Week 2 of Term 4 has flown. It was a good week. All four of my classes are preparing for Yearly Exams - which for two of the classes (7 and 8) involves testing them on the material that they learned over the course of the whole year. My Year 9 and 10 classes are working on a couple of fun assessment tasks. My Year 10s are working on one that involves exploring Australian popular culture and how it has influenced pop culture internationally. I have learned pretty quick that this is a ridiculous topic for me to be teaching. Not only am I not Australian, so I have no idea about Aussie pop culture (really, that is something you can only know by living here for a while) but I also haven't had TV (cable) in a couple decades (when I did have it, I was in Germany and we watched British channels like Sky One or military channels like AFN - so I definitely am not in tune with 'normal' pop culture even from the States.) I've also been influenced by my parent's music taste and so don't follow any modern bands or singers. So my Year 10s are having a great time being the 'experts' while I help them as best as I can research for their task.
My Year 9s are doing a cool assessment where they have to compare the change in population between an Aussie city and an Asian city over the last 100 years. I was beyond excited to have found a file that you can upload to Google Earth (they are called KMZ files) where population data was displayed through bar graphs across the entire Google Earth Globe. If you want to try it out on your own computer just click this link and once it downloads and you open it, Google Earth will open with the file's data embedded. It's cool stuff and I was really excited to be able to share it with the HSIE staff so that they could use it with their classes. Google Earth presentation, including timeline and bar charts for individual cities (kmz, 2 MB) Our family had a long 4 day weekend this weekend as I took Friday and Monday off. We went to the Warrumbungle National Park, which is a place we stopped over for just a night back during our winter break. I had a feeling when I was there last that I would love it in warmer weather and with more time to explore and I wasn't wrong. I feel like I need a bumper sticker like the "I heart the Chugach" bumper stickers in Alaska, but it should say "I heart the Warrumbungles." We had three days there and to make it better, our Polish friends Ola, Niko, and Luke joined us. The first night it poured - our first night of serious rain in all our nights camping in Australia. We grilled at the covered BBQ area for dinner and chatted over wine under their canopy while the kids slept snug in their tents with the pattering of rain lulling them to sleep. The morning came with blue skies and sun and we all took off on a great hike. Really it is up there as one of my most favorite hikes that we've been on so for on Australia. We all walked together for about 5 km, and then Luke, Niko, and Tom turned back while Ola, Olin, Alta and I finished the 14.5 km loop. It is the longest hike my kids have gone on - even in all their Alaskan hikes - and I was so proud of them. We were cruising. The Warrumbungles is an ancient extinct volcano who's magma solidified inside the mountain in columns. Through the millions of years, the mountain around the columns eroded away to leave these pillars of magma scattered around the land. Kangaroo are plentiful and the screeching sulphur crested cockatoos and the prehistoric landscape make for the scene of dinosaur movie. We had so much fun hanging out with our friends and are really going to miss them when we leave. They have been teaching us words in Polish: yes, no, radish. We are also really enjoying being with people that are foreigners to Australia and that come from an area in Europe that Tom and I spent so much time in. We are familiar with the same flowers that people use in their flower boxes back in Germany and Poland. At one point, Ola's tee-light went out and I tried to get it out of the glass that it was in to relight it. I spilled wax all over the glass and apologized. She said that it was no big deal because it was an old mustard glass. "Hey!" I said. "My parents use old mustard glasses as water glasses!" For those of you that are reading this that have lived in central Europe (Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, Poland) you'll probably recognize what I'm talking about. I love it. Being with them is like being home in Germany. On Saturday night we booked a session at the Milroy Observatory where the world's largest public telescope is housed. Saturn. We saw Saturn. It was amazing!!! We also saw a dead star, and a star cluster that was 8,000 light years away. I love the sky here in Australia, and looking through that telescope was like kissing the sky! (I know that sounds kind-of dorky, but the exhilaration was the same.) Sound bites: 1. Luke and Ola made us our first real English breakfast (they used to live in England). Eggs, ham, and beans! 2. On our way home from camping, about two blocks from our house (by the Private Hospital for anyone who knows the neighborhood), we passed a man trying to help an echidna across the road. We don't live in the wilderness, so seeing an echidna cross the road here is definitely something noteworthy! 3. Olin and I spent our morning drinking coffee (me) and cocoa (him) next to a small camp fire with the magma pillars stretching into beautiful morning blue skies and kangaroo grazing on the fresh Spring grass around us. 4. "Heh. That red ant and that green ant were fighting over a bee's butt." - Alta while on a hike 5. "Mom look. A cockroach's head without the body. And it is still alive!" - Alta while on a different hike 6. We learned to find the Scorpio constellation and I really do wish it was visible in the Northern Hemisphere. It is just really neat to see in the sky and you use it to find Saturn, which makes it even cooler. 7. While looking in the telescope at Saturn, a shooting star crossed my field of vision. Guess that doesn't happen very often! 8. Tom is getting some little green tomatoes on his patio garden tomato plant. 9. My parents are coming Thursday of this week! Olin and Alta don't know yet. It's a surprise. 10. I hit a kangaroo with the car. Enjoy the pics. Ola took some good ones on our hike, so I'll try to post them when I get copies.
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Term 4 is here. One week down, 9 to go.
