Term Two - Day One

We have both been retired from teaching for more than six years, so it shouldn't really matter to us that school started again this morning.

The Teachers' Union is threatening industrial action if all classrooms are not fully staffed. The Education Department says that there will be a teacher in every classroom , even if some of them are relief teachers. Oh, yeah - posturing on both sides.

The schools that are short staffed will be in the country with little incentive for any one to fill the vacancies. They have poor housing, few facilities and usually a local mindset that regards teachers as transients, somewhat akin to gypsies, rogues and vagabonds.

In the past teachers were forced to accept such postings.

Kevin spent a year in one such town. He was forcibly posted there, despite numerous life factors that should have prevented it. His father was dying, our son was in his last year of High School and dabbling in drugs, plus I was in a promotional position. Thus his family could not accompany him to the town, and every Friday he drove to Perth to have some semblance of family life for the weekend.

Of course this bolstered the locals' attitude that teachers didn't become part of the town. I am still angry about the whole situation, even though it was nearly 20 years ago.

Child sponsorship

Yesterday we received an email reminder about our sponsorship of a young lad in Bali. He is in his last year of primary school and we have been sponsoring him for three years now. It sounds like a big deal, but A$100 per year pays his school fees, writing and reading materials etc. Our sponsorship is done through the John Fawcett Foundation and 100% of the $100 goes to the child. It is managed by the foundation and the Head Teacher with the father can draw out approximately $10 per month. We can follow the transactions on the net.



John Fawcett is a Western Australian who has lived for many years in Bali and has devoted his life to helping Balinese on a number of fronts.

A few years ago I was involved in a project sending school materials to a school in the mountainous region of Bali named Bangli. The Bangli area is the third poorest area in Indonesia and is quite close to the Kintimani volcano. My cousin and I rounded up desks, chairs and computers and they were dispatched by sea to Bali. After many glitches with Indonesian Customs and other problems, the gear arrived and we travelled to the school to set up the computers. They were all wired in and we discovered that the power supply was filched from an adjoining building by bare wires and that it was only powerful enough to run one machine at a time. The story of getting adequate power to the school and paying for it is novel-length. Joan and I plan on returning soon to see if the computers are still running and if they need some repairs.

School's In

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.