, but usually with some added specificities regarding places, people, incidents. South Auckland has become such a pejorative label these days, it becomes easy to just box it up with the latest act of violence and let it fester as some lawless zone of anarchy in your imagination, and then to avoid the place entirely, only flirting with death during the odd trip out to the airport.
I spent about two and a half months in Clendon after I arrived back in Auckland, at the end of the street lined with houses built for an expected boom in upmarket living along the Manukau Harbour that never came due to a perceived “coarsening” of the population, and accompanying rise in crime rates (as an example, the house I was staying at had been broken into three times in the last year and a bit up until I left, the unreasonable price of a house facing a public reserve). I didn’t really get out and about much, instead busying myself with starting my classes two days after arriving back in the country, which involved driving in to the North Shore for an 8:30 start every day. I left not really getting to know anything much about the area, except that the stories about the burglaries so commonplace, representing a mix of thief modes: no-nonsense professionalism; quiet desperation; and thrill-seeking idiocy (the garage of the house was broken into during my time there, but while I was in New Plymouth, but three young youths on the spur of the moment as they walked through the reserve. They did it just before 6 on a Monday evening, a time when most people would be coming home from work – it was just their dumb luck that the owner of the house is a primary school teacher and the house guest a student, because it was school holidays, and we were both out of town, me having left that very morning). It goes without saying, none of those modes have any defence; breaking into someone else’s house is a shattering invasion of privacy and an assault on our view of the world as essentially for us, a place for us to chase our dreams build our nest, raise our families, enjoy being alive. I have no interest in living in any place where the risk of my house being ransacked is so high. I couldn’t do that to my family.
It’s easy to see how negative connections are made and strengthen over time, the news washing over us like seawater, most of it evaporating away – the good stuff, the neutral stuff, the everyday living stuff, leaving only the thick crust of evidence supporting your initial opinion – the senseless violence, the misery, the hopelessness. That’s why I always thank God that I’m going to be a teacher. It is in the classroom that you really get an idea of the true vital signs of the surrounding area. Kids are the canaries in the coal mine for society, I think. And these canaries have a lot to say.
Coming up: what my first placement taught me about multiculturalism and stereotyping.
Liverpool, goddamn it, it’s been 20 years since I was goaded into supporting you by a maniacal metalwork teacher-slash-Arsenal supporter at intermediate, and though you rewarded me with a league championship the very next season (emphasis on next: the season I was dragged into the idea of soccer as a game to actually watch, rather than mock, is the one famous for the final game, where Arsenal needed to beat Liverpool by 2 clear goals to leapfrog us and win. Cue the last-minute goal from Michael Thomas and cue the metalwork teacher getting on the intercom Monday morning and mocking relentlessly the small cadre of us who had chosen to trumpet all things Liverpool because they had looked unbeatable for most of the season), I’m getting a little impatient. I’m getting to the age now where the wife will probably not appreciate me getting totally smashed drunk and/or naming our first child Scouser in honour of another league win. You’re wasting away my youth. Get it together. Stop bloody drawing.
A couple of days ago, I sat down to do some writing. Now, I’m not the type of person who needs silence to write; in fact, silence bugs me, burrows into my subconscious, needling. Silence, the lack of sound, absence of air waves, it just begs your synapses to start anticipating the sound to come. Will it be the neighbor, a creak of the house, the phone ringing, the exhale of a partner who would rather you were paying attention to them rather than the alluring brightness of the LCD? Then, when those little bones in your ear, the ones you only learn about because they are so small and named after tools (we are trained from a young age to respect the power of the stand-alone, bizarre factoid – and as a result, we tend to let them dictate our opinions and decisions a little too much), vibrate as they evolved to do, your thoughts can’t help but take seed around it, like carbon dioxide gas on imperfections of the walls of the glass of coke or lemonade, or whatever. Where did it come from? What is its significance? Was it real, or am I just going crazy?
And the writing consequently stops.
Me, I’m a music guy (listener only, unfortunately. I’m waiting for my mid-life crisis before comitting to the guitar lessons. By that stage I’ll have a kid and have the added bonus of embarrassing him or her at family get-togethers). I dig it, it gets my spirits up, my creative thoughts moving, and I write, concentrate, research, better (playing right now: In Rainbows, by Radiohead). Anyway, I open iTunes on this occasion (other times it’ll be WinAmp; WinAmp has all the music on my computer loaded onto it, while iTunes only has the cream de la cream that’ll fit on my 30 gig iPod), and go through looking for some place to start. I notice that I have a lot of missing artwork downloaded into the player. So I start fiddling around with that. Then I notice that I have a lot of stray tracks with no album entered, meaning no album artwork is found. So I start to to searches on Wikipedia to find the album names and entering them into iTunes.
