This week has gone so quickly. School seems to be hectic with additional testing being foisted upon us from the powers that be. What I love about it is that it is now six weeks into the school term and this testing is only being introduced now. However, it is to be conducted between the start of the school term (ah... 6 weeks ago) and the last week of November. Of course we, and supposedly all other schools, have already conducted our own baseline testing by now. No matter (or should that be no problem?) we will now drop everything, and I mean that literally including lesson plans, and indulge in a little testing.
The little testing consists of:
letter recognition,
sight words,
phoneme segregation,
reading nonsense words,
recognising initial sounds,
writing samples with analysis,
maths strategy testing for multiplication & division,
and a tick sheet for each child for their social skills in about six catergories.
I felt a New Zealand influence on the testing and wonder who has initiated this? So I felt right at home with it all but a huge amount of additional work. So guess what I'm doing this weekend? That's right, marking! And don't forget the recording of all this data.
The results don't look good and I wouldn't mind doing all this work if I felt that the results were going to be used to adapt the curriculum to meet the abilities of the kids we are teaching. The current curriculum has way too many outcomes in it. For instance, my maths outcomes are more than the number of weeks in the year so you know you are not even able to teach them all, much less allow the children time to absorb them.
I had one girl in each class able to use a repeated addition strategy to get the correct answer for the multiplication strategy. I think three or four got the subtraction correct for the division. Using word problems for girls who can't read English is not the cleverest way to run a maths test. Even with me reading it to them, their understanding is limited.
Oh well! There's always the old adage, "If you don't like how things are done here, go home!" On that note...
I've handed in my notice at my job in Blenheim so intend to stay here for several years. I'm working with a wonderful teacher who has worked overseas for 10 years and knows all the tricks of the trade to surviving in the classroom environment. Give them what they want and don't stress about it. Make it easy on yourself. Of course, I've yet to learn how to do that but am watching her closely for tips.
I've run assembly with one of my classes this week. Our theme was Science, Matter, Materials. The girls did a great job of reading in English and Arabic and paraded their posters around the school. Our science is going great and we use the science lab at least twice a week. We've tested the absorbency of paper, found out what materials are permeable and impermeable, investigated permanent and temporary change to materials (flour, sugar, salt, jelly, sand, plaster filler) when we add water, made salt dough decorations, and lastly we made play dough. The last two activities were looking at how water changes materials, in this case flour.
This week we went on a trip to the Abu Dhabi Science Festival. Three grades went on two buses so you can imagine what an organisational nightmare that was. We (the English teachers) were told that we were leaving school at 7.30am so all arrived early to find no-one, and I mean no-one, there. Mmmmm.... so much for that idea. I'd upset all my girls by telling them they had to be at school by 7.30am when their buses don't arrive until 8am. So some taxied in and others got rides. So I was pretty annoyed when we didn't leave until well after 8am, when the last school bus arrived! There is no communication between the English & Arabic staff, or very little anyway. We (the English teachers) were told to write out name tags for the children with our name and phone numbers on them. The Arabic were not so had to do it all when we arrived there.
Anyway we arrive early to the amazing venue where our group is met by attendants holding a number. We are put into groups of 25 then follow our guide. We enter the vast hall and are sat at long tables where the children are all given a pencil and activity book to fill in time while we write labels and all the other schools arrive. Thousands of children of all ages are there and as the hall fills up the noise reaches a crescendo.
Eventually we are lined up following our guide and taken into the next hall which houses the exhibits.
WOW! They sure know how to do things over here.
Science takes on a new meaning with each interactive station better than the last. I'm wanting to break out of the line to try some of the activities. First for us is the car racing where the girls assemble a buggy made of what looks like technic lego then use rubber bands to power them down an 11m race track. Not one race track but two side by side so the teams can race. The winners get their distance on the winner board. The girls are totally absorbed in this for the 45 minutes we are there. What I'd give to have access to resources like this at school.
As we leave this exhibit we are all given a brown paper bag containing a bottle of water, a museli bar and a muffin. So off we traipse to the next exhibit which is wind power. This one wasn't as exciting and my 'naughty' girls wandered around touching things. You realise how little exposure these kids have to anything that we consider normal at times like this. They can't keep their hands off stuff and try to break everything. I noticed it in the science lab at school when we were making salt dough and play dough. Very little had had any baking experience and don't know how to behave when using ingredients. Or how to behave in a environment that had dangers. More on that later...
