Sydney - Day 2

Tours and museums are rarely the way I like to see a city, but today was full of both and still great.

We started with a walking tour of The Rocks, a part of Sydney rich with history. The tour offered a wonderful sense of Sydney throughout its two-centuries of foundation and growth. We learned about everything from the unique way each convict quarried sandstone to the gangs of late nineteenth century Argyle Cut. Most fascinating was the way the heritage elements of The Rocks, sometimes old structures and sometimes just rocks themselves, are intact and intermingled in a still-functioning part of the town.

Lunch was a bit of refined pub food. A menu replete with meat pies and mash, but cooked with the care and served on the large plate that behooves fine dining. It was satisfying to see such pride taken in what is generally considered a secondary function of a good pub.

A stop in a small art gallery piqued an interest in aboriginal art and we followed it up with quite a review in the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art. While the art form is ancient, much of aboriginal art is impermanent and only recently collectable or collected. Thus it required a conscious effort, post World War II, by the aboriginal art community to present their work to the larger world. The exhibit was almost entirely bark paintings, covering animalia, elements of daily life, and the spiritual world. The docent spoke to a level of symbolism within the cross-hashes, dots and lines, a technical language totally different than western art, that I wanted deeply to understand. Unfortunately, by the time we reached the resource room with books and Wikipedia, we were too tired to really pursue the matter. I also learned that the pointilistic paintings from central Australian tribes are intended to reflect a bird’s eye view of the world, a tiny bit of information that totally transformed my appreciation for these pieces.

Across the water was the Sydney Opera House and the ever-changing weather made it seem a logical next visit. At first I was disappointed to find the opera house not clad in crisp black glass and white tiles, as it seems from afar, but instead brown and cream. But the exterior grew on me, especially as its harmony with the surrounding colors became apparent. At first, the $35 price tag for the tour of the interior seemed to set a high bar, but the trip through three venues and well-presented historical videos left me very satisfied. We actually got to sit in the seats of both the great concert hall and opera theatre. Try finding another way to do that for $35!

The interiors of the halls are only slightly less spectacular than the outside of the iconic structures. The interplay of the wood and concrete, the melding of the domes and arches with the internal rectangular volumes, and the stunningly presented vistas of the harbor and bridge demonstrate a thoroughness to the genius of the building. Inside and out, it was one of those buildings that was simply exciting just to see.

Sydney - Day 1

Before starting our time in Shanghai, we're spending ten days with good friends in Australia as a sort of belated honey-moon. We'll be visiting Sydney, Adelaide, the St. Claire wine country, and an Outback sheep station. On our way up to Asia, we'll stop in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for two days. Laptop in tow the whole way, I hope to keep up a goodly blogging as we go!

We got in to Sydney very early Monday morning, losing the entirety of Sunday as we flew. I'd like to record that the success of our noise-cancelling headsets offered a good night's sleep on the plane and earned me my first "you were right" of my marriage.

Our dear-friends-to-the-end met us at the airport despite the hour. While we knew, rationally, that the Southern Hemisphere is in the midst of winter in July, it was still quite a shock to step into forty-degree temperatures fourteen hours after the San Jose summer heat. We had our jackets prepared but were missing other key items of comfort, like closed-toed shoes. Fortunately, when carrying all your worldly possessions on your back (or luggage cart), seasonal clothes can’t be too far away.

We spent the rest of the day walking Sydney’s city center, which features a surprisingly dense array of towering glass and metal, interspersed with historical sandstone buildings. We stopped first at the old barracks, a building constructed in the early 19th century to house the convicts sent from England. I had wondered if Australia's convict past would be hidden away, it was exciting to see it so frankly displayed. The barrack's self-reflective museum featured an engaging deconstruction of the building, walls that had been chipped in layers to show the transformation of the structure across two centuries of use. We didn’t have time to walk through the whole museum, but were treated to a very informative presentation by a docent in the free gallery. She had a most refined Australian accent and hearing it juxtaposed with a more quintessential Aussie twang forced me to start thinking about the subtleties of dialect even here.

