Part-time Weeks

I'm really grateful that I am able to work part-time while Penelope is small. Some days, I get to spend a lot of time with her, and then a few days she learns and grows with other people. It also breaks up my week nicely into different parts. 

I had another week of polar-opposites teaching. Tuesday was working with small classes at the behavior school - expectations are different than mainstream schools because the kids are prone to having outbursts where they could be violent or break things. The school building is very old and stuffy - there isn't air conditioning. Wednesday was working at a newly-renovated school in a gigantic classroom, the size of six classrooms at any other school. The class was a combined class; essentially it was two combined third and fourth grade classes, so 60 kids, shared with another teacher. The classroom was comprised of multiple rooms and styles of workplace areas (booths, lap desks, short desks you can sit on the floor and work at, standing desks, tables for about five students, a separate art room, even an outdoor balcony), three different air conditioning units, three smartboards. It was more like an open-plan office than a classroom. Because there are so many kids and a big space, the teachers have set up a lot of ground rules to make transitions easier, and most of the kids did a good job of following them. I have yet to see much of the benefit of these large classes, and think it mainly makes it easier for lower performers, kids with learning disabilities, and kids with hearing difficulties to slip through the cracks. I guess it might make group projects easier, and it would help teachers standardize the curriculum across the grade level. They just really require kids to be independent in a lot of ways, which some can handle and some can't. 

Penelope was given a clean bill of health, and therefore, returned to daycare. For the first time, she celebrated "Harmony Day", which is basically a multicultural celebration that happens each year in schools across Australia. The other kids returned to daycare, so she had a more social time too. Today, we returned to swimming lessons and she had a blast. She has started walking (stumbling is more like it), and gets better at it every day!

The weather has been very hit or miss lately - mostly miss. I guess that's the mark of autumn around here. It's been very rainy, on and off. It's good because the plants definitely need it, especially since NSW has experienced pretty bad drought in recent years, but I'd be happy for some sunnier days for a little while now.