A Little Background of the School

Alright, so most of my posts have been about all of my travels, but I promise, I HAVE been working at Thames High School. It turns out that some of my information that I had mentioned in one of my first posts about the school was wrong, so I'm just going to clarify on some things now that I know more about it.

Here's the school I am at!!

First I’m going to talk about the scheduling, which I know I already talked about a little bit before. Basically, the school has six-day weeks in which each day is a different schedule. There are two periods, then a twenty minute interval for morning tea, two more class periods, lunch, roopu/whanau, and then the last period. Depending on what day it is, I have a different schedule, so some days I have only two open periods and others I have three (since student teachers take on three classes).  It’s pretty interesting because the teachers here do not necessarily have to teach only one subject. For example, I could teach the math classes that I’m doing now, and I could also be teaching an English class if I wanted. They don’t get a degree in teaching a certain subject, however they get a teaching degree and then take certain additional content courses at University. These courses they take are generally what they teach, but they just don’t get certified in one subject like we do. It’s pretty interesting, but I’m sure it is nice for those teachers to have a variety. This isn’t necessarily a New Zealand thing because I heard one of the teachers saying that a lot of schools rotate on a 10-day schedule instead of 6. Regardless of how many days there are, I think having a change in the way the schedule is each day is a neat idea. Then you don’t get stuck with the same class first period every day, or the same class last period every Friday. It gives students a relief from having to have the same monotonous schedule all the time as well.

Here is the staff's "Pigeon Holes" or basically just their mailboxes. The copy room is that open door to the left of them. These are inside their administrative building. If you walk right, you would hit the front offices and if you go left you would walk into the staff room.

This is as you leave the staff room. You have to go outside to get from building to building. The building straight in front of the picture is the library, and if you go to the left of that you will hit A Block, which is where the math and science rooms are. They do provide roofs for students to walk under in the rain, but students eat outside as well so they just need to find somewhere to huddle under and eat when it rains.

I teach a Year 9 class (which is like an 8^th grade class) which is Petro’s class, Year 11 (grade 10) which is with Richard Janutka from Canada, and a Year 12 (grade 11) which is Zac’s class. After lunch, the students all go to their roopu or whanau class. Roopu, meaning “group” in Maori, is for juniors (Year 9 and 10) and Whanau, meaning “family”, is for Seniors (Year 11 – 13). Roopu classes stick together for all of their classes for the most part, and they will be in the same class again for Year 10. If you can remember one of my first posts was “Roopu Day Out”, this was a bonding exercise for the Year 9 class because they will be together for two years. I ended up really enjoying working with these students, so that’s how I wound up teaching Petro’s Year 9 class. I have them for maths class (yes that ‘s’ is supposed to be there because that’s how they say it here) and also after lunch for roopu with Charles Carruthers (who is a history teacher here). During their roopu time, the students get a chance to work on homework, set school goals, silent read, or any other activities that the roopu teacher assigns. Some roopu classes have feeds in which everyone either pays money to get food or each student brings something to share. It works our pretty great! Then in Year 11, you join a new Whanau class for the remainder of your school years, and they tend to put immediate family in the same whanau. Therefore all the years are mixed in these classes. 

This is Petro's room here that I teach in. That door in the back leads to Karien's room, and then there is another door connecting to Zac's room where I teach as well. There is also a door on the opposite wall of this door here that leads to the maths office. It is really convenient being so close in case you forget to grab something.

Here's our office, and you can see where it connects into Petro's room. There are two other classrooms where Richard teaches (also one of my rooms) and Doug (who is filling in for Linnea who I was supposed to work with). Those rooms aren't connected with the office but are connected to each other with doors.

Here is me hard at work in my little station.