I have just finished my first week of Term 4, and the one statement that I could write that would sum it up is that if all my weeks at Narara Valley High School had been like this week I probably would be doing everything I could to immigrate to Australia. It was hands-down the best week this year. It wasn't that the kids were especially good, in fact I even had my first EVER (like in 12 years of teaching) fight in class (Year 10, 3 boys that all got suspended). But despite that, everything just felt so good. I think there are a couple things coming into play. The first is that the kids have accepted me. Even the principal told me that the first two terms in any Aussie school, but especially this one, can be hard as the kids are putting you through their 'test.' The next is that I'm officially fed up with ding-bat rude kid behavior, have fully embraced the idea that it isn't personal, and have really cracked down on it. Instead of keeping kids for detention where they just sit passively for 10 minutes, I now have them do "school service" where they have to pick up "papers" (garbage) during lunch. Name on the board = 10 papers. Each check = additional 10 papers. I love it because not only do the kids hate it, and therefore seem to be responding with better behavior, but when they do pick up garbage it helps change one thing that I have never really enjoyed about being here - all the litter. I also have discovered a key to having seating charts with a class that meets in 9 different classrooms. Instead of a seating chart for each classroom, I've told certain kids (6 specific boys in my Year 8 class) that they can't sit by each other. No matter what room they walk into, they can't sit near one another. It's awesome!! I've seen such a change so far in their behavior. I hope it continues to work over the course of the next 9 weeks. Something else to point out about this Term so far is that I'm feeling so much more confident in taking 'risks' the way I did at school in Alaska. What I mean by this is the idea of 'putting yourself out there', or 'trying new things.' I approached Michael, the principal, about doing a presentation to the staff (75 people) about Alaska and our school system. He thought that was a great idea and so will have me present during one of our Wednesday after school meetings. I'm also organizing a Skype or videoconference session between my Year 8s and Year 7s and my exchange teacher in Seward's 7th and 8th graders. I'm also hoping to get three of my Year 8 students to Skype with Seward's 6th grade class. The final thing I wanted to mention is that I've been tasked with writing the open response section of the Year 7 Yearly Exam. Whew! It is actually kind-of fun, but definitely time consuming. I hope to have it finished up this afternoon and ready to go to print tomorrow morning. Outside of school: We've all been enjoying the summer weather, though it is REALLY strange to see people start to put up Christmas decorations with hot weather, tropical birds, and palm trees all around! It was in the 90s this week and I'm just dripping buckets after my runs in the afternoon. The kids have been enjoying swimming at our friend's pool across the street. This weekend, we went horse back riding (thanks Grace for getting that for us.) I've never been before and always wanted to. My horse was named Dakota, Alta's was Mouse, and Olin's was Halo. That's all for now! I can't think of anything that I have ever done that has brought my family closer together than traveling, and this trip, I'd say, has been the jewel of our traveling experiences in Australia. Our trip took us all around New South Wales, We made it almost all the way to Broken Hill and down to Victoria and the Great Ocean Road. We at lots of sandwiches, saw lots of animals, and read almost the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy on audiodbook. (14 hours left of it!)
I'm struggling a little in finding the words to describe it all. It is hard to describe the experience of spending all those hours gazing out the car window at the endless kilometers of Outback, feeling the inside of the car windows to get an idea of how hot it was outside, and wondering what it must have been like for the people who first settled out there. It is hard to explain the silence in the car after passing an emu injured on the roadside, attempting to run away from our oncoming car with it's broken leg and battered side. It is hard to describe the sense of closeness and belonging you feel when you, once again, climb into your sleeping bag with your family close around you, their headlamps softly glowing as they read just a few more pages of their books while listening to the wind shake the tent outside. We bathed in creeks, washed our clothes in sinks, met a wonderful retired couple at a community fire pit, and learned about Victoria's caterpillars who climb trees and spit burning acid on you. Olin and Alta found a $1 coin under the boardwalk at the 12 Apostles along the Great Ocean Road and were more interested in retrieving it (to the great amusement of the Asian tourists) than in looking at the world famous attraction. We swept up flies in an old sheep station kitchen, climbed a steep hill to find a grassy opening full of grazing kangaroos, and learned to find koalas by watching for other tourists pulled off along the side of the road. We said 'hi' to some locals at a very remote, hot, and dusty Outback town only to have them simply stare back at us, and we learned to always be aware of how much water we had in our big water jug in the back of the car. We saw racism that I've only ever experienced in history books, and were touched by a type of kindness that I can only imagine is rooted in a culture where people help each other because the environment can be so hostile. I enjoyed watching our children grow. Every morning they packed up all their own camping gear, and every night they made their own beds at the new campground. At one campground, they wanted to go watch TV at the camp kitchen. When I showed up about 20 minutes later to wash the dinner dishes I found them sitting on a horseshoe couch with 6 teenage girls that all had Down Syndrome. The girls were a part of a retreat and had accepted my kids, as my kids had accepted them, on the big community couch watching TV. (I'll mention that they were all watching a news report on the local weather which made the scene even that more unique!) Olin and Alta learned to navigate holiday parks, started a beer bottle cap collection ('Olin, these bottle caps here are the ones you find in the Outback, while these over here are the ones you find in places like Dubbo.' - Alta), and eventually stopped alerting us all to emu and kangaroo out the window because they just became a normal part of the scenery. There is so much more to tell, but I'll leave my story there. Enjoy the pictures (and don't forget to click the pictures to see the captions describing them.) |
AuthorThe Liljemark's enjoy exploring the world. This blog chronicles our adventures. Archives
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