Update II: Classes and a field trip

My group itself seems to be settling in to the regular rhythm of classes on Mondays, Wednesday evenings, and Friday mornings, and we’ll have that normal schedule for these two middle weeks of October before throwing a three-day-weekend opportunity in there at the end, with some adjustments the way we did at the beginning of the term.  Even so, this past Friday we held our class as a field trip, walking around the old part of the city with our charismatic and much more coherent regular instructor Lorraine, whose regular gig is at the Art College. 

It’s strange to try to do some of the same things I always do, in a new setting: for example, for my first short assignment I always have students bring in hardcopies and then tape these to the walls so that everyone can look at each others’ submissions and reflect on what they see in others’ work that they didn’t do themselves, and what they’d do differently on revision, and why.  I don’t have them write anything on their colleagues’ work, just their initials, and then after they’ve had a chance to read at least ten others’ pieces, they take their own down and write out comments on the back--these comments can become the bases for my own critique, as in “You’re right, Jacob--you can include X and Y, and bump that other paragraph down a little,” so that the whole process becomes less completely directed by me.  The classroom is not ideally laid out, as the chairs don’t have tops, but there are half a dozen small tables that the early arrivals lay claim to so they have a writing surface.

 "A gift from Florence" for those of you who remember...

We’ve had some unseasonably cold and rainy weather of late, just in time for our first outdoor class of the term on Friday, a walking tour starting out at the cathedral downtown and taking in some of the earliest buildings constructed after the convicts arrived.  Amelie joined us after making sure Alex was safely at school, and mercifully the rain had stopped by the time we were actually underway.  About four students were late, something that is always a little hair-raising for me as a trip leader, and unfortunately it was the usual suspects with whom I will have to have one of those Difficult Conversations with.   

But Lorraine’s approach was informed, lively, well-paced, and thoughtful, and I was heartened to overhear so many students saying “I want to come back here later and see more.” That's not always a given with these things, and I appreciated how well paced the whole tour was--none of that overstaying one's welcome or feeling you were being yanked away, and even with some street crossings we kept the group together pretty effectively.  That said, every field trip or other excursion is for me a stressful occasion, and my sleep has been affected by the anticipated problems, the need to remember lists of phone numbers, etc.  

Of course at the end of the afternoon, after a pleasant lunch with Lorraine and Amelie at the cafe atop the Museum of Contemporary Art, I saw this vision of an alternate reality as I waited for the ferry home at Circular Quay--those are sort of normal sized boats in front:

Update I: Alex is in school!

Things on the domestic front have proceeded well since last posting as well: thanks to some pretty breathtakingly efficient playing of the school bureaucracy, we were able to get Alex enrolled in the local high school (the only one in the state that is both coed and doesn’t require uniforms) such that he could start class on Thursday!  Stunning actually, that with Amelie going in on Monday morning (after their two weeks of spring break) and with a multitude of little details to take care of including verification of visas and pro-rated fees and actual placement interview with the principal on Wednesday morning, he could start the next day, being shepherded around the new surroundings by “buddies” assigned to him, meeting most of his teachers, and getting squared away. 

Several clutch performances were necessary for this to happen, not least Amelie’s determination to get things done, but also incredibly friendly front-office people at the school itself, at the main office of education (Amelie started referring to this person as “Saint Peta,” she was so helpful and can-do about everything), back home (with our friend Michele securing a transcript from Alex’s old school--you can’t get the full previous year online, only the truncated present year--and scanning it and e-mailing it) and again Wednesday at the school (getting the application forms we’d filled out the previous hour faxed over to the central office right then, rather than forcing us to go to Office Works or wherever to get it done).  Yet with our MasterCard heated up (this is unsurprisingly more expensive than public school in the states, but a lot cheaper than private school tuition), we got the call that afternoon that he could start the next morning.  Amazing.

We couldn’t help reflecting with some sadness at how different this experience was than what would probably have transpired the other way: our experiences with Berkeley city bureaucrats and educrats have been so fraught with “No, not for two weeks” and “No, that person is away from her desk doing her nails” and “No, that’s not in my job description” and “No of course you won’t have a direct phone line to call to get your queries answered, instead you’ll be in voice-mail menu hell” that we couldn’t imagine getting a positive result in three weeks, much less three days.  Perhaps this is another side benefit of having ended up in an apartment in such a chi-chi postcode as Mosman: the wheels might well not have turned so smoothly somewhere else.

There are a couple of curve balls--the only language option available is Mandarin, which may be semi tough to catch up in (though the standard does not appear to be very high)--but the cafeteria meets Alex's specifications, there are people to play hoops with, and (if we can persuade him to do it) there is the option to take Learn To Surf as his PE.  He may end up with tennis just for the familiarity...   So we hope for the best.  The math isn't out of range, and he and I are continuing to do our almost-daily sessions keeping up with the homework grids sent from Berkeley.  Stay tuned.

