Like, totally Rad(ford)

In Australia a college is not somewhere students go after high school as it is in the United States – the term refers to any school. Thus, Radford College in the Canberra suburb of Bruce (insert Monty Python Australia sketch here) is a K - 12 campus.

This school is the first really foreign school that Sara and I have worked in. When we work overseas we have always been in international schools – places where ex-pats, and locals looking to send their kids to US universities, send their kids in countries where the native language is not English. This time we were in an honest to goodness foreign school – part of the local system. Thanks to our friend Dan Ferri – these Aussies took a chance on a couple of poets from Cleveland Ohio.

You can see they gave us a manageable but busy schedule. As happens quite often our dance card filled up as teachers began talking about our visits into their classrooms and those who were sitting on the fence with a “wait and see” attitude decided they wanted to get in on some of this poetry action. So our schedule became loaded with crisscrossed lines and penciled in times as it evolved during our stay.

Like I said this is fairly common and understandable. Teachers are busy people and have a hard enough time getting to all their lessons and curriculum objectives and sometimes don’t feel there is time for poetry in their schedule. What Sara and I offer is a way that teachers can integrate poetry as a tool in their classroom – so while the finished product may be some sort of verse it still pushes their classroom goals forward and might I add, at a quicker pace than a five paragraph essay, a report, diorama, book report or any other of the myriad text types used for assessment. Ask the teachers at Radford about the narratives we wrote about the water cycle or the definition poems on democracy and you’ll find some recent converts to poetry as a practical classroom addition.

The students and teachers at Radford were engaged and enthusiastic, we visited classrooms of kids from third through 12^th grade and only went to the wrong building one time during our week long residency. Thankfully a breathless fifth grader found us and led us back to the right classroom. It is a whiplash inducing experience to go from a group of eight year olds writing about the toys in their bathtub to a class of 18 year old young men and women studying Plath and Hughes one right after the other but it’s also what makes our job so much fun.

We thoroughly enjoyed our visit and met some really dedicated professionals; including a 7^th grade science teacher who was carting around a pair of orphaned possums in her bag. So thanks to Peggy, Claire, Dylan, Therese, Dan and all the other folks we met during our stay. In the words of the school chaplain, “God bless you mob!”

That’s all I Canberra

What the Aussies lack in pronouncing of syllables in their words – they make up with over the top down under hospitality. After our charmed respite in Sydney I figured things couldn’t get much better and I was wrong. People went out of their way to be hospitable to us at every turn during our stay in the capital city Canberra.

Sara and I got in on a Sunday and weren’t slated to start working for real at Radford College until Thursday (we did visit a few classes on Monday to introduce ourselves to the staff and visited a couple classes to get the lay of the land) so we had a few days to explore the sprawling park like city. Where Sydney piled up tall against its harbor – Canberra spreads out in a radius from the parliamentary building, embassies intermixed with residences and forested parkland. The place is a biker or runners paradise and I took full advantage of the fact borrowing our friend and host, teacher and former NPR commentary star – Daniel Ferri’s mountain bike. Dan’s a re-planted Yankee (Chicagoan really) who now teaches at Radford (this all fits together eventually – trust me.)

 

Anyway – Canberra is nothing like Sydney – in fact it is for the birds. Birds like I’ve never seen in the wild before – parrots – cockatoos – magpies – ravens – swans – crazy looking pigeons with hats on, not to mention the bushy tailed possum that stared us down from a tree during an evening walk or the giant fruit bats with three foot wingspans who darted out from the shrubbery during that same constitutional. Add the kangaroos and rabbits I saw while biking and you’d have thought we were in a wildlife refuge – not the capital city of a whole country the size of the United States.

As for hospitality – on day one we went to the National Museum – the equivalent of our Smithsonian where we wandered about for an enjoyable couple of hours. The walk there was about an hour and a half and we were a bit tuckered out so we asked the lady at the info booth if she could help us obtain a taxi. She said she’s be more than happy to call but as she picked up the phone an older woman behind us poked her head out and said – never mind – I’ll drop them by. So our new friend Marjorie drove us home from the museum – giving us an impromptu tour of the embassies and a view of the gate to the prime minister’s house. In fact everywhere we went – museums – memorials – just walking on the streets – folks couldn’t have gone out of their way enough for us. This was certainly southern hospitality to the nth degree! Oh yeah – did mention that the bus drivers were just as likely to tell you to skip the fare as not?

So what’s up with the dropping of syllables in their words though? Canberra is pronounced Can-bra, Melbourne is Melb’n etc etc. Nobody could give me any explanations other than – that’s the way we do it mate. Of course this ruins the pun in my title but, keep on treating your visitors like you treated us and that’s good enough for me.