Little Scholarly Differences

Duo-tangs. How I miss them. And three-ring binders. I'm learning to make do, but it's been a slow process. Here in Australia, they use folders with plastic sheets inside, so students put their photocopied booklets into the plastic sheets instead of a duo-tang or a binder. When they want to use their booklets, they take them out of the plastic sheets. While we moved to binders at Esther Starkman School this past September, I have to say I've been missing duo-tangs more due to their simplicity and ease of use. Pop your booklet into your duo-tang, open when needed. Take out unit when done and start all over again. Binders are more cumbersome and take up more space, but they still allow you to look at pages without having to take them out of a plastic sleeve. They also use scrapbooks for subjects such as health, so we're gluing pages into our scrapbooks, rather than popping them into a binder or duo-tang. I can't double side because then students can't glue their page in. It's been a very interesting experience, learning how to organize our materials in our folders and scrapbooks rather than binders and duo-tangs!

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I've also had to learn brand new classroom vocabulary. Here are some examples of Australian school supplies and their Canadian equivalents:

textas = markers
coloured pencils = pencil crayons
rubber = eraser (and rub out = erase)
tissue = Kleenex
outliner = Sharpie/permanent marker
rubbish bin = garbage can (and rubbish = garbage)
sport = physical education
LOTE = Language Other Than English (in this case, Japanese)
duty = supervision

And yes, it's texta and not texter, Google it! I've been trying to use the Australian words rather than the Canadian, but sometimes I forget, so the students are adapting to me as well.

The paper in their workbooks doesn't come lined with margins, so Australian students are always "ruling up" (drawing their own margins with red pen or coloured pencil). They definitely know how to use a ruler better than their Canadian peers! They seem to enjoy using a ruler too, much to my surprise.

Another difference at school is the fact that there's air conditioning in all the rooms. In Edmonton, it would be nice to have air conditioning for the 15 days or so during the school year when the thermometer makes its way past 25 degrees Celsius. We don't have it, but it would be nice. Here, it's a necessity. Since school started February 4th, the average temperature has been about 37 degrees (and that's not including what it really feels like with the humidity). Unfortunately, I find the air con cold and often have goosebumps. It's hard to know what to wear when it's so warm outside, but so cool inside. I didn't pack my cardigans as I knew it would be warm, but now I'm wishing I had a couple. I will have to go shopping sometime soon.

For physical education, or sport as it's called here, students play outside in the undercover area, on the basketball/netball courts, on the oval or in the school yard. There is no gymnasium. They have a specialized sport teacher who takes them for one hour a week. On Fridays there is Senior Sport for students in grades 4-7, where they rotate through winter carnival sports, including soft cross, netball, tennis, soccer, touch, volleyball and cricket. My station is soccer, which I can handle (I wouldn't have a clue how to run soft cross, netball or touch). My students are going to teach me how to play cricket and maybe touch sometime during the year. I look forward to bringing it back to Canada to teach the students there next year.

Students also have LOTE (Japanese) and Music once a week for an hour, and another teacher takes them for Science for an hour once a week as well, which means I get 4 hours of DOTT (Duties Other Than Teaching) time a week, which is a much sweeter deal than what I get back home in Edmonton, which I think was 80 minutes a week. During that time I can actually get most of my planning and photocopying done so that I don't have to go in on the weekend and I don't bring a lot of work home (besides marking). School starts at 8:15 and runs until 2:30, with one 20 minute recess and one 40 minute lunch break. I have three 20 minute duties per week, which I think is reasonable considering the size of staff and the student population.

Coming soon, a post about swimming with whale sharks and snorkelling the Ningaloo Reef!

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Cyclone Rusty Heads to the Pilbara

Many of you in the northern hemisphere were probably unaware, but last week Karratha almost had an encounter with Tropical Cyclone Rusty. The week leading up to landfall, Rusty was all anyone could talk about, and to these unexperienced ears, a little anxiety began to sneak in. Back home, in landlocked Alberta, we have no real weather worries. The occasional tornado does touch down, sometimes with devastating results, like Black Friday in 1987, but that doesn't happen very often. We do get the odd snow blizzard, but buildings aren't destroyed and people aren't killed. In the grand scheme of bad weather, we've got it pretty good in Edmonton.