Back to the Science Festival. The girls made windmills then sat them in front of a wind machine. A hot air balloon rose and fell at the push of a button, a yacht sailed across a table powered by the wind, and a wind tunnel propelled plastic then our paper lunch bags skywards.
After sitting and eating our snack we wandered over to the next exhibit which was to be a show inside a theatre. As we waiting the girls were entertained by reading free magazines which the Arabic teachers found for them, then a display of dry ice magic. The show inside the theatre featured Supermarket Science and had the children enthralled as the 'magician' performed her acts. Here is a link to her website. http://www.science2life.com/
As we left the Festival we were corralled into herding pens as we awaited our buses arrival. Each girl was handed another brown paper bag of water and food for the trip home. The noise in the bus was incredible and I was glad we weren't going much further when we finally arrived back at school. Needless to say I found a quiet activity for the girls to do while I continued testing individual students.
Back to my science lab experiences. As I said, the girls have little experience in everyday things that we consider normal, such as water play, baking, and how to behave or listen! Most girls help with cooking but only one or two had any idea how to measure ingredients and as for getting their hands dirty making salt dough!
But the 'incident' I refer to involved one girl who never listens or never understands any directions. I don't know if she is unable to understand because of her limited English or for 'other' reasons? Anyway, I have been over the Science Lab rules so many times but do they listen? NO!
So I'm teaching at the front. They are sitting in three rows at benches. Next minute there's this girl and two others coming round the desk to the front. Then, whosh! One girl is down on the ground. I saw it happening but was unable to prevent it. She tripped, whether it was on the platform I was standing on or by one of the other two girls pushing her, I don't know, but she went down like a ton of bricks. I thought she'd knocked herself out as she hit her head on the table on the way down. I'm only one step away, if that, so I reach down to her to find there is blood pouring out of her forehead. I slap her hand over it and apply pressure with mine then try to get some order back while I call for the nurse. I don't want to sit her up as she fell heavily so I call to the girls to get the nurse. Meanwhile they've all crowded round and are freaking at the one drop of blood on the floor (lucky they can't see the wound) and nobody has gone for the nurse. So here's the injured girl screaming, the class nearly hysterical and me yelling for someone to get the nurse. Talk about a language barrier. So much for calm in a crisis. Finally my screaming is heard and two girls run for the nurse who arrives with a gauze pad. She takes one look at the wound and says it'll need stitches. So she gets the wheelchair and takes the girl away. I manage to regain some control of the class and quickly, and discretely, mop up the blood on the floor. Meanwhile the girls find any excuse to come up the front to check out the blood!
The pack mentality is alive and well here and I saw it with the young boys at the Science Festival. They follow each other and run around then crowd round whatever it is they are doing. The physicality of them leaves me thankful I'm teaching girls. The Arab teachers don't seem to care about the punching and kicking and eye gouging that was occurring while the English teachers try their best to stop it. It's a losing battle and I can see how the riots and 'unrest' that we see on TV occur and get out of hand. Thinking for oneself isn't a strong point.
Last night I had my quarterly check on my apartment. Two lovely men arrived ten minutes before the arranged time to check that I was home. Promptly they arrive back on the dot with a ladder and a bag of tools. They checked all the plumbing, even undoing the s bends to remove gunk, washed the A/C outlets, checked all the electrical including lights, cleaned my extractor fan and who knows what else. All this is preventive maintenance. No phoning up a plumber or electrician for me when they come in and do all this.
I suppose preventing problems is much easier than dealing with them later.
The one thing they didn't check was my fire extinguisher. I have one and a fire blanket beside the stove. You'd need them in an apartment no doubt. Last night I heard the fire alarms go off just after I went to bed but we don't have false alarms like we did in the previous building. When I set our alarm off inside our apartment the watchman phoned me up on our intercom to find out what was happening. It's a long way down 28 flights of stairs but I'd rather be running down them than up them.
