The End of the Year!

Tomorrow is the last day of school and I'm more than slightly amazed that we have been in Singapore for three years now. They have just whizzed by and this past six months have been the most frenetically busy I have ever known. It's been great but, wow, it has been busy!

I've done some pretty cool stuff at school this year. I lead two overseas trips. One with Year 9 to Sabah which was brilliant. It was really rewarding seeing kids responding to being out of their comfort zones so positively. We have a lot of mainland Chinese at our school and they were not impressed with sleeping in hammocks in the jungle and having to prepare their own food. But by the last day they didn't want to leave, which was pretty cool. I also took a group of kids to Bali to look at volcanoes. This was the second time I've done this trip and this year was as good as last. Kids get so much out of seeing the real life version of the stuff we talk about in class. Although this group were sort of 'too cool for school', individually they all said they had a great time and would do it again. There were other things too, but I won't bore you with that.

Early start at Changi

Jungle Camp

View from hotel at Kintamani, Bali

View from Mt Batur, Bali

Our school has grown a lot over the three years we have been here. In August 2012 we had 317 kids from Nursery to Year 13. At the end of this year we have over 800 kids and we look like hitting 900 by the time we come back in August. The growth hasn't been without its issues but we have managed to pull it off. Even though we are dead knackered and looking forward to the holidays, I am already a little bit excited about next year. Our staff is fairly stable now and that means we can organise things with more continuity. Our department work well together and we have done some really good stuff this year. Hopefully we can consolidate that and then build on it next year.

Mel is the co-ordinator of two core subjects for IGCSE and IB. This keeps her busy, and is both challenging and rewarding. She will be working full-time next year, which will be a big change for her and Matilda. I think she is keen to be working full-time, but she will miss the time with Matilda. We have been very lucky that they have that time together over the last three years. Mel and Matilda got to do lots of stuff together that wouldn't have been possible if Mel was working full-time. Matilda will also be at school for the whole day next year. This won't be such an issue as she asked if she could stay at school longer and has been doing full days for most of this term.

One of the things I really love about our school is the commitment to professional development. Mel and I both got to travel overseas for courses this year, which was awesome. Mel went to Phuket for Global Perspectives workshop and I had three days in Nanjing for a Geography workshop. We were also able to go to the annual Google Education Summit here in Singapore. I attended a workshop with the head guy for Google Geo Tech Education looking at Google Earth and Google Maps, as well as few other things which was quite geeky and cool. I also have a course in Bangkok lined up for September, which should be interesting.

Wearing daddy's hat at Melbourne Airport
the day we left for Singapore

Making 4th birthday wishes

Mel was looking at some photos yesterday, from around the time we arrived in Singapore. Matilda was still a wee baby; not long walking and just learning to talk. Tomorrow is the last day of her first year at school (she was in Nursery for half a day for most of the year). She really loves going to school which is awesome. We were looking at her report today. She has done quite well. She loves Chinese and swimming!
It has been amazing to watch Matilda develop from a wee baby into a little girl. She has an incredible imagination and makes up stories and songs about everything almost every day. She loves to draw and has done some interesting of portraits of Mel and I. She is very much the little princess that cares a lot about her clothes and shoes. But she also loves watching volcano videos and nature documentaries with her daddy. She also loves maps and flags:)

Matilda is very well travelled for a 4 year old. This year we went to Myanmar, Australia & NZ for Christmas and Perth for Easter. Myanmar was very cool and I am dead keen to go back. Christmas time is a much nicer time to visit both Australia and NZ. The weather is much better and everyone is mostly relaxed. Perth was great as we got to meet my cousin's little boys Zander and Jace and Mel and Matilda were able to spend time with her sister Rose out at Kalgoorlie. Matilda loves seeing her big cousins, Zoe and Emma.

Sunset over the Irrawaddy River

Shwezigon Temple, Bagan

Tilda singing to the Buddha

Sunrise ballons over Bagan

Big Umbrellas

With tomorrow being the last of school, we now have 7 weeks holiday. Yeah! We went to NZ and Australia this time last year and while it was good to catch up with friends and family, the weather is shit. Mel and I vowed we would never visit at that time of year again, unless it was absolutely, positively unavoidable! To bring things back into balance we will be heading for Thailand and Bali this year. We're heading up to Bangkok late next week for a few days. We are taking our helper, Lorie, with us so she can visit her son who teaches English there. In the last week of June, we are hitting Bali with Mel's sister and parents. It is Rose's birthday and good chance for Tilda to hang out with her big cousins for a while. I am going to Java for a couple days to visit some of the ancient Hindu/Buddhist temples near Yogyakarta and take geeky photos. In the last week before school we are spending a few days at a flash resort to make sure we are fully rested and relaxed!

I guess that's it for the moment. Being on holidays means I should be able to post again soon. But I probably won't:)

Ciao!

Christmas Holidays are Nearly Here!

Almost Christmas time. I can't believe how fast the first half of this academic year has gone. Just amazing. We have 2 more days at school. Well, it's really 1.5 days because we finish at 12 on Friday. Then we have buses to take us into town to a place on Singapore River for our Christmas do. Quite looking forward to that:)

Term 1 felt kind of short. Teachers were at school for most of 10 weeks but the students were there for 8 weeks. We had quite a few new teachers starting this year and there was a nice positive vibe about the place. This was a good thing because there was a little bit of negativity at the end of last year. In general the negative have people moved on.