Getting ready for the paper flow...

Here's a niche job for ya.

Funny to have done this teaching thing for so long that the rhythms of the quarter are permanently imprinted on my brain and my sense of self: tomorrow I get the first batch of papers to mark, and my life will change as it always does when I these little bundles of love stack up like a string of aircraft waiting to land at O'Hare International.  I'm having my students write a progress report on their internships, with the fictitious audience being the director of Quarter Abroad and the director of the Internships and Career Center back home--a nice two-fer, since I want to get a status report from everyone anyway, so why not have it count?  I put in a couple of late nights organizing the last chunks of the readers I have pit together, and creating primitive class websites with cobbled-together schedules that reflect the maze of weird alterations due to field trips or holidays or other deviations from routine (the coming two weeks will be the set schedule, bracketed by oddities that make syllabus planning a nightmare: students want to know what they'll be doing, and will ream you for being unorganized if you don't commit--but if you commit and then announce changes then you get reamed for being unorganized as well!), but there are still lots of little bits of administrivia like filing dates for seniors graduating in December that a certain type of student wants to frame as somehow my problem!

On the domestic side, we did eventually get the eedjits at The Apartment Service to get us another actual full set of keys, so I didn't have to try my next options of taping over or grind off the "do not duplicate" admonition that had discouraged the last timid locksmith / key-grinder.  Amelie also seems to have convinced the stand-in for our now-vacationing agent that we will be reimbursed for the cheapo knives, cheese grater, garlic press, and other essentials that were missing from the sogenannte Boutique Apartment.  Sort of nickel and dime given the ridiculous cost of housing in this part of Synny, but I suppose it's the gesture that counts.  I'm afraid I am already resigned to the fact that this is completely funny-money, that we will survive no matter what the outlay is, and we should not get too anal-retentive about relatively inconsequential amounts.

Alex is whistling the tune to Pirates of the Caribbean in the next room as he plays on the iPod Touch (sans wifi) and Amelie is off on a well-earned walkabout to the ferry and thence to the Botanical Gardens with its fine view of the Opera House and the harbour.  For a kid with no volume control, this apartment living may be a struggle (for us, not for Alex).  Tomorrow we discover whether the local high school will or will not accept a visiting Yank with Learning Issues and generally good humor, or whether we will be doing a kluged-together home-school and tutor thing for the next seven weeks.  So far at least the pre-Algebra review that Alex and I have been doing together most mornings has gone better than it ever did back home, and he has actually done more writing on his own proto blog (highly encouraged by his teachers back in Berkeley) in the last week than we have seen him write in multiple months.  Of course, Alex has deftly hacked the TV to receive ten times as many channels as I could coax out of it in my desultory way (actually only looking at the six on-air channels was bad enough), and we have had to lobotomize the TV once already by taking an essential cord away because of surly behavior.  At least we were able to do this in good Kaiser parent-group fashion, not by threatening consequences or anything, but by having the TV disabled the day after the outburst, with Alex understanding what had happened and why....

With Julie near Curl Curl Beach

As advertised, the climate here is so variable it makes your head spin.  Yesterday after a hot and muggy Friday the weather turned cloudy-misty again, last night we had window-rattling winds and thunder and lightning, and today it is gorgeous--though I need to knuckle down and mark some journal entries before tomorrow, the first of our big Mondays stacked with classes.  Yesterday we met our Berkeley friend Julie again in the beachy suburb of Manly, and with her daughter (whose space Alex probably dropped into when he transferred to public schools five years ago and Julie's family moved here) we had lunch, did a long coast walk & talk, and then had coffee in a town several beaches farther North. 

As I've remarked before, I am totally chuffed at the ways this city has preserved beach access, sometimes with headlands cut across by trails, but usually one can walk above waterline but below houses.  After pretty decent Thai food in a restaurant along the not-nearly-as-crowded-as-on-a-sunny-day pedestrian mall, we ambled off through the wind and mist, up Manly Beach, North Steyne Beach, Freshwater Beach, Curl Curl Beach, and up to Dee Why, probably 10 km of pleasant walking later.  Along the way Julie and Lulu helped orient us to the school situation, and Alex alternated between shyness about the possibility to hostility to acceptance and almost enthusiasm and then began the cycle again.  Then after a welcome coffee / pastry at a cafe (and I will take some pictures of the gorgeous foamed-milk art that seems to be more common here--if you're going to pay $4 for a small latte you may as well get a beautiful leaf-or-heart-shaped design tattooed artistically into your drink), we we bused back across the Spit and home in the deepening twilight.  I should add that last night the clocks changed, so we will have slightly darker mornings (yes! no more 5 AM birdsong waking us?) and longer evenings (yes!).

Now to attack some journal-commenting and see if I can get Alex to do a little reading.