On that note of physical exercise, I've purchased two tennis rackets and two table tennis bats. Now I just need to find someone of my ability to play with. With the weather cooling down nicely the tennis courts here are busy already. I think I'll book myself some time for a 'play' before attempting a game with anybody though. "Don't want to let the side down, what?"
The little testing consists of:
letter recognition,
sight words,
phoneme segregation,
reading nonsense words,
recognising initial sounds,
writing samples with analysis,
maths strategy testing for multiplication & division,
and a tick sheet for each child for their social skills in about six catergories.
I felt a New Zealand influence on the testing and wonder who has initiated this? So I felt right at home with it all but a huge amount of additional work. So guess what I'm doing this weekend? That's right, marking! And don't forget the recording of all this data.
The results don't look good and I wouldn't mind doing all this work if I felt that the results were going to be used to adapt the curriculum to meet the abilities of the kids we are teaching. The current curriculum has way too many outcomes in it. For instance, my maths outcomes are more than the number of weeks in the year so you know you are not even able to teach them all, much less allow the children time to absorb them.
I had one girl in each class able to use a repeated addition strategy to get the correct answer for the multiplication strategy. I think three or four got the subtraction correct for the division. Using word problems for girls who can't read English is not the cleverest way to run a maths test. Even with me reading it to them, their understanding is limited.
Oh well! There's always the old adage, "If you don't like how things are done here, go home!" On that note...
I've handed in my notice at my job in Blenheim so intend to stay here for several years. I'm working with a wonderful teacher who has worked overseas for 10 years and knows all the tricks of the trade to surviving in the classroom environment. Give them what they want and don't stress about it. Make it easy on yourself. Of course, I've yet to learn how to do that but am watching her closely for tips.
I've run assembly with one of my classes this week. Our theme was Science, Matter, Materials. The girls did a great job of reading in English and Arabic and paraded their posters around the school. Our science is going great and we use the science lab at least twice a week. We've tested the absorbency of paper, found out what materials are permeable and impermeable, investigated permanent and temporary change to materials (flour, sugar, salt, jelly, sand, plaster filler) when we add water, made salt dough decorations, and lastly we made play dough. The last two activities were looking at how water changes materials, in this case flour.
This week we went on a trip to the Abu Dhabi Science Festival. Three grades went on two buses so you can imagine what an organisational nightmare that was. We (the English teachers) were told that we were leaving school at 7.30am so all arrived early to find no-one, and I mean no-one, there. Mmmmm.... so much for that idea. I'd upset all my girls by telling them they had to be at school by 7.30am when their buses don't arrive until 8am. So some taxied in and others got rides. So I was pretty annoyed when we didn't leave until well after 8am, when the last school bus arrived! There is no communication between the English & Arabic staff, or very little anyway. We (the English teachers) were told to write out name tags for the children with our name and phone numbers on them. The Arabic were not so had to do it all when we arrived there.
Anyway we arrive early to the amazing venue where our group is met by attendants holding a number. We are put into groups of 25 then follow our guide. We enter the vast hall and are sat at long tables where the children are all given a pencil and activity book to fill in time while we write labels and all the other schools arrive. Thousands of children of all ages are there and as the hall fills up the noise reaches a crescendo.
Eventually we are lined up following our guide and taken into the next hall which houses the exhibits.
WOW! They sure know how to do things over here.
Science takes on a new meaning with each interactive station better than the last. I'm wanting to break out of the line to try some of the activities. First for us is the car racing where the girls assemble a buggy made of what looks like technic lego then use rubber bands to power them down an 11m race track. Not one race track but two side by side so the teams can race. The winners get their distance on the winner board. The girls are totally absorbed in this for the 45 minutes we are there. What I'd give to have access to resources like this at school.
As we leave this exhibit we are all given a brown paper bag containing a bottle of water, a museli bar and a muffin. So off we traipse to the next exhibit which is wind power. This one wasn't as exciting and my 'naughty' girls wandered around touching things. You realise how little exposure these kids have to anything that we consider normal at times like this. They can't keep their hands off stuff and try to break everything. I noticed it in the science lab at school when we were making salt dough and play dough. Very little had had any baking experience and don't know how to behave when using ingredients. Or how to behave in a environment that had dangers. More on that later...