For some peculiar reason, this interests me. I love the concept of a complete set of data. I love knowing how many albums I have from 1992 on my computer (14, currently). I love knowing how many songs over 10 minutes long I have. When I was teaching in Korea, most of my co-workers disliked the grading period, but I looked forward to seeing all my assessments throughout the semester come together into a cohesive whole and say something about the achievements of the students in my classes. The most intellectually stimulating, energizing time in my life so far came when I did my Masters in Ecology, a group of us in the same lab, helping each other out with fieldwork, the joy of statistical correlations, finding an obscure reference that backs up your own findings….this sounds a lot geekier than it’s meant to. My point is, I have the type of brain that likes to organize stuff.
Basically, my talent could be replaced by a few lines of code in any cheap computer. Perhaps I do need that guitar.
Oscars noms out, hard to care seeing as the Academy has long been a pusher of lazy, middle-of-the-road prestige films. (I mean, Crash is a Best Picture winner; I’ve always had the pet theory that members of the Academy – average age, 87 – were trying to get themselves shut down so they could spend more time playing canasta and shaking their canes at teenagers exposing their ankles in public – kind of like suicide by cop, except much more dispiriting. Have you seen Crash? It’s Racism for Dummies, Cinematic Foreshadowing for Dummies, Angelic Supporting Characters who Flirt With Tragedy Accompanied by Sickly Sweet Scores for Dummies all rolled into one.)
One of the rare moments of subtlety in Crash (2005)
So this is an expression of my complete and utter indifference – except….I’m sometimes a petty participant in culture, because I’m over the moon that The Dark Knight missed out on a nomination. The rise of the uber-fanboy is one of the side effects of the internet that has you sometimes wish for a supervirus to wipe everything clean (shades of Fight Club, another uber-fanboy film that I happen to love. But you know, I’m not a dick about it). TDK is one of the most incoherent (note to fanboys: this is not the same thing as incomprehensible or confusing, I do have a functioning brain, I did understand what was going on), overwrought, preachy, on-the-nose action films around, with the characters walking around speaking in declarations and the action scences looking as if they had been cut in a blender.
Christopher Nolan, whose Memento I love, but whose everything else has left me cold, is no action director. He has no real sense of geography and choreography in his camera placement and editing, with wide shots, close-ups, mid-shots alternating with random camera placements. I couldn’t wait for the action scenes in TDK to finish. Unfortunately, once they did finish, we then had a string of scenes where the characters pontificated on the THEMES OF THE FILM (all-caps to represent the subtle representation of said THEMES in the FILM), and so I couldn’t wait until stuff started blowing up again. A vicious circle only alleviated a little by Ledger, doing his own thing, servicing a character who, while representing chaos and anarchy, has some of the most elaborately pre-planned escapades around (I guess even psycho anarchists need to storyboard their great social commentary).
I was over at Kiwiblog for the first time today, looking to see what stokes the fire of Kiwis these days, or at least the political-minded among us. I tend to shy away from political discussion because I find it so regressive and banal, personal principles bastardized in order to join and support a team (“right”, “left”, “National”, “Labour” etc), with most energy spent wildly insulting anything that is produced by the opposition “team”, trading ad hominem attacks, indulging in et tu quoque festivals, and arguing generalities when specifics are what matter. Case in point: Tony Ryall cancels the health conference; you’d think most people would be interested in knowing what happens in these conferences, how successful they are, and how vital they are for the improvement of the health industry before attempting to even have an opinion on it – I certainly don’t, because no-one seems particulary interested in giving me any information about the situation. But no, instead we have the usual totally made-up assumptions to shore up the talking points for your side. From the Your Say link:
“Yes Tony Ryall did the right thing in cancelling the conference. After what has been going on in our hospitals it is very obvious that the previous two conferences in the past five years have achieved very little.” (Lesley, North Shore)
Quick question: how the hell do you know, Lesley?
“This is just posturing and won’t achieve anything of significance. Does the Minister have nothing better to do?” Aqua (Waitoa)
Quick question #2: how the hell do you know, Aqua?
