As a primary school teacher you get a certain amount of freedom. Not a heck of a lot by any standard, but some. Of course, when it comes to the actual curriculum, there’s freedom in things like which Roald Dahl book you choose to teach them and the way you go about helping them understand the concept of multiplication and division, but that’s pretty much it. Otherwise you’re stuck with teaching as mandated by the state. Not that that’s a bad thing, just that there’s not a lot wiggle room. But, where there is some wriggle room, you can bet I’m trying my hardest to wiggle.

Some of that comes to excursions. Yes, you have to do things like take the kids to places where they can learn about recycling and the solar system, but there’s also the opportunity to take them to places where they can do more skills based activities. At the moment, I’m trying to convince the school that it’s a good idea to take the kids to an ice skating rink in Melbourne. Okay, so I completely understand that ice skating is a little bit risky in terms of the OH&S involved. I mean, there’s a very, very slight chance one of them could fall and accidently skate over another kid’s fingers, but that’s pretty unlikely. Plus, the school requires parental permission for any type of excursion, so the parents that are worried about it can easily just refuse that permission.

Of course, we’d have to start the trip off with some quick ice skating lessons. Melbourne actually has an ice skating rink located pretty close to the school, so that would make transportation a lot easier, but the fact that we’d have to make sixty kids feel confident on skates is a bit of a worry. I’ve talked to the arena on the phone a couple of times and I’m not even sure they’re confident they can deal with that many children. At the moment, it’s all still a bit of a gamble. I just hope I can work it out.