Australia, Day 6

Today's meetings covered Tasmania's system of child care from birth through 10th grade, with some interesting wrinkles to the story.
Our first stop was the Ptunarra Child & Family Care Centre, a local place in North Norfolk that allows families to get support, starting from family planning through prenatal care, early care into child care, in the hopes that the education and connection with others in the community will allow young mothers and fathers better opportunities for raising their children before they get into kindergarten. 

Ptunarra

Outside Instrument

A beautiful place, but here is where I believe I discovered the reason for this concerted effort to make education such a major priority in Tasmania -- adult illiteracy is at over 40% -- that would constitute for me the kind of crisis the warrants spending a lot of taxes on education, including a complete overhaul.







Our next stop was New Norfolk High, a 7-10 grade school just up the road from Putnarra, with 93% of its children coming from families in the bottom bracket of economics, and not one family in the top bracket.  The school had some really cool things going for it, including a literacy program integrated into all subject matters and a shop where students got to build guitars, among other things.  However, the principal minced no words about the central plan of changing schools being too ambitious for schools of his type, especially as no principal gets to hire teachers as they are appointed by the central administration.

Guitar built by New Norfolk High students

Our next school was an amazing primary school (grades K-6), Windermere, that is only 4 years old and has a very interesting architecture.  Not only does it have pods, but each pod has essentially inner walls made of glass so that each class is clearly visible from the outside and is accessible through sliding doors.  The furniture is easily movable in all of the rooms, including one table that is set at standing height for the students.  The bathrooms are single stalls with a complete door, apparently an easy way to cut down on bullying, and the teachers do not have desks in the rooms but have a space for themselves, again with lots of windows, that is almost like a ship's bridge, overlooking the entire pod and the library that greets the students coming in. 

The teacher bridge

One of the classrooms

One odd thing -- while this is a new school, it was not built for growth but for the capacity needed at the time, making them already scramble for classroom space.
Our final visit was Montrose High School, new, with a heavy emphasis on the performing arts (and we did get to see a rehearsal of 3 numbers from the musical Man of Steel).  While everyone else got a tour of the school, I spent some time with one of the teachers who does the most with online learning.  Their LMS is called Fronter, and it is used for some special cases and for hybrid learning environments.  So the idea of a lot of online learning going on in K-12 is not quite there.  However, the students currently do all have a laptop, though there is no guarantee that the have internet at home besides access over their smartphone.
After these trips, we wandered some more the streets of Hobart, and I snuck into the first floor of the University of Tasmania's Fine Arts School.

University of Tasmania, Fine Arts School

Finally, we got to see a local band, the Starlings (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlkyiM1BOLg), perform in downtown Hobart, and it turns out that they are local high school teachers.