Year With The Yanks Australian Exchange Teacher Gets Perspective On Two Countries’ Approach To Education

On his last day at Bowdish Junior High, Damian Hallinan is wearing a faded denim shirt and blue jeans.

No one told the lanky Australian that the school’s band and choir Christmas concerts called for something a little more dressy.

After a year Hallinan, 38, still trips over the little things.

The science teacher left his country a year ago to teach seventh grade here in an international exchange of teachers. He traded not only jobs, but homes, with Shonnie Kerkuta, who is due back at Bowdish after the Christmas break.

The students just love Hallinan, says Principal Glenna Smith.

“Mr. Hallinan is cool,” says one message on his white board. “Smile, Mr. Hallinan,” says another.

The seventh graders are working their way through individual presentations, related somehow to science.

One boy talks about his glasses. Another discusses cars, seemingly trolling for facts on the spot. “Camaros are faster than Mustangs. Um … wheels roll. This is a blue convertible.”

Then comes a budding wildlife biologist, Angela Bocook, who grabs her audience fast.

“My presentation is on my dead wiener dog. He got run over in July. His name was Squirt, and his relation to science is biology.”

Bocook passes around snapshots to back up each point. “His natural instinct was to dig for rodents.” That came with a shot of Squirt digging in a mole hole.

“Thanks, Angela, that was good,” Hallinan says.

Hallinan threaded his way through a maze of differences this year. In some ways, he says, Spokane schools knock ‘em dead: Our kids’ ability to stand up and speak well in front of a class is formidable. Our homework standards are higher than we think; and teachers here get more work out of their students than in Australia.

Other facets of our school system he criticizes: a lack of collaboration among teachers, the draining winter and spring schedule. And a certain resistance to change.

Down under, high schools include seventh through 12th grades, and technical classes start in seventh grade. That includes electronics, as well as wood and metal shop classes. Kids do things like build computers, Hallinan says matter of factly. “We start dribbling it into them early.”

High school graduates with that kind of background generally do well in university engineering programs, Hallinan says. Or if they go into carpentering or building, they need less on-the-job training.

Schools in Australia have no sports. Instead, private clubs organize athletics. “It’s a privilege for kids to be involved with sports there, and costly,” he says.

He’s still surprised at how quickly teachers clear out of the junior high at the end of the day.

“I’m looking around for someone to compare notes with, and they’re either coaching or on their way home,” he says.

A lack of day-to-day brainstorming among teachers left Hallinan feeling depleted. In compensation, though, having his own classroom was a delight.

Australian teachers don’t get their own rooms. Instead, their desks are clustered in a central staff room. They do a lot of team teaching and their class schedules include more variety than Hallinan’s five daily sections of seventh-grade science.

That all allows for more exchange of ideas among colleagues, Hallinan says. If he were king for a day, he would rework our school schedules, so that teachers here could meet regularly to discuss different ways of approaching their work.

Other differences?

“Your kids cuss less than ours.” But a couple of favorite pieces of low-grade profanity aren’t considered curse words in Australia. Sometimes other teachers were surprised that Hallinan let kids sound off. “But they just don’t register in my brain as swear words.”

Here, parents and teachers talk more with each other. There, an administrator acts as a go-between.

Here, junior high students are taught seven subjects. There, schools try to cover as many as 10 or 12 subjects in a semester. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” he says.

Here, from what Hallinan’s seen, change is uncomfortable for many educators. Especially, technical change. “There are some older teachers who still don’t know how to turn their computers on,” he says, disapprovingly.

There, “our schools are very good at change.” That’s because with state elections every three years and government-run schools, major changes in philosophy and policy can occur like clockwork.

Hallinan, his wife, Wendy, and their children, Joel and Bianca, will travel to Oregon and northern California before heading for home in mid-January.

That’s due to one more difference: Schools in Australia don’t start up until the end of January. Then they run on a nine-weeks-on, two-weeksoff schedule.

He won’t regret the change. “Last year, when I got here, I had that long slog through until spring break. Then just one week’s break. Oh, that was tough,” Hallinan admits. , DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Photos (1 Color)