Students at Government schools resume tomorrow - teachers have been on deck since Monday (or, if in an administrative position like my sister, since last week).
Neither of us is the least bit nostalgic. Between us we gave more than 55 years to the WA Education Department, plus another 15 years to Papua New Guinea, and we are happy to be out of the system. But our daughter Helen has just started her second year of teaching. She is at a different school with a different year level. Last year she taught Year 2/3, this year she is teaching Pre-Primary.
She rang us yesterday after her first day (student free). Everything is great at the moment and she is happily planning her first term's program. She knows she can rely on us for assistance with the additional resources that every teacher needs and which are never easily available within the constraints of a school's budget. State education is chronically underfunded at the grassroots level.
I am starting on the dress-up box tomorrow. So far Helen has found nothing in her classroom for this essential Pre-Primary activity. Maybe the previous teacher took it all with her, maybe she didn't have a dress-up box at all. So I have bought a large plastic crate on wheels from Red Dot, and tomorrow I will go through my collection of fabrics to find lengths that I can hem. These will be cloaks, robes, sails, walls for rooms under tables . . . anything the imagination can make of them. Of course, this weekend we will also buy a few props like toy stethoscopes, tiaras, cowboy hats - look out the $2 shops! - but it is better that the major part of the box be anonymous bits that can be transformed into anything, rather than specific pieces like Batman, Superman or fairy costumes.
Tomorrow she will meet her 2007 students. I hope they will be happy together.
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