School Info

 

This post gets into the nitty and gritty of our school world...TL;DR school schedule, teachers, and student body details 😊 We finished our first full week of school on Friday (we had 2 days the week prior) and are feeling like summer is truly over and we are back into the world of school. And also into this new world of school here in Malaysia. The boys have uniforms, this picture is of the first day when they both wore their regular unifrorms, on PE days they get to wear their PE kits which were pictured in the last blog post (black athletic shirts and shorts). 

The routine is new-the school operates on a 7 day rotation with 80 minute long classes in the Secondary School...This means that I see a class 3 days in one 7 day cycle (see the image below for a sense of how the schedule works). I am teaching 6 & 8 math and science-5 classes total and also 7th grade wellbeing (about emotions, physical, emotional, intellectual, social wellbeing). So I am wrapping my mind around 4 different preps and then also the free periods I have to plan, grade, etc. Likewise, Rowan is wrapping his mind around 80 minute classes and seeing different teachers on different days, keeping track of homework, etc. North's world is a bit different as he is focusing on meeting with kids and the greater scheme of university counseling, wrapping his mind around international applications, the IB diploma system, graduation requirements, using a Mac, doing everything in Google, etc. Talus is on the same rotation but this just means that on some days he has PE or music or Chinese or art or...He is 100% all in on having all of these different specials and getting to work with different teachers!

As I write this there are 4 boys in our house playing hide and seek. Two of then are ours and two of them are schoolmates-New Zealanders who have never lived in New Zealand (one was born in Dubai, the other was born in the Netherlands). This sums up much of our school and our families. The school is growing-we are part of a cohort of 26 new teachers and there were over 60 new students in the secondary school (the whole school is just 600 kids so 60 new ones is signficant). We are teaching with people from New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the UK, Turkey, Kenya, Ecuador, India, Colombia, the Philipines, Malaysia, Spain...I'm sure I've missed some! In coversation if people talk about where they are from it's a combination of "I'm from...but most recently I was living..." and many of them have kids that were born in different countries.

Our student body is also a mixture-many of them are staff children so they are citizens of different countries but also their backgrounds are so varied-parents from two different countries, maybe they were born in a different country than either parent, and many of the staff kids have lived in different countries as well over the course of their lives. North was reading a book called Third Culture Kids about what it means to grow up internationally while trying to have your home culture and your new culture and not having deep roots in either (necessarily)...It's interesting to think about as a parent and as an educator.

Both Rowan and I are learning about what it means to be outside the language norms; about 40% of our students are from Malaysia, many of them speak Bahasa Malay or Chinese (or both) as their home language. We also have a significant group of students from China and from Korea. During math as I walk around the room to check in with students I frequently have no idea what they are saying as they're explaining things to each other in Bahasa or Chinese. Rowan is finding this in classes and also in social situations to some extent and is learning how to navigate it. Apart from working with multilingual students I also have a handful of students who are still considered English Language Learners and are part of the ESOL program-they are not yet considered proficient at English so are still receiving English language support. I know that my experience working with teachers in Bellingham has made me more prepared for this job (shout out to Rachel, Yana, and Grace in particular) and I also know that this job is going to make me so much better as an educator because I have to constantly be thinking about vocabulary and instruction for students who are learning English...

We are finding routines in our new schedule (arriving to school at 7:20 and leaving at 4:30), the boys are trying the school lunches (take a look at the menu!) and Rowan has discovered that he can use his school money to buy cookies, chocolate rolls, and chocolate milk. We are cooking more and ordering food less though we have not yet nailed down dinners that we are excited about and that also make for good leftovers (it's hot and we are not yet using our oven so currently everything is on the stovetop); if you have dinner ideas for us that make easy lunches please share them in the comments! The weather is changing a little so we are starting to wrap our minds around what afternoon thunderstorms actually look like (apparently we have not yet seen a big storm so I'm preparing ⛈️). I also had the opportunity to get a root canal last week...just gonna say that Dr. Emily is my new best friend and Malaysia has solid dental care!

 The boys have made their mark on the walkway between our house and the cafe at the clubhouse.

 last weekend in downtown KL and lastly, this weekend...because driving Go Karts is now something we do on the weekend!