Fire Hose Rodeo

Kia ora!

Kei te pehea koe? (How are you?)

Kei te pai (I’m fine)

It’s been finally confirmed; I’ll be spending my second teaching practice at Villa Maria College, an all girls high school that’s nearby my residence. Villa Maria is the sister school to St. Thomas of Canterbury College, where I just happened to spend my first teaching practice last year. In short, I’ll be in Christchurch while the majority of my midyear classmates will be teaching all over Middle Earth.

With TP2 just around the corner, a portion of today’s Professional Studies class was spent on how to deal with extreme situations. This was because of a recent news story where at Auckland’s Avondale College a teacher was stabbed in the back by one of his students. Jenna, a classmate of mine that specializes in science, will be teaching at Avondale on her second teaching practice.

The other half of the class was devoted to Māori Alive presentations, and how to make classroom learning more cooperative among students & with the teacher. Knowing the Ukrainian language is an advantage when it comes to speaking Te Reo Māori because you can write out the sounds & syllables using Cyrillic letters, making the pronunciations a lot easier.

Tino pai (Very good.)

At cadets, the juniors paid a visit to the nearby fire station, where they were taught & shown the vehicles & equipment (hoses, Jaws of Life, cutter, etc.) used by NZs fire personnel. Surprisingly, they didn’t have a pet Dalmatian. To show the dangers of driving too quickly, the firemen showed the remains of a car that was found wrapped around a wooden telephone pole. The driver’s side was completely destroyed, and the car had almost been sawed into two equal pieces. The driver & passenger survived, but I’m guessing the driver wished he didn’t because the car belonged to his mother.

To finish off the visit, the backup fire truck was brought out and the cadets got to play around with the fire hoses, spraying powerful streams of water in the air an on the pavement. If I had known earlier, I would have arrived in American football gear and have asked to be sprayed with the hose. (When you’ve survived a 12,000-foot tandem skydive, you feel like you can do anything)! The powerful streams would have knocked me over but the firemen ‘regrettably’ said that even with safety gear, they’re not allowed to spray people, not even rioters like in North America. (People on fire get put out with fire extinguishers).

This week is assignment week meaning I have been feverishly working on history & music lesson plans, making sure that all the ‘t’s are crossed and ‘i’s are dotted so that nothing can go wrong . . . go wrong . . . go wrong . . . go wrong . . . If all goes well, the professors will remain confident of my teaching abilities.

Ka pai! (Great!)

To further improve my English writing, I joined the list of contributors to the free university magazine titled CANTA. My first assignments are to review two music CDs in the styles of Hip Hop Instrumental and Drum & Bass. I hope I don’t disappoint the editors.

Ka Kite ano! (See you again!)