New Insights and Information from Conversation Partners

     My conversation partners, Claudio (Claude) and Mary have been super helpful enlightening me about the educational systems in their respective countries if Benin, Africa and Christchurch, located on the South Island of New Zealand. Claude grew up in the town of Portonovo, which means new port named after the city of Porto in Portugal. People form Portugal discovered Portonovo and thought it looked like their city of Porto. Claude works 18 hours per week teaching English in a public school where he works as a civil servant. He also teaches French (the native language of Benin) in a private school. In Benin there is a nation-wide program called “Education For All”, a subsidy granted by the government to both public and private schools. “However, that subsidy is insufficient to such an extent that some schools lack enough classrooms. Some international donors often come for help with furniture supply. Besides, there is shortage of school materials namely books for students. The government just send some in the schools and the principal of schools give out to teachers. Then the students are to pay money to photocopy the whole book. Some students' parents often lack money for photocopying the book. As a consequence, some teachers expel the students from their class. For my sake, i never expel my students. when there is a student with a book on a table, i usually tell the student without the book to use it with his neighbour with the book.  Moreover, the government doesn't provide the classrooms with computer. This is one of a major issues we, EFL teachers are confronted with here. Adding to that, the students have no grounding about computer” (Claudio, 2011). Claude explained that the government does not support early childhood education. UNICEF is actively working with young children in his country.
     Mary explained that poverty is rampant in New Zealand and on the rise. Food is very expensive and there is a Government Sales Tax on everything. Health care is free and there are lots of benefits for people with children as well as those unemployed or suffering from disabilities that prevent them from working (Mary, 2011). “Schools here are labeled so to speak according the area they are located in and how well the people in the neighbourhood around the school are doing economically. For example, my school is located in a well to do area where housing prices are high and the median income of the area around the school is quite high. Schools are rated on a decile scale from 1(lowest) to 10(highest). My school is a decile 9. This means that most of the children there come from families where income is high, education is highly regarded and this rating gives the school has a good reputation. However the bad side of this is that because the school has a high decile rating with supportive parents who are able to help out financially when asked to, the government limits the operational funding of the school. My school has to find funding every year to pay for the numerous teachers' aides that we have. There are lots of students with high needs and the number increases every year. The school also has to find ways to buy computers and find the extra funds to send teachers on professional development courses. Decile 1 schools receive lots of funding from the government because the school population cannot afford to help out the schools when they need more money for things. The children are fed breakfast every day and the school helps families to pay for school uniforms. I think that the decile ratings of schools automatically make people label the school and have a pre-determined idea of what the school's population may look like. Test results are not used to label the school as performing or not performing up to standards as I believe they are in the US (Mary, 2011). 
     Early childhood programmes here in New Zealand receive lots of government funding for now. The previous Labour government(which was more to the left) granted every child 20 hours of free childcare as soon as the child turned 3. I volunteered to pay an additional fee per hour to ensure that my daughter’s preschool teachers get to have release time for professional development and that they get to hire extra teachers to help out and to ensure that they hire qualified teachers who have specifically trained as Early Childhood teachers. The current National kept the 20 hours of free childcare, however believes that the early childhood centres don't need to have teachers on their staff who are all qualified to teach Early Childhood that they can have some teachers who have no training at all. They undervalue the profession of Early Childhood teachers” (Mary, 2011).
      The more I learn about Benin, the more I admire Claude for his drive and persistence in obtaining an education at a university and his dedication to the teaching field. He explained that when he explained email to his fourth grade class that, “ they are astonished when i tell them that one can send a message to a person living thousands of miles away and have answer back within a couple of minute when the correspondent is connected” (Claudio, 2011). In Christchurch, Mary experiences diversity in much the same way as in the US. “NZ has had a huge influx of Asian immigrants in the past 20 years and had to adapt quickly to accommodate their needs” (Mary, 2011).

References

Mary, (9/2011). Retrieved from personal e-mail.
Claudio, (9/2011). Retrieved from personal e-mail