(I can see this becoming my fall back question when reading any political blog in New Zealand. It’ll save me valuable thinking time that I can spend in trying to figure out why Liverpool can’t stop drawing games at the moment.)
This post was spurred by my stumble across to Not PC, a right-wing blog with nothing of interest whatsoever, seeing as it completely toes the line of what you’d assume a blowhard right-winger would think about everything in the first place. The left gets to experience dodgy editing, staged “confrontations” and silly animation skits from Michael Moore when being spoon-fed platitudes they already hold dear. On Not PC, they get endless links to people saying the exact same things and some truly terrible right-wing humor (not their strength; just as you wouldn’t bother asking a left-winger to mind your ranch, you’re never going to specifically ask for a conservative stand-up comic.)
Thankfully, Kiwiblog appears to be a little more balanced, a little more nuanced, even if the comments section I happened to scan involved a tete-a-tete about global warming, both sides simply parroting the figures of pre-approved sources, followed by someone demanding to know why there are gaps in the fossil record if evolution really exists, and how we can be descended from apes if they are still around with us today. (!)
Take a classroom of kids….
Published February 6, 2009 personal commentary Leave a CommentI spent seven years teaching English at university in Korea to freshmen, as monocultural a setting as you are ever likely to meet. In all that time, I taught seven non-Koreans (a Japanese girl, a Chinese girl and a class of five Saudis who had all received scholarships to study business in Korea, despite the fact that they knew no Korean or the default, rarely used, back-up, English. Hence they had a year of intensive English and Korean classes. Great guys, Muslim all, wrestling with the temptation of alcohol and pork in a land swimming with the stuff. I think they lost the fight.) So, when I made the decision to come back to teach high school science (science being what I majored in, and what I’m interested in, among other things), I was a little concerned with how I was going to cope with (a) human beings going through puberty, and (b) managing a class full of such diversity.
Now, I love diversity, I love the multicultural nature of Auckland in general, but that doesn’t mean that stereotypes don’t become established about certain cultures, ethnicities, nationalities, genders, and none more so than in schools. Asians work hard but don’t mix well. Boys are turned off by the feminine nature of English. Indian girls are quiet and hardworking. Maori students are more likely to disrupt the class. Girls hold a grudge against the teacher for a long time and can be difficult to “win back” if you upset them in class. History teachers are more likely to be right wing than geography teachers (on the other hand, maybe we should stick to students for the time being). I pictured something approaching a Terry Gilliam animated skit on my first day in front of a high school class, weird things happening everywhere, an amorphous mass of discontent students in their own little words, hanging off the rafters. In particular, I was worried how I would relate to young Maori or Pacific Island students, seeing as I’m a typical white guy (another stereotype!) without much in common with them, or so I assumed.
But you know what? People are people, and kids are kids, and while you may in fact have a class of rafter swingers, it is often the case that you can’t really identify any correlation between behavior and nominal stereotyped group. As an example, here is a short list of the students who gave the most trouble over my two placements:
- An Indian girl with the most sour attitude imaginable to any type of work.
- An emo white boy with attention issues.
- A tall, spiky haired softballer with a chronic inability to stop whatever stupid comment he had formulated in his mind from exiting through his mouth
- A half-Maori boy who was a talkative disrupter with his friends around (but remarkably quiet and pleasant when they were absent)
- A white girl with strict religious parents, the only student to directly challenge me in class in a whiny, self-satisfied manner, but who also turned around to take quite an interest in the class after I made the conscious effort not to hold a single outburst against her (that is the tough thing about being a teacher, is knowing when to give a demonstration of your power. Some kids just have a bad day – that’s no excuse for them to have a go at their teacher, of course, but some degree of pragmatism is important on our part. On the other hand, some kids willfully push you, trying to establish boundaries for what is acceptable in class that favour them and remove the influence of the teacher, and you absolutely cannot let this slide, as that is what happens to the class, a slow downhill slide into anarchy).
Now, the descriptions above are how I would describe them if I were watching them act petulantly in my class, but they were also good for some laughs as well. It’s just a matter of managing 30 individual relationships in 50 minutes while trying to teach valuable (mostly) information and sticking to the scheme, while keeping the entire class engrossing and fun. And then you do this 4 times a day, 5 days a week.
Sounds easy, doesn’t it?