More holidays

We are just over half way through the mid-winter break. No posts for a whole term since last holiday! Why? Busy, busy , busy during term-time. In fact that was a really busy term. Busier than usual, though teachers rarely get much down-time during term. Lots of good things happened at work. The new course we have been developing has taken off and we took 3 days off school to go possum trapping, 1 day off to learn quad riding skills, plus 3 afternoons of bush walking around a local nature reserve where we have started to trap pests. Each day out takes organisation in itself with a lot of paperwork to take kids out of school. Plus you have to set lessons for all your classes who are staying at school. It is a major pain and it does put one off leaving the "safety" of the establishment. But the minute you drive out of school with a van load of escaping students it feels exactly like that .... you have escaped from some kind of prison. I think that a large portion of students would learn more and faster and without the tensions that arise in school, if those children were taken out of the institution of school. There are echoes of previous work in learning disability services in that last paragraph. Normalisation is just as important for mainstream kids as for those with disabilities. It is cheaper and more "efficient" to herd large numbers of them into one class room with a teacher ratio of 1 to 25 pupils, than it is to allow pupils to learn in more life like contexts. Just as it is cheaper to stick all the disabled kids into a special centre with the minimum number of staff that you can operate the place with and say that you are meeting their needs. Anyway, after that little digression you will be wanting pictures of the children I suppose. I shall hunt through the hard drive and post some up.

Found some pictures atken during the term. Stephan turned 60 and he had a birthday bash. Good food and company. Been trapping in the garden to get the hang of the traps we are setting in the bush. Here is a rat caught in a fenn trap. They are pretty effective and my favourite trap so far out of the ones that I have set. Stuart and I spent an enjoyable evening on Moturoa Island counting calling kiwis. We went over on a Saturday afternoon and were sent to a bush edge towards the end of the island. We had to listen out for and record any kiwi on a large map. We heard 2 males calling. Overall the survey estimated an island population of about 60. Very healthy. We were posing for the pictures!