Talk of Tropical Cyclone Rusty had me going out to Woolworths to prepare: I bought a case of 24 water bottles, canned fish, canned beans and canned fruit. I loaded up on other groceries too, with the thought that if the roads flooded at least I'd have food to eat (although at the back of my mind I was thinking what if there was a power outage and all my food went bad?). I bought a battery powered radio and got my head torch out. I was ready to head to Beck's if a yellow alert was called, ready to hide out in her bathroom under a mattress if need be. The thing with cyclones is they're so unpredictable and it could have turned and headed straight toward us at any time. It was frightening and I don't know if following Oz Cyclone Chasers and the Bureau of Meteorology online helped or made things worse. The feeling of relief I felt when I found out it was heading toward Pardoo Station and not Karratha was indescribable. Poor Pardoo, but thank goodness it wasn't Karratha was all I could think. Even Port Hedland, which did go on red alert (the next step up from yellow), escaped the worst of it, ending up with hundreds of millimetres of rain and terrible winds instead.

This is an image from February 26 at 5am. Pretty scary, eh?

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And a satellite image of Tropical Cyclone Rusty heading toward the Pilbara Coast:

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March is apparently the worst month for cyclones as the seas are at their warmest. Hopefully we won't get as close as we did with Rusty, but you never know. They are unpredictable and funny things can happen. I will be more prepared heading into the busiest time for cyclones~ I've got my water and tinned food ready to go. While it was exciting, I can't wait for cyclone season to end April 30.

Car Shopping

I finally bought a car! It's a 2004 Holden Astra City edition. It's white, it has four doors and it has air conditioning. It does NOT have power windows, but I imagine I'll mostly use the air con anyway, so no biggie. It's also an automatic, which is not something I thought I'd drive again after discovering that I love driving stick. Last time I was in Australia I drove stick around Perth and I was fine, but this time around I was a little anxious about it and thought an automatic might be easier to handle driving on the left, so an automatic it is.

I bought it off of Karratha Buy, Sell and Swap on Facebook, not Dreamer's Hill, which is where I thought I'd find it. Buy, Sell and Swap is where Karrathans post items to (you guessed it) buy, sell or swap. You can find anything on it: dining room sets, gym memberships, video games, vehicles... I had been scanning the site for a couple weeks and noticed that most things went pretty quickly. You had to act fast to get in on the deal. When Ashleigh's ad came up for the Astra I was the first one to reply. I viewed it that afternoon and had my friend Beck's husband check it out the next day. I had bought my three previous cars privately before, but never without having a mechanic checking it out. Apparently that's quite pricy to do here and while I was a little nervous about skipping this important step, it seemed like a good buy, so after doing a Revs Check (a vehicle history check) I went ahead and bought it. The last Revs Check I had done showed the vehicle in question, a Mazda 3, had flood damage and had been written off, so that was $35 well spent. This one turned up nothing, which eased my mind a bit. I'd be happier if my brother the mechanic was here to check it out, but I think I did pretty well all things considering. Dreamer's Hill is a large lot on the corner of the Dampier Highway where people park their cars, utes and boats hoping for a sale. It's where I found the Mazda 3. It's a quite a busy place on the weekend and gets lots of traffic. When it comes time for me to sell the Astra in December, I'll probably use both Dreamer's Hill and Karratha Buy, Sell and Swap. I'll need to make a quick sale too!

A surprising thing about buying a car in Australia: you have to pay a stamp duty when you transfer ownership. It cost $220! What?! This car buying business was more expensive than I had thought. The car itself was $7400, the two Revs Checks were $70, the registration fee was $436 and then comprehensive insurance was ~ $900. Crazy! Just over $9000 initial investment and then gas (I mean, petrol), which costs $1.68/L. At least it's not New Zealand, where prices were as high as $2.16/L! Hopefully I'll be able to recoup most of the cost of the car when I sell in December.

I'm a little sad I don't have an SUV (I really had my heart set on a Toyota Rav4, a Honda CR-V or a Jeep TJ), but with gas prices being what they are, I don't want to shell out more than I have to. So I'm not driving what I pictured myself in, but I am driving an Aussie car, which I love! Hopefully it'll grow on me. My first big road trip will probably be to Coral Bay over Easter, which is at the end of the month. It's a six hour drive, which is a long day driving by myself. I've driven to Canmore by myself before though, so I can do it. I'm not sure how to do it without music~ I have no CDs here and I'm sure the radio won't work the entire time. I guess I'll be listening to my iPod through my ear buds- yuck!

This weekend is the Labour Day long weekend. It kind of snuck up on me, so I'm not going away anywhere special. I've been invited out on both Saturday and Sunday nights, so that's exciting. Hopefully I'll finalize Easter plans and make some headway with my April holidays as well.