We went to Japan for the first term holidays. It was the first time we had gone back to Japan since we left 9 years ago. Mel & I were both really excited to be going back. We had a good time visiting the places we used to hang out although some places had closed down. The place I took Mel for dinner on our first date had moved and was difficult to find. We were really disappointed to find it only to find out that it had closed in April. We didn't do lots of sight seeing but we did manage to catch up with lots of people which was really cool. Tilda loved playing with the other kids. It was interesting to note that we (the parents) didn't really seem to have changed much. But the kids had grown up lots! We did quite a bit of shopping for things that we can't get outside of Japan. I also bought new lens for my camera which was very exciting for me:)

Kobe from the Ropeway

Nunobiki Waterfall

Tilda loved the ropeway!

Funky roof at Sorakuen Gardens

Term 2 has absolutely whizzed by! Which is both good and bad. It means that the holidays are here already. But it also means that the last 2 or 3 weeks have been crazy busy with all kinds of things to tidy up before Christmas. One of those things was our first Days of Nexellence event. This is a day when we take all our Year 7-9 students off timetable and give them are series of activities to complete related to a central theme. Our theme for this event was a murder mystery.

Although it was a lot to organise, it was worth it because it was an awesome day! The kids loved it. There was a really positive feeling all day. It was great to see the "too cool for school" kids get dragged into participating in the activities by the others. Our school is a Mac 1:1 school so ICT is a big thing for us. The whole event was based around digital technology. It was cool but the online activity was massive to the point where our server was starting to become overloaded. We had live stream TV to broadcast breaking news and to share information with students, clues hidden in a Minecraft world and we used a Twitter hashtag (#daysofnexus) to share information vis Twitter. Several of us were tweeting solidly all day and just as we were finishing up, #daysofnexus was one of the top 10 trending topics on Twitter in Singapore which was really cool. And as of 9:30ish tonight, it was still in the top 10:)

We are heading back to NZ for Christmas on Sunday night. Mel is looking forward to being able to drink wine at a decent price and Tilda is really excited about seeing the animals and Granddad's digger on the farm. I'm looking forward to chilling out and not thinking about school for a while:)

Well nothing much else to say so I'll be off. Merry Christmas and all the best for 2014!

Been a while!

It's been a couple of weeks since my last post. Nothing terribly exciting has happened. We have settled into something of routine which is good. Tilda has been really good in general. She did have an ear infection which took a little while to get over and is getting loads of teeth at them moment. Who knew teeth were so unpredictable?

Mel has connected with some of the other non-working wives & partners which is great for them all. Mel set up a Facebook page and they are setting up playdates and outings with each other. Being to get to know other people has relieved some of the stress for us both. It's hard to head off to work knowing that Mel is kind of bored at home. I think it's been cathartic for Mel to be able to share her frustrations with people who are going through the same kind of stuff.

School is chugging along ok. I think I might said in earlier post that there were a lot of new staff starting this year (27!). There has been a fair bit of turmoil at the school over the last 12-18 months and there are a lot of things that aren't quite right yet. There are systems & processes that aren't properly in place. In some cases previous teachers didn't leave things when they left (e.g. schemes of work, resources) or if they were left, they were fairly half-arsed.

Probably the biggest issue is our Grade 12's (Year 13 in NZ). These guys weren't treated terribly well by some of the previous staff and so they were quite wary at the beginning of the year. More than a couple had quite the attitude going on. Unfortunately they, in some cases, are behind in their work. And by behind, I mean a term behind not just a week or two. Some will struggle to pass their IB diploma this year, which isn't fair on them. It was very instructive for me when we did a reflection activity after the first day of school. More than one student commented along the lines of "the new teachers seem to care about us", "the new teachers seem to know what they're doing" or "I'm glad they got new teachers and kept the good ones from last year". When I showed my Homeroom partner, we both felt quite sad for these kids.

There some positives though! The school roll is significantly lower than it should be. So our classes are small. The biggest class I have is my Grade 6 Humanities class with 18. I have 12 students in Grade 9 Global Perspectives and 9 in my Grade 11 Environmental Systems & Societies. My 3 senior Geography classes all have 4 or 5 students. On the whole, the students are all pretty nice kids. There a couple of special ones but they're pretty easy to deal with. We certainly don't have the behavioural issues that I saw from some kids at Fraser.

Some other positives? Because there are so many new staff, there's a good sense of camaraderie developing, which is cool. We have drinks on a Friday which is good. Very expensive though and I have to be careful not to get too carried away! This year is pretty much viewed as a transitional year so we have quite a bit of room to experiment with different things. I find that I'm able to use ICT a fair bit more and myself and the Grade 6 English teacher are planning to do some collaborative work next term which is kind of exciting. There's also lots of PD going on. I've done some IB training already and there are 6 of us flying to Malaysia in the October holidays to do some more. Tomorrow there are a group of us off to a Google Apps summit at the Singapore American Singapore.

For me one for the coolest things is the fact that I can watch 3-5 games of AFL footy every weekend. For free:) It's finals time now and my Magpies are playing the Hawks tonight. I'm pretty nervous because Hawthorn have looked good all year. Wait and see I guess:)

Anyhoo, that' it for a bit.

Ciao for now & GO PIES!!!