Not knowing

How do you learn your way into something? How do you get a sense of the system, the politics, the picture before you? And what if you can’t see the picture itself?

I’m trying to understand New Zealand educational systems, and I’m doing it by reading working papers and reports and descriptions of things. Most of what I’m reading so far comes from various governmental departments. I don’t even have a sense of which governmental departments are responsible for which things yet—or even which departments even exist. It’s a system that is deceptively similar to the system I know, similar enough so that a paragraph of context at a bit of a research article would have me feeling like I knew what was going on. But a deeper layer in lets me know that I don’t actually know what’s going on, that my initial thoughts and assumptions about how things are connected and why are likely to be wrong.

I think, in fact, that that’s one of the most confusing things about relocating to a place like New Zealand. There are some things that are so profoundly familiar and it’s so easy to hang on to those things and believe that now I understand them. Then there are the pieces that seem to have a different name for things but ultimately the insides are the same. Togs are the same thing as a bathing-suit. Jandals are the same thing as flip-flops (which is less jarring than the Aussie word for flip-flops, “thongs”). But national curriculum or national standardised tests are not the same from place to place. Neither are “normal schools” I’ve just learnt. Here’s a useful lesson: Normal schools in the US are places where teachers are trained. They’ve now been absorbed by universities or renamed or whatever, and now they exist mostly in history (SUNY Geneseo was once a Normal School, etc.). Normal schools here are also used in teacher training and also a bit of an oldish term, except they still exist. Here’s where it’s interesting: these “normal schools” are totally different in this context than they are in the US. They are not actually teacher education schools, but rather (what we would call) K-12 schools where teachers do (or used to do) their practice teaching. This is something like what we would have called a “lab school” except those mostly don’t exist in the US at all any more, and the normal schools here aren’t so lab-like as they were supposed to be in the US (it may be that the lab schools in the US mostly weren’t as lab-like as they were supposed to be, either). This is a tangent, but it’s also an example of how it is to learn your way into a system that is both similar and different. Everything I’ve read that has mentioned “normal schools” I now know I didn’t actually understand. Geeze.

I think it’s probably true that my being outside the NZ system will be a benefit as my brain expands and I learn to question things in US education that once looked just like The Way Things Are. And it’s likely true that because I’m an outsider, I’ll be able to look in to this system and help people inside it question things they might not have seen. At the same time, right now I just feel so stupid all the time. I don’t know anything, really, in large part because I don’t know what I don’t know. The normal schools thing just came up in passing—not a question I would have asked. How many more things will I find that have the same name but with profoundly different meanings—or the same general meaning in a profoundly different context? So here, in my second week in this office (although only my 4th day, since I’m here so seldom), I’m not even beginning to learn about what I need to learn about. I’m sitting here on a windy and chilly day thinking about what it takes to learn about things I don’t know how to learn about.

Last night at the park, Naomi and I sat on the swings and talked. She’s nervous about going back to school next week, in part because there will be placement tests that will determine which level she’s in. In a school without clear grade level divisions (she’ll be in a class with kids a year older and a year younger as well as kids her age), this kind of what we would call “ability grouping” or “tracking” is the way they determine which teachers the kids have and in which groups they’re placed for a variety of subjects. Naomi has been worried about maths (which she now pronounces with the s on the end) and has been wanting to be given worksheets for practice work (right now she’s keen to learn algebra for reasons that escape me). Last night she confided that she didn’t actually know what the subject “literacy” meant. I explained and she got it: “ah, English and language arts.” And she seemed to think that she knew how to handle that. But then, thinking it over, she realised that she might be fine in maths and she might be fine in literacy, but she was in big trouble in social studies—because it’s a whole different social they’re studying. And we sat and realised we have no idea what things will be like for her in science—will that be more local or more general? How much science is local, and how much general? How do you go about learning about what you don’t know you don’t know?

Coming back to the office from lunch, I stopped by the library to get books about New Zealand education. With the load heavy in my hands, I left the building and found myself in the middle of a parade: the “sevens” have come to town. This, for those of you who don’t know (which I’m assuming is everyone), is a gathering of a certain kind of international rugby game, the kind that plays with seven on a side (as opposed to the other kind, which must play with a different number of people on a side). Today the international set of teams came to Wellington and marked their arrival with a parade. This parade snaked through the middle of the city, holding up traffic and generally making a mess of things as people stood by the sidelines and yelled. I saw the floats for Argentina, Papua New Guinea, and then for the US. For a reason I absolutely don’t understand, my eyes filled with tears at the sight of the US flag flying—even though the US flag and what it has come to stand for in the world generally depresses me. And I looked at the team of handsome men in the float, black and white, smiling and waving, and I thought, “Those are Americans!” This is absurd, since I live in a house full of north Americans, often visit with Trish and Marianne (who grew up in California), and Marianne’s WWOOFERs (http://www.wwoof.co.nz/staying) with her who are also often from the US. Generally there are more folks from the US than from NZ at our dinner table. But still, for some reason, the back-of-my-mind, gut reaction, was this longing to talk to the men in the float (it probably didn’t hurt that they were cute). I’ll have to figure out what that means somehow…

So, there’s lots to learn in the internal and the external landscape. So what else is new.