Journal for hvietmei

Alright, I’m going to try to avoid deleting this entry!

Here I am in Alice Springs! I got in early this afternoon and I’ll be able to relax here (and maybe even get a little studying done) tomorrow before heading out on my camping/hostel-hopping trip across the outback. My hostel here is quite lovely. I’m sharing a room with seven other girls from across the globe, the room is very clean and has a cool tile floor, and we have our own bathroom which is also very clean and nice. The town itself is nice and small, and the main drag is really cute. Overall, not a bad place to chill out for a day and a half between busy days.

So, to backtrack and fill in some details about Victoria:

The Great Ocean Road was a long day of driving in a fairly steady drizzle, but I think it was worth it. The rock formations and the many beaches, each with its own character and type of sand, were fascinating. One of the coolest things about the rock formations is the way they like to remind us that they are temporary: there are actually only eight stacks in the “twelve apostles” because four have fallen into the ocean since the formation was named, and the “London bridge” now only has one arch and is no longer connected to the shore. Most of the rock in the area is limestone rather than sandstone, so that was also an interesting change.

It was also really cool to see the Victoria countryside. I was actually surprised how much it really does look like some kind of idyllic pastoral landscape. A lot of my pictures are of expansive, rolling, green hills. I can see why Europeans were so excited about it when they first saw it. Even though the conditions aren’t as much like those “back home” as those explorers thought, it does seem to give that illusion.

The Grampians were amazing even in the rain, but I was glad that it stopped raining by the end of the day. It started raining about five minute into our first short bushwalk. This was fine with me and with the cool Canadian woman I was walking with, but I felt bad for some of our fellow travelers who were from warmer climates and weren’t really dressed for bushwalking at all, much less bushwalking in the rain. Oh, well, no one melted. After that, we got to dry off by visiting an Aboriginal cultural center, which was really well thought-out and designed to bring the viewer through the history of the people of the region up to the present, addressing everything from Dreamtime legends to the “lost generations” of Aboriginal children who were kidnapped from their families as recently as the middle of the twentieth century, to the current challenges and disadvantages Aboriginal people face in Australia. By then, it had at least stopped raining although it was still overcast. We went to see this not very intense but very pretty waterfall, and then headed up to the “peak” that I mentioned before to look out over lovely rolling hills just before sunset.

I had a really interesting conversation with the Canadian woman I mentioned during our rainy bushwalk. She is a high school home economics teacher who is here for a year on a teacher exchange that works much like a student exchange. What was interesting was that she sees some huge differences between the Australian secondary education system and the model we agreed predominates in both of our North American countries. She’s actually very frustrated with the way high schools work here. Apparently, the kids are much less respectful towards their teachers to the extent that she feels like she has to raise her voice or even yell consistently just to keep their attention, a practice she says the other teachers take for granted. She says that her school is a slightly poorer area of Sydney, but that she has been hearing the same kinds of things from other Canadian teachers all across Australia. She was even more frustrated with the fact that each class is always graded on a curve. And not the kind of modified curve teachers in the US sometimes use, but an actual bell curve : 10% of students always get the equivalent of a D to and F even if the whole class is full of over-achievers, and 10% of students get an A even if no one ever turns in their homework. I don’t understand why they would choose to do things this way, and it seems like this may be the reason for the overall under achievement this teacher noticed. If all you have to do is not be the slowest person in the class, why bother pushing yourself to do your personal best? Does this system make sense to anyone reading this blog? Maybe someone can explain it to me.

Those are pretty much my adventures so far! I’ll be staying at hostels on two nights in the middle of my camping trip, so I’ll try to post updates then.