On Wednesday’s the school has assemblies instead of roopu/whanau. The students are all placed into four houses, named after four past principals, based upon which house their families were in. The students can earn house points (just like in Harry Potter!) based upon their actions and behavior in school as well as athletics. The school uses Loyalty Cards as a motivator because these cards can be turned in once they have a certain amount of signatures on it. These signatures are provided to students based upon behavior in class. The school uses the philosophy of Positive Behavior for Learning (PB4L) in which Respect for Others, Self, Learning, and Environment are focused on. Each week one of the four categories is stressed, and students work towards meeting these actions to get their cards signed. At school assemblies, the students all sit in their houses and then loyalty cards that were turned in are put into a drawing for a chocolate bar. Students who had more than 15 cards turned in got tickets to an amusement park!

This is their assembly hall. As I said, they are all sitting according to their houses and there are four houses total.

It turns out that students come from all over the Coromandel Peninsula to come to Thames since it is one of the bigger high schools and provides more opportunities. If you remember from my trip around the Coromandel, we went up to Coromandel town and also Tairua, these places were over an hour away and some students take busses all the way to Thames. One of my best students is one who travels a long distance to get to school each day! At least it’s a pretty drive. They also do some distance learning here, so one of the teacher basically skypes all the students and they try and do some learning over the internet. It’s not as common, but if they don’t have enough students at school to take the class, they will open it up to other schools. 

Here is the entry to the library. They have to leave their backpacks outside of it which works pretty nice because then students can't take anything from their without permission.

The students’ uniform consists of a navy blue polo with their logo on it, either a blue skirt or blue knee-length shorts, and black shoes. They have sandals that they need to wear or they can also where black, close-toed shoes. The students really hate wearing their sandals (nobody in NZ seems to like wearing shoes) so if they are wearing them improperly (standing on straps or something) or not wearing them at all and are caught by a teacher, they get put on trash duty and need to put on a reflector vest and pick up garbage around the school during lunch or interval. The students are also allowed to wear either a Thames jacket, sweater, or fleece if they have one. I’ve seen students wear a variety of things. Apparently they can wear pants if they want to, but it is really “uncool” and I have never seen a single student wear pants yet. The Year 13s get to wear white polos and can wear any kind of black sandal or nice shoe, so you can tell who the older students are. As far as the teacher’s dress code, we can pretty much wear what we want. I stick to my black pants and a v-neck shirt since I didn’t pack much, but for the most part teachers dress pretty casually. Many people like to wear long flowy shirts or dresses, so that’s common amongst women. The men usually wear khaki shorts and a button up or something. The only teacher who wears black pants and a tie every day is one of the maths teachers who is only 23, so he thinks it makes him look older and more professional. 

This building is the staff room from the outside now. If you were to go into the building to the left, that is C Block where there are social studies classes. This is where my roopu class is since the teacher I work with is history. You can see some of the regular blue uniforms and also the white polos for the Year 13s.

Finally, this school has a liquor license…a liquor license!! I don’t know if it’s that big of a deal to anybody else, but I just thought this was crazy. Basically, they have a locked refrigerator with beer in it and on Friday they open up the bar. I haven’t been at the school any Friday yet since we’ve been traveling right after school, but apparently that’s what they do. I’m not sure if they make teachers pay for the beer, but I just know that they just sit in the lounge after school on Friday and drink it. I find it hard to believe that any school district in MN would allow a liquor license.

Here is the staff kitchen. There is complimentary hot tea and coffee every day which is super convenient with plenty of coffee cups and dishes to be used to eat. There is an oven and a panini press as well!

This is where we all sit during our staff meetings, lunch, and morning interval. It is a pretty big room and it's really fun sitting in there with everyone and talking to them.

This is the story of our lives. Petro spoils us and makes our lunch which consists of just a deli sandwich and some fruit. I don't know what it is about her sandwiches, but they are always delicious! Whenever we try and make one they just never turn out the same. You can definitely say we look forward to lunch every single day.

I plan on adding more information about how their testing system works here, but I figured I’d keep the posts separated, so be watching for that! So far, this school has been great. All of the teachers are super helpful and friendly, and they are all so interested in what we are doing while here. It’s been a really fun experience at this school, so I’m looking forward to another two weeks after this holiday is over!