Well, we've just finished three days at school and there are definitely some major differences from school in North America.
Organisation seems to be lacking. Officially, students have been in class for six days now but many of them have not yet met all their teachers. That assumes they actually have teachers. It was discovered only yesterday that there was no one scheduled to teach math to our two Grade 9 classes. They checked with me and I agreed to teach them (I'm excited to have math classes again!) but they need to completely revamp the entire school's timetable to make this happen. Since they are hesitant to do this until other problems are also identified, those classes will continue to go without math for a few more days.
Giving the chaos of the timetabling system, the students are never informed of what classes they will be receiving. When I walk into a classroom for the first time, I need to tell them what class I'll be teaching them. Many of them are quite excited to be taking a computers class since 40% have never used a desktop computer.
However, I am the only Computers teacher at the school. Only the Grade 12's are scheduled to have a computer classes and they only get one 40-minute block every seven days. There are 42 students in the class and only 11 working computers (actually none of them are working right now because no one knows the password but hopefully I'll get an email about that by next week). I've estimated that this means the average student will, at graduation, have spent only four hours individually using a computer, roughly equivalent to 3-4 blocks of any InfoTech class at home. Tomorrow, we'll begin learning to type on our homemade paper keyboards.
The age range in some classes is rather large. Chloe's grade 8 class has students as young as 13 and as old as 22. One of my Grade 11's is 22 and I haven't checked with my Grade 12's.
Organisation seems to be lacking. Officially, students have been in class for six days now but many of them have not yet met all their teachers. That assumes they actually have teachers. It was discovered only yesterday that there was no one scheduled to teach math to our two Grade 9 classes. They checked with me and I agreed to teach them (I'm excited to have math classes again!) but they need to completely revamp the entire school's timetable to make this happen. Since they are hesitant to do this until other problems are also identified, those classes will continue to go without math for a few more days.
Giving the chaos of the timetabling system, the students are never informed of what classes they will be receiving. When I walk into a classroom for the first time, I need to tell them what class I'll be teaching them. Many of them are quite excited to be taking a computers class since 40% have never used a desktop computer.
However, I am the only Computers teacher at the school. Only the Grade 12's are scheduled to have a computer classes and they only get one 40-minute block every seven days. There are 42 students in the class and only 11 working computers (actually none of them are working right now because no one knows the password but hopefully I'll get an email about that by next week). I've estimated that this means the average student will, at graduation, have spent only four hours individually using a computer, roughly equivalent to 3-4 blocks of any InfoTech class at home. Tomorrow, we'll begin learning to type on our homemade paper keyboards.
The age range in some classes is rather large. Chloe's grade 8 class has students as young as 13 and as old as 22. One of my Grade 11's is 22 and I haven't checked with my Grade 12's.
I am also playing in the hostel soccer tournament this weekend (I'm the only one who's not a student!) and we won our first game!
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