The city’s central park and botanical gardens were our next stop. Staring up at trees filled with large sleeping bats helped me to appreciate that we were really on a different continent, ---we just don’t see those in San Jose. It’s hard to get a sense of real foreignness in a modern English-speaking country, but I’ve heard Australia’s flora and fauna provide it in spades. I hope the bats are just a taste of the exotic animals we’ll see on the trip.

After lunch, we continued our stroll around the city center, including the Queen Victoria Building and Darling Harbor, both clearly tourist draws. Fortunately, the middle of a Monday in winter kept the crowds small. The QVB featured lovely glass and metal lattice work that reminded me of Paris and a friend of London. Sydneysiders are a well-dressed lot and walking through this swanky set of shops and those surrounding it showed the origins. We were very happy to see few typical American stores, though a lot of international brands are here as well as in the US. Darling Harbor was blustery and cold, entertaining us mostly through a “drawbridge” that turned ninety-degrees to allow ships to pass. The engineering display was interesting, but forced us to stand in the cold and wind just a little too long. We also found remarkable that Sydney’s monorail, like that of Seattle and Disneyland, serves almost no functional purpose. Let me know if you've ridden one somewhere that does!

It began raining, first in a “oh, just a little nip” sort of way and then, after fifteen minutes or so, turned towards a full “aww, what the hell.” Umbrellas hadn’t made the 35kg cut and we found ourselves arriving at the famed Sydney Opera House wet and uncomfortable. I was cloaked in a five-dollar poncho that set the guards’ looks askance. We decided to return for a tour and more picturesque perusal of the Sydney icon another day and caught a bus home. Besides, it was four o’clock, in a country where QE2 still graces the currency, thus certainly time for tea.

Move-d!

After our wedding, my wife and I took a day to relax and then came home to continue the all-consuming process of dissolving our lives here in America. Only now, the day before we are set to leave, do I think we’re finally done.

In parallel with saying good-bye to friends and family, we have watched our home trickle away. Piece by piece, we’ve gone about un-assembling the efficient and happy environment that we had slowly put together across four years and combined in the last nine months. First went the bedroom furniture, over a month ago now. Soon followed by the patio furniture. Then went the bookshelves and their beloved occupants. Next the credenza filled with our files and stationery. Finally our dining room table and couch. Today someone came to take our mattress and we took our three paintings and remaining lamps to storage. I’m writing this entry from a hotel room, as our apartment is now totally bare.

It’s been a torturous process. Not the simple cross-town matter of packing, moving, and unpacking. A cross-oceanic move means that every item is a decision. I call it “3 S or G,” ---ship it, store it, sell it or give it away. What makes the cut to be squeezed into the 35kg or so that we can carry to Shanghai? What will keep in temperature uncontrolled storage until 2010? What will we need as soon as we return? What is worth trying to sell on CraigsList? We run through these questions a hundred times an hour as we evaluate our drawers and closets and cupboards. It makes the process exponentially harder and longer.

In the end, a consistent rule has emerged. Most of what we are taking to China is clothes. My wife and I are both tall and we’ve been told that will make clothes much harder to come by. We’re also taking some of the electronic necessities of life and a few favorite, portable, games. But by and large, we’re going to arrive in China bearing a whole lot of cotton.

Similarly, most of what we are storing is books. Our professional workbooks, the worksheet masters teachers always need, have all been scanned. Over the last five months we spent hours and hours slicing the binding of our workbooks and scanning them. Those are going to China with me on my hard drive. But those that couldn’t be scanned, our classroom library and personal books, probably consume two-thirds of all that we are keeping, right around fifty boxes.

We’re also keeping a lot of odds and ends. A surprising lot that filled an astonishing number of cubic feet and packing hours. Little necessary tools of life, from our plates to our bikes, to our hampers, the tools that we would just turn around and buy again. Immune to spoilage or obsolescence, it seemed silly to throw or give them away. So they sit in storage, ready to greet us when we return.

