Tuesday 29/05/08
Prac Block – Day Twelve

Today we went out to interschool sports. For the entire day.

My prac teacher wasn’t down for a sport – so she stayed at school. I signed up for volleyball, and went with two of the other teachers and the prac teacher from Boat C2. There were twenty-five girls all playing volleyball against 3 other schools. The day was organised by the teachers (of others schools) but run by the students.

I was pretty intrigued, but when we got there, after organising the girls into teams and giving them their run sheets (that told them which rounds they were playing in and which courts and when to do court duty etc), the girls just took themselves off and made it to all of their games with no supervision or coercing from the teachers at all.

The students were allowed to roam around the venue (some big gym) freely and were expected to know where they were supposed to be for games and duty and did it. I was shocked however, when the teachers with me simply sat and did marking all day. They didn't even watch the games to encourage the girls. The teachers from other schools were there, some watching and some marking, but pretty much, none of the teachers actually paid any serious attention to the games they were sitting near, or made any active effort to encourage the girls playing.

As a result, the games were pretty shabby and the Kimberly College girls got down heartened a fair bit because they weren’t really pulling anything together. Some of the other schools suffered the same way while a few just had teams of girls who really didn't care at all.

I sat by the court that they grade nine’s were to play on and supervised the two year nine teams. One won two games, and the other only one. They had a good time playing after a while though.

Later on, I was talking with some girls and they were saying how they usually had some problems with the Shailer Park girls. Then one of them came up to me and told me that a group of Shailer girls had been teasing one of their school mates and had dumped soap on her while in the toilet. It was a pretty weird situation which we handed over to the Shailer Park teacher (who did a fairly good job of handling it all).

Back to school and we were back at about 2:10 – pretty early for a 3:00 finish. I snuck off to the Languages room to do some work and I walked in on the principle having a “serious talk” with one of the grade ten boys. I quickly vacated to the staff room next door only to find that too was inundated with students.

The reason for this all too soon became clear as the principle came back in, had a go at some of the students for lying and then telling them that the person they had been called up to the office to give information on was going to be expelled (it was his birthday and he thought it would be cool to bring some alcohol to school).

Ahh yet another expulsion. I wonder if we will have class talks about it tomorrow.