Harmony Day

I woke up this morning tired. I have been awake in the middle of the night with what I call work brain. It’s baaaacckk. Anyway, I was scheduled to go to the grade 4 classroom for Harmony Day. I contemplated for a couple minutes that I might just feign sickness, or as they say here “chuck a sickie.” But, I really did want to see the boys do their Aboriginal dancing at the all school assembly at 9 am, so I hauled myself out of bed and went out into the rain.

I wish for no cancer (please)

Normally I’m just an extra pair of hands that hangs out in the back of the room, but today Jacqui was busy getting the assembly participants ready and as I got there, she said to me on her way out of the room, “Can you line them up and bring them over in 5 minutes?” Uh, okay, time to be a 4^th grade teacher! So I used my handy dandy attention getting devices that I teach my students (“if you can hear my voice, clap once…”) and told them they had to be really good on the way over because I only had this one job and I wanted everyone to think I could pull it off. We dodged the raindrops on the way to the gymnasium and they lined up on the floor. Jacqui gave me a thumbs-up.

They have student-led school assemblies every Friday where they give out individual “good choice awards” and whole classes are awarded for good behavior at specials (PE, Japanese, Music). Students were all lined up and waiting for presentations to begin. In front of me I observed a pair of girls doing the patty cake clapping game, impressively quickly and quietly. And right behind them were two boys playing can-you-move-your-hands-away-before-I-slap-them game. Classic gendered behavior. Today grade 6 students put on a skit to teach Prep and Year 1 students what rubbish to put in which bin. The 5-year-olds got a real surprise from seeing a hand with a thumbs-up come out of the bin flap, indicating that the boy had chosen the correct bin for recyclables.

In honor of Harmony Day and the valuing of many cultures, a group of Aboriginal boys and a local Koorie leader performed three dances for the school. The boys looked nervous and proud, all at the same time.

I volunteered to take the class back by myself, seeing as how I was so successful getting them there. When we sat down in the classroom, one student said some kids were laughing at the dancers. It was my golden opportunity to lead a discussion like those I had been teaching student teachers to lead. We talked about all the reasons why people might have been laughing. Someone suggested maybe the dancing made them happy. I said, “That could be. What if they were laughing in a way that didn’t feel good?” Someone said they might laugh because it was different and they weren’t sure how to act.  Then Jacqui came in and students told her some kids were laughing, and she said, “Well, I’m disappointed in those few people, but I think there were 600 people in there who really enjoyed the dancing. The boys did a beautiful job and I think on Harmony Day I’d like to focus on the people who enjoyed it.”

Jacqui showed an animated video called If the World Was a Village which depicted a village of 100 people representative of the world’s demographics. Students were surprised that Australia was only 1% of the world’s population. The video also touched on how many languages would be spoken and the proportions of people who experienced poverty, air and water pollution, and food shortage. After the video, the teacher asked the students to use their iPads to type out two things that stuck out to them in the video and the class discussed them.

As recess time approached, the intercom lady announced it would be an inside recess and the kids cheered. One of the girls who had moved from Scotland the year before had brought a sugary treat from her culture called “tablet” to share during recess. It was made from sugar, condensed milk, and butter. Teachers gathered in the center common room and enjoyed pumpkin soup and bread supplied by a parent group I think. At the end of the half hour recess, we returned to the room and two of the girls played their iMovie for me. They made a 2-minute movie, complete with a plot, subtitles, and credits – all during this one recess! It was essentially about two girls (one of them Scottish) who save the world from evil tablet. After recess students used their computer devices to create graphs that demonstrated the percentages of population on different continents.  All of this youthful techno-competency made me feel a little like a luddite.