As I slid the roll-a-door down for the last time today, I couldn’t help but chuckle a little as I imagined myself pushing the door back up in two years, engulfed immediately and viscerally by the life we’ve left. But I also realized that I couldn’t actually imagine myself, that I didn’t really know who I would be when the door goes up again. I was struck by a simple question: Will all this stuff still be important to me?

What Bad Math Hath Wrought

There were two articles in the Mercury News Thursday that may seem unrelated, but I find them deeply connected:

California Requires Every Eighth Grader to be Tested in Algebra

Foreclosures Filings Surge 53% in June

Algebra is a vital math skill, taking it in eighth grade puts kids on a track to start calculus in high school, and this helps them prepare to challenge the Asian Math Menace and get into college. I agree with all this. Can we move on?

I also know that when we push kids into math for which they aren’t prepared, they do not, as policymakers dream, rise marvelously to the occasion and learn three or four years of math in one. Some children, under the influence of some teachers, can make such a gain, but the vast majority of kids and teachers will flounder awfully. They will hate math, they will believe that they cannot do it, and they will never learn the basic skills they need to survive. This is not low expectations, this is proven reality.

This brings us to the second article. It is mind-boggling the number of Americans who signed up for mortgages they couldn’t possibly afford and accepted the over-valued prices of homes that couldn’t possibly be sustained. We’ve heard and read a lot about borrowers being “swindled” and “tricked” into poor mortgage arrangements by “predatory lenders.” But more than an ethical problem, this is an educational one.

The crisis in our housing market is a result of millions of Americans not having number sense, not knowing how to check their figures, or how to run a spreadsheet or how to even make use of a mortgage calculator online. They relied on lenders to do the math for them and they didn’t have the skills and confidence to put a halt on things that didn’t add up. I’m not suggesting that we mandate finance standards in third grade, but rather that if our education system didn’t leave our citizenry hating math and feeling totally incapable in using it, they wouldn’t fall for these tricks.

For the vast majority of people, math, like reading, is entirely a means to an end. It is a set of tools to be used across a lifetime, not a milestone achieved once and left speedily behind. The math skills required to sensibly negotiate a mortgage are almost entirely taught in sixth grade. But with top-down mandates of math performance, we guarantee that unless they are learned then, they never will. No time to cover vital skills, on to Algebra! Doesn't matter if you're just mastering percents, on to Algebra! The inevitable turn of phrase is that setting goals beyond the reach of many kids only serves to leave every unprepared child behind.

If we’re serious about getting all California kids into algebra in eighth grade, start with serious, drastic action…in second grade. End social promotion. Mandate summer school. Publish teacher names and passing percentages in the paper. The next year extend it to third grade. Continue until our system is exclusively producing eighth graders ready for algebra and then demand they all take a test. Solving our math problems by starting with an algebra test in eighth grade is akin to trying to solve our obesity epidemic by mandating that all 45 year-olds run a marathon. Too much, too late.

Giving children tests we haven’t prepared them to take only serves to take away their confidence in their abilities and their enjoyment of learning. Every day, the news makes plain the cost of such a mistake.

You Too Can Teach Abroad!

My fiancée, Ms. A, and I have received a lot of questions from other teachers about how we went about attaining our overseas teaching positions. In honor of our acquiring our visas for China, the Last Big Hoop we had to jump through, here’s the story:

My interest in international schools was piqued years ago, when I visited one in Japan. The idea lay dormant through my TFA years and then resurged in force last summer, when Ms. A and I strolled by the American School of Paris. When we came back home, we plunged ourselves into investigations of our different options.

