Albury High - Day One

Sitting in the car pool this morning, heading across the border, a trickle of nerves meandered across my abdomen. Going back to high school. Ughh! Something I swore I would never do.

I'm having doubts about this course; it would seem that La Trobe have been taking as many students as possible for funding purposes. A uni motivated by money? Never! (I still have nightmares about the signs from my last year of undergrad: "Macquarie Uni: Where higher learning equals higher earning"). Anyhoo, many of my classmates were unfortunate enough not to receive a place this week, i reckon, cause La Trobe have taken on far more students this year and haven't thought about how to accommodate them.

So Pete and I walk into the school and are taken to the Social Science staffroom. Pete is a history major (humanities) and I'm supposedly English/Humanities, I guess from the spattering of linguistics, philosophy and cultural studies I did. So we both find ourselves in a room where the teachers focus on economics, geography and commerce. So not either of our areas. Pete get taken to the history staffroom and I'm taken to the English staffroom where the head teacher is none too impressed with having a student teacher dropped on him out of the blue in the last week of term when all year elevens are in exams. Supposedly he declined a request some weeks ago to take on student teachers for the exact reasons outlined above.

However, after initial grumpiness, he and all the other teachers were most accommodating and I had a really good day. I discovered that high school kids aren't nearly as nasty as I remember - perhaps my own high school was especially cliquey - and it was comforting to realise that I'm totally capable of doing the face to face teaching, in fact have already done much of the same, just with kids from a very different cultural background.

Literacy and competancy levels were stunningly varied. the year 8s had a reading test that reading through, I doubted many adults could pass. The same kids spent the rest of the double period prepping for debates later in the week and I had an astonishingly astute conversation with one girl about the difference between an intellectual and an emotional argument as she tried to get her head around the different angles of animal cruelty and testing.

However, later in the day, reading some of the year 9 kids work from one of the lower level classes, the literacy levels were scarily low. One kid's work I read had a phenomenally bad grasp of basic grammar. Whilst this kid was truly competent with Microsoft Publisher, the spell check was clearly an alien phenomenon! Talking with the teacher afterwards, I asked how these kids could be helped; literacy programs are aimed at the kids on the bottom rungs, but those just above are allowed to slide through the system with grammatical misunderstandings many of my ESL students would be ashamed of. For the first time ever I questioned the theory that kids naturally pick up the grammar of their first language and wondered if we shouldn't be spending more time on basic literacy in high schools instead of everything English being directed towards comprehension.