[11 August] Week 4 Term 3 ends

The school has made itself nationwide well-known this week.

If you watched the TV1's Breakfast programme or 6 o'clock news on Monday you should know what I am talking about. School's cellphone rolltrack system was the NZ's first and this week, there are more schools to adapt this system. I personally don't think how innovative this marking rolls by cellphone is because I don't understand how this system could make a difference to attendance.

It's true our school's poor attendance was improved this year, but I think it's totally as the result make more phone calls and the employment of that "Community liaison", one of my teacher called this “liaison officer” as a "Michel Jackson like" huge man, wandering around school and catch pupils.

In old days to get roll data you have to have a runner to collect information from each class, then manually find each student's contact details, and this could take about half day if situation gets serious. Now with the system all things just happening instantly.

This system, in my perspective, is just like a poor school's computer system. In some rich schools, teachers are just marking their rolls in the computer, because every class just has one or more.

If you would like to know more about this system, here is the site. Our school is its ‘case study’

Lots of bizarre things happened this week, and most people didn't even realise these things.

A group of Chinese principals visited school Thursday this week to see how 'nice' our school is and discussing possibility of things like exchanging students and provide fee paying students.

The most bizarre thing about this is that no one had seen them in the school at all. It's very obvious that the school management is desperately keeping those principals away from pupils. Some people confirm that the principals were possibly in the staff room or library, but it's pretty sure they had no contact to the students from start to the end.

Why those principals were kept away from students? Well you can think about this yourself; assume that they saw Penrose students doing things like ... compare with $10,000 a year per student.

Another even more bizarre thing happened after the principal leaved around the interval, and also not very much people knew this was happening. Two, three or more police cars appeared just about hundred metres from school with flash light on but no sirens; also there was at least one police helicopter in the air. Why this is happening is still unknown as this story didn't even appear in the news but what I understand is a house next to a reserve near our school has been seized, police putted up the yellow type saying things like "keep away" around the house.

I have to say that I didn't see those things happening but there are about three or more teachers and students confirmed the same facts to me.

But, there is something I saw. A policewoman was running possibly from back gate of school to the school office. This is really strange because that policewoman didn't look very serious like a crime is happening, keep your pupils away things, but she's actually smiling.

I'll try to figure this out next week.

We had a ‘special assembly’ this Tuesday and it was a nightmare for some. School has finally decided to provide more ‘healthy’ food and progressively remove the ‘unhealthy’ ones from canteen.

However, that was still a boring assembly. I only heard one thing that interested me: ‘your generation is the first one in history which your life expectancy is actually decreased from last generation.’ Which means, some people, like some people my mind is just thinking at the moment will actually die early.

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