Day to Day

I thought I'd post once a week...and then we settled in and our routine started and I thought "what on Earth am I going to post about weekly?!". Because we aren't traveling or exploring all the time, we are just living-working and going to school, trying to figure out how to access The Great British Baking Show and books in English, playing football 7 times a week, grading assignments, grocery shopping...Dealing with a cracked tooth by Rowan (eating a frozen TimTam which is a type of cookie) and another unexpected dental appointment (I've been every week since the last week of July). And today I am home while everyone else is at Rowan's game because the sink in our wet kitchen got clogged and the plumber is here (North snaked the drain last weekend and it was gross). The day to day of living in a place as opposed to traveling through a place.

Tomorrow Rowan and I leave for a 5 day trip with the entire 6th grade class to Lumut, a town 3 miles up the coast. We will stay as a group and do daily activities with some outdoor instructors like snorkeling, paddleboarding, water rescue, visiting Pangkor Island. I think we are both excited and dreading it for very different reasons! It will be a good experience for him, being with his classmates, sleeping in a room with friends, being in the water that much and trying new things. Likewise, I am looking forward to getting to know this class more since I teach them and this is Rowan's cohort...but chaperoning 6th grade is always a unique adventure. 

Pangkor Island looks like this so...that seems like a pretty good deal even with 54 6th graders.

North spent the last two nights in Thailand at a university counseling conference, he ran two university fairs last week, and is in the thick of talking to students about applying to schools, meeting with families, and wrapping his mind around international school applications. Still so much to learn and also wrapping his mind around the differences between mental health counseling, academic support, and the focus on college counseling that he has here. I think it was good for him to get away from us and the school and meet other counselors and also reconnect a little bit with a place he spent some time in his early 20's-he found some good street food and some other travelers to talk to.  We are at the time when people warned us about homesickness...and that is true to some extent for me. I am definitely missing Washington (ok and the people in the US as well). But more is the move to a new place with new systems and grappling with my pedagogical values: what beliefs do I hold about best practices in teaching middle grades students, teaching in general, and then teaching science and how does that play in this new place with different systems, students, curriculum, etc. All places have issues and every time I have entered a new school there have been growing pains-that is to be expected. At the same time I feel like the last 10 years and my work with Ambitious Science Teaching and as a WA State Science Teacher, adding a Library Endorsement, reading and talking to fellow educators about multicultural education, and working closely with Multlingual Specialists has really enabled me to develop a strong foundation of what it means to be a "good" teacher and what I want my classroom to look like...and it just doesn't here. Some of that is because I am trying to learn 4 new curriculums and some of that is because my actual time with students is less and some of that is because of the focus on assessment and some of that is because 🤷‍♀️ But the fact that I'm not currently able to be in the classroom the way that I believe is best for kids is causing some cognitive dissonance...so food for thought, something to explore this week while I am not in the classroom, and also a reminder from a fellow teacher "give yourself some grace"...