On tour in Sydney

I introduced myself as "[Zealous], on tour from Melbourne" to a man in a Coogee Beach fruit shop yesterday. It worked like a charm... I am loving this little working holiday!

This is how I am being kept while I write reports:












This is the view from my 'office' where I write my reports, in between being regularly plied with excellent cups of tea:


And this is the view from my rehearsal space (my Bella's flat above the shop):


Yep, those are HARBOR glimpses there folks...

I wish I could spend longer in this posh Eastern Sydney suburb (the women up here drink weak lattes and organic pomegranate juice, love little dogs, and seem to all have adorably cute babies. They also don't seem to work much).

I am nine kinds of content, and am being relatively productive. I am halfway through my reports, and feeling very relaxed, and warm! It is noticeably warmer here compared with Melbourne. Note BLUE sky in photo above.


I am also doing this:




*All photos taken using inbuilt camera and Photo Booth. I love my macbook.

Napoleon

I feel this proud and pompous. I started writing my reports.

I have 99 to go, and would like to finish them before I go on tour to Sydney. In three days. At my current rate of 1 report: 55 minutes, I'm not sure I'll be completely report-free by Tuesday, 6am, but I'll give it a red-hot go.

Anyway, Napoleon only slept four hours a night, and what's good enough for that little man is good enough for me. I shall be to report writing what Napoleon was to military strategy and ruthless megalomania. Impressively successful and efficient, then a rapid about-face and some humiliating defeats, before spending the end of my teaching days bailed up on an island being looked after by some nice British guards. (Insert lewdly inappropriate accents where you see fit)

So, with my alarm set for some short time from now, I wish you a very good night. Bon soir.

To victory, ha ha! etc.

Reports

Things I am doing/have done this week to put off writing the new VELS reports:

1) Started a blog.

2) Ridden all over Brunswick and Parkville to watch my brother and sister play hockey in Arctic Melbourne conditions.

3) Packed up shop and headed down to the coast. I do this most holidays, as I convince myself that I will be much more productive if I stay in a little house where there is nothing to do but write. In reality, every time I just go op-shopping, brood along the beach and watch movies. Then I lug my bags of untouched marking and my computer back into the car and make the two hour journey back to the city.

4) Planned a trip to Sydney where I will play music in a friend's cafe, brood along the beach and watch movies...

5) Going to put up posters for my housemate's band around Brunswick and Fitzroy.

6) Written a post about procrastination.

First rant for the teachers

This blog will be primarily comprised of my evolving theories on particular issues, some fiction nonsense, and some random verses. Today I have chosen to start my first post on the former.

The issue of performance pay for Australian teachers is particularly close to my heart. A person who is a highly competent, interesting and dynamic teacher should be getting paid a great salary. However, any person who is highly qualified within a competitive academic field, and then enters a profession that helps train and nurture young people, while multi-tasking, doing countless hours of unpaid overtime, completing ever-increasing administration and legal record-keeping tasks, should be getting a great salary. Teaching should be a respected profession, that attracts very intelligent people with specialist academic knowledge, well developed skills in interpersonal interaction, management, research, technology, etc, and with diverse life experience. Australia needs to move more towards Norway's apolitical education system, (where there is an overarching education ministry that is not linked with the government, and where approximately 96% of secondary students attend a public school) and as far as humanely possible from the United States' dire education system, where public school teachers have to take on second jobs during the (unpaid) school holidays.

It is not a particularly profound idea to suggest that some people just make better teachers than others. A second-year out teacher, with curiosity for life still intact, a motivated and professional attitude, and good research skills, could be just as good a teacher as someone who has been in the profession for fifteen years. Just as some people are born leaders, or born performers, or born con-artists, some people are born teachers (please excuse my facetiousness; I do think teaching is a mixture of those three, plus plenty more). But on the other hand, confident and intelligent people can learn to embody all of the features of a great teacher, in which case, for them, the more experience the better.

Teaching needs to be so well regarded, and well paid, that the best-of-the-best compete to get into the profession, and are then supported and funded by the government to do the very best they can for the kids they teach. The competition must end there. The teaching community is, largely, an incredibly generous and supportive one. Where teachers feel secure and supported in their own positions, and have plenty of opportunity and encouragement for professional development, they will naturally strive to improve, and share their knowledge with others. Thus continuing the general support-and-care-and-share love-in that comes with a common, highly noble, goal: in this case, educating young people.

Any performance pay scheme would have to include a huge increase in education funding. The fact that Julie Bishop's plan does not, must mean that some teachers will have their salary reduced. It has also raised many questions about how teachers will be assessed, the most likely being a mixture of students' academic scores, student and staff surveys, and maybe some professional development appraisal. If these surveys are anything like they surveys we know and hate from market researchers (I always do these if I have time by the way: I used to have to do this job so that I could afford to get a degree) they will be tedious and boring, and if the kids doing them are anything like I was, or the students I know now, they will be apathetic smartarses, or irrationally glowing. It should never be a child's responsibility to do an adult's job and expecting student surveys or student results to form the basis for an adult's pay is a ridiculous burden to place on a child.

The AEU have suggested some good compromises - although I completely reject the idea that salary bands should go in order of 1: 'Graduation' 2: 'Competence' and soforth. Someone can be competent at the job they were hired for regardless of their experience.

Well there. That there's some premature cynicism to get the party started. Next stop, Non(sense)Fiction Town I think.

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