Back to the Science Festival. The girls made windmills then sat them in front of a wind machine. A hot air balloon rose and fell at the push of a button, a yacht sailed across a table powered by the wind, and a wind tunnel propelled plastic then our paper lunch bags skywards.
After sitting and eating our snack we wandered over to the next exhibit which was to be a show inside a theatre. As we waiting the girls were entertained by reading free magazines which the Arabic teachers found for them, then a display of dry ice magic. The show inside the theatre featured Supermarket Science and had the children enthralled as the 'magician' performed her acts. Here is a link to her website. http://www.science2life.com/
As we left the Festival we were corralled into herding pens as we awaited our buses arrival. Each girl was handed another brown paper bag of water and food for the trip home. The noise in the bus was incredible and I was glad we weren't going much further when we finally arrived back at school. Needless to say I found a quiet activity for the girls to do while I continued testing individual students.
Back to my science lab experiences. As I said, the girls have little experience in everyday things that we consider normal, such as water play, baking, and how to behave or listen! Most girls help with cooking but only one or two had any idea how to measure ingredients and as for getting their hands dirty making salt dough!
But the 'incident' I refer to involved one girl who never listens or never understands any directions. I don't know if she is unable to understand because of her limited English or for 'other' reasons? Anyway, I have been over the Science Lab rules so many times but do they listen? NO!
So I'm teaching at the front. They are sitting in three rows at benches. Next minute there's this girl and two others coming round the desk to the front. Then, whosh! One girl is down on the ground. I saw it happening but was unable to prevent it. She tripped, whether it was on the platform I was standing on or by one of the other two girls pushing her, I don't know, but she went down like a ton of bricks. I thought she'd knocked herself out as she hit her head on the table on the way down. I'm only one step away, if that, so I reach down to her to find there is blood pouring out of her forehead. I slap her hand over it and apply pressure with mine then try to get some order back while I call for the nurse. I don't want to sit her up as she fell heavily so I call to the girls to get the nurse. Meanwhile they've all crowded round and are freaking at the one drop of blood on the floor (lucky they can't see the wound) and nobody has gone for the nurse. So here's the injured girl screaming, the class nearly hysterical and me yelling for someone to get the nurse. Talk about a language barrier. So much for calm in a crisis. Finally my screaming is heard and two girls run for the nurse who arrives with a gauze pad. She takes one look at the wound and says it'll need stitches. So she gets the wheelchair and takes the girl away. I manage to regain some control of the class and quickly, and discretely, mop up the blood on the floor. Meanwhile the girls find any excuse to come up the front to check out the blood!
The pack mentality is alive and well here and I saw it with the young boys at the Science Festival. They follow each other and run around then crowd round whatever it is they are doing. The physicality of them leaves me thankful I'm teaching girls. The Arab teachers don't seem to care about the punching and kicking and eye gouging that was occurring while the English teachers try their best to stop it. It's a losing battle and I can see how the riots and 'unrest' that we see on TV occur and get out of hand. Thinking for oneself isn't a strong point.
Last night I had my quarterly check on my apartment. Two lovely men arrived ten minutes before the arranged time to check that I was home. Promptly they arrive back on the dot with a ladder and a bag of tools. They checked all the plumbing, even undoing the s bends to remove gunk, washed the A/C outlets, checked all the electrical including lights, cleaned my extractor fan and who knows what else. All this is preventive maintenance. No phoning up a plumber or electrician for me when they come in and do all this.
I suppose preventing problems is much easier than dealing with them later.
The one thing they didn't check was my fire extinguisher. I have one and a fire blanket beside the stove. You'd need them in an apartment no doubt. Last night I heard the fire alarms go off just after I went to bed but we don't have false alarms like we did in the previous building. When I set our alarm off inside our apartment the watchman phoned me up on our intercom to find out what was happening. It's a long way down 28 flights of stairs but I'd rather be running down them than up them.
On that note of physical exercise, I've purchased two tennis rackets and two table tennis bats. Now I just need to find someone of my ability to play with. With the weather cooling down nicely the tennis courts here are busy already. I think I'll book myself some time for a 'play' before attempting a game with anybody though. "Don't want to let the side down, what?"
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