What's going on

I'm mid way through week two of uni. Week one was somewhat of a blur. A slew of facts, figures, dates and assessment requirements jumbled upon us as the class as a whole fought to tread water. The lecturers have warned us that the whole year might be an exercise in creative water treading.

The course:
I'm studying a grad dip ed p-12 at LaTrobe's Albury Wodonaga campus, which incidentally feels smaller than my primary school. In efffect it's a two year course crammed into 9 months, which I'm quite happy about given my attention span and current funds. We have to be at school 5 days a week, mon-friday, 9am - 4pm. Wednesday is class free, but starting in a week or so we have field work - ungraded observation days within a school environment.

The course is split into three streams: issues, methods and fieldwork/practicum. And this is where my brain starts to hum loudly as the pressure builds up within. The Issues stream looks at teaching methodology whilst Methods looks at the 5 disciplines within the Vic system: Arts, English and LOTE (Languages Other Than), Maths, Science and Humanities. Health, I.T. and warm fuzzy topics like interpersonal skills get slotted into some other fuzzy space, but here my brain is really starting to overheat. The third stream is our practical experience: 20 days of field work and 45 days of graded practica (or practicum - one is the plural of the other but the left side of my brain has started to melt).

The p-12 qualifies me to register to teach in both primary and high schools in Victoria. Though "middle schools" are slowly being introduced - yrs 5-10. But who wants to teach in Victoria when the money is so crap compared to other states. The keener question would be "why would you want to teach in an Australian school? Well I don't. Although the challenges of teaching up north or out west within an Indig. community are quite appealing. It's nice to be back in an Australia that is finally Sorry, and it would be good to be able to make a positive contribution to the reconcilliation process. Otherwise I'll possibly be heading back overseas at the end of the year, although that's a year of philosophy away.

The assesment is huge, as is the amount of paperwork I seem to be dealing with at the moment. In effect, on top of practical teaching stuff, we have assesment for about 8 areas, all of which have a ton of different styles of assessment. Just to completely confuse and scare the pants off us, the past week has included overviews of everything that is expected of us over the whole year. We have about 35 differing assignments over the next 8-9 months. You do the maths cause it's my weak area. Then we have relective journals, visual journals, portfolios and various other individual and group w*%k tasks. This is multitasking gone ballistic.

At the moment I'm trying to figure out the difference between a reflective journal and the visual journal - why can't I use a blend of art of written work to reflect my experiences? or maybe I can? - plan a peer teaching exercise for next week, review an interactive CD as a teaching resource, familiarise myself with prominent educational theorists, devise a P.E. warmer, freak out about a maths diagnostic test next week, and find and contact schools overseas with a view to doing my final practicum in Thailand, Indo or back in Japan. Oh yeah - and I think AUSTUDY have already screwed me over of course!

It's all really quite exciting though and is slowly falling into place. This time last week I was in a state of denial, but I managed to make sense of a goodly portion of my notes yesterday and feel like I'm somewhat getting on top of things. Kind of. Send me hugs. And my new contact details are on facebook too.