We started, actually, with Department of Defense schools for the overseas dependents of soldiers. This seemed like the ideal placement for us, as it features a student population more similar to the one we teach now, represents meaningful national service, and offers locations throughout regions we were interested in: Western Europe and Asia. We speedily finished our applications but then read the fine print: DOD schools do their hiring in May and reserve the right to reassign you anywhere in the world. We probably could have swallowed the latter clause, but the former meant that we would have to leave ourselves and our current schools in the lurch about our job next year long past the usual hiring season, both an unprofessional action and a personal risk we were unwilling to take.

This pushed us to look at the different options for getting jobs in private, international schools. These schools are for the children of expatriates, overseas businesspeople and diplomats. Often called “American schools” abroad, they hire credentialed American teachers to offer American curricula in countries from France to Uzbekistan. (Yes, I am aware that if we went any further from The Trenches we'd be teaching at Exeter. No, that's not the point.)

According to one source I agree with, if you are set upon teaching in one particular region or country, you’re best off applying directly to the schools there. We were more open-minded. Medical necessity knocked a few regions off our list, but we knew we could be excited and enthusiastic about wherever the winds of fate blew us. Young teachers, specialized in a very different kind of school and student, we didn’t think we’d get to be choosy. Consequently, it made sense for us to work through a placement agency. My research found three big ones, Search Associates, International School Services and the Council of International Schools. They all perform the same service, matching IS teachers and schools, and they all seem reputable and capable.

We picked Search Associates because they held an information session and hiring fair in San Francisco, driving distance from our work and home. The application process was extensive, requiring three supervisory recommendations, two from parents of past students (Aiiii!!!), a statement of philosophy, a personal introduction, a resume, and a lengthy online application. We pushed ourselves to do as much as possible in the summer, before school restarted, because we knew that anything unfinished would wait until Winter Break. By the end of December, all our materials were complete. This gave us access to the Search Associates’ database of international schools and their openings, and more importantly, an invitation to the hiring fair in February. It was very easy to link Ms. A’s application and mine, as teaching couples are preferred by almost all international schools and a large part of the faculties of many.

As February approached, Search published their list of schools attending the recruitment fair. We researched them and developed a priority list. When the fair finally came, we found that some schools we were excited about no longer had openings for our levels (Spain!) and some new ones did. (Beijing!) We also found that many schools had done their research on us, and we received several invitations to interview with schools we had not originally anticipated. (Moscow! Ningbo! Seoul! Singapore!)

The whole year-long process was wonderfully ripe with potential, as it seemed equally likely that we could end up in the snowy reaches of Aomori, Japan, or the tropics of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. At one point, we had to put up a world map at home so that we could keep track of where all the schools we were considering were located and not embarass ourselves in an interview with a geo-gaff. Quick - Could you talk about the climate at the International School of Vilinus?

The first night of the fair we circulated a large room filled with recruiters, scheduling a list of interviews for the next two days. We had no idea whether or not we were competitive with the two hundred other candidates there, so we signed up for nearly twenty interviews, starting at 7:30AM the next day.

The next day, we quickly found that we had underestimated ourselves. After four interviews, we had three offers, all from schools at the front of our list. A school in Costa Rica had given us only until 12:30 to commit, so at 11:00 we canceled the rest of our interviews and went to lunch to decide whether we would spend the next two years in Costa Rica, Korea or China. It was a wrenching decision. Gaining Spanish fluency had been a motivating factor in our original thoughts of moving abroad. However, our school in China was, simply, in China, a nexus of excitement in the world today. Further, Ms. A was hesitant about her teaching placement in Costa Rica, a special class between K and 1 for lower ELLs. She was anxious for a break from the demands of ELL instruction and hoping to see her expectations reset by two years of work with native speakers. Finally, we were persuaded by the financial realities of the situation. Working in Costa Rica meant foregoing the opportunity to save money for our return to the pricey Bay Area, while working in China meant returning with nigh on a down payment for a house. We decided that we would find another way to learn Spanish and signed with a school in Shanghai for the next two years. Jittery with excitement and exhaustion, we drove home and called our friends and families to tell them the news.