Traffic Wardens and School: A Different World

Walking to school to pick up my sons, and I pass a traffic warden, waving a piece of paper and arguing with a mother. Nothing odd in that, the ticket-crazy habits of traffic wardens are enough to raise fury in anyone, in any culture, I think. The argument is loud, and it is about the precise point at which the pavement becomes a drop-down kerb. My sympathies lie with the harassed mum, until the traffic warden says, wearily and loudly, "Look, will you just move your car, because otherwise I will have to GIVE YOU A TICKET, do you understand?"
I do a double-take. Fuck me, this traffic warden is offering her the chance to avoid a ticket? Is this country for real? Did I miss New Zealand and arrive in Fairyland by mistake?

"I'm sorry, this apple has too much taste."

Moving here from England meant new food, and it also meant losing school dinners. This was not a problem for my middle son, who is hyposensitive to taste and will eat almost anything. Actually, that's not strictly true. In recent months he has developed strong aversions to food that he considers he is eating too often, like lentils, when I was trying to use up the lentils before leaving England, and potatoes, this week when I have a huge sack of potatoes that will go off if we don't use them. If we suddenly had a glut of sweeties and chocolate, no doubt he would take a militant dislike to them too. But packed lunches are pretty manageable. The introduction of packed lunches, however, is a complete nightmare for my oldest, who has very pronounced and eccentric food preferences that change with the wind.

We've done a lot of work on this and now he will try most things, he will eat cooked food well as long as he understands what is in the recipe. But snacks are still difficult. We have near-daily conversations of this kind:
"Can I have some bread and jam? No margarine. Or butter."
"Sure. Here. No butter or margarine."
(intake of breath) "You CAN'T give me bread with that jam on it, you know I don't like it!"
"But you liked it yesterday. You wanted more."
"You know I hate it! You did it on purpose! It is HORRIBLE!"
"Er - "

Blood, Politics and Special Educational Needs: My First Waitangi Day

Today was a NZ public holiday, to celebrate the nineteenth-century Maori-English Treaty of Waitangi that ended the Maori Wars: or to celebrate the twentieth-century New Zealand noticing that this treaty had been comprehensively ignored, and doing its best to rectify matters belatedly: or to celebrate the twenty-first-century New Zealand: or to protest against it all, depending on what newspaper article you read.

We watched the news the day before, where Maori protestors chased Prime Minister John Keys chased off a marae where he was due to meet with Maori leaders. Police and protestors clashed violently, and the camera showed one protestor with blood pouring down his head. "Oh, don't worry, I'm fine," he said to the camera, in a fine demonstration of the famous Kiwi laidback mentality: in Britain the protestor would have been pointing at the blood yelling "Look what this Tory/Labour/Fascist dictatorship has done to me!" Coming from England, where riots involve burning buildings and shootings, this all seemed too gentlemanly to be true. The police had no riot shields, and their method of crowd control seemed to be to hold hands in a field dotted sparsely with protestors, asking them if they would move back in the manner of a weary farmer trying to get tourists off his land before they disturbed the ubiquitous New Zealand sheep, whose field it undoubtedly was.

Because children are not crisp packets: why I prefer inexperienced teachers

So I said to a teacher friend, that I suspected there was a generational aspect at play in the problems we had encountered at kindy. The thing is, the kindy teachers are good at their job. They are well respected in their community. Like many schools who are abysmal with SN, they have a great reputation with neurotypical kids. So - rather than assuming there is a black hole in their heads where the word "developmental disability" is concerned and into which all empathy and intelligence disappears without trace - I am guessing that they are not fully up to date with research into autism, special needs, developmental delay and the like.

My teacher friend was surprised that I found the older generation of teachers to be less helpful. She said that in her view that it is better to have an elderly, experienced teacher who has vast experience of kids than a new graduate with lots of book-knowledge but little expertise in teaching yet. I couldn't agree more - except where Special and Developmental Needs is concerned. It took me several days to work out why I thought this, because it was the opposite of common sense, surely? I mean, everyone knows that the more experience the better?
It's a bit like crisps. Which I am missing, a bit, discovering how much poorer the range of "chips," as they call them here is, than in England. They have them, but they are expensive. I mean, how can an English-speaking country not recognise the importance of cheapo prawn cocktail, sour cream and chive and salt and vinegar on every corner? What do New Zealand parents DO with their whingy children, if they can't nip down to the corner shop and have an argument about which is better, barbeque sauce or tomato ketchup flavour? I digress. Anyway...

Unprepared: volcanoes and small children

We do not live in a very hip and happening suburb. On a Friday evening there is a choice of Pak'N'Save (discount supermarket), a bar promising me GIRLS ONSTAGE, and the late-night closing of our local library. So the library it was. I am currently working my way through the children's New Zealand geography section. There I found a book marked 'Volcanoes.' Leafing through casually, I read with some alarm that our city was in a particularly volcanically active area. All those beautiful shore views of extinct volcanos, I now realise, are not actually extinct at all. They're dormant, or even active. They could go off at any moment. The book had an inset into this page remarking how important it was - for all residents of New Zealand, but PARTICULARLY those living in our area - to have a full disaster survival kit in the house at all times. Hmm. Funny how the estate agents neglected to mention this.

When the carer support and respite woman came yesterday, I had an experience that was somewhat equivalent to discovering that the green and pleasant landscape into which you have just embedded your family and your lifesavings is a seething mass of unstable volcanic activity.

I'm sorry, I don't understand, what do you mean, you don't want a cup of tea?

So today the respite and carers' support woman came to visit. "Do you want a cup of tea?" I said as she arrived, automatically moving towards the kettle. "Oh no, no thank you," she said, and, as I looked a bit puzzled, added "I've just had breakfast."

Fair enough, I thought. Although a bit spartan, surely no one really refuses tea because they have just eaten, surely? Anyway, we started our meeting, which I had been pre-warned would be a marathon (it took three hours, in the end, which was shorter than expected). After about an hour, I asked again. "Would you like some tea now?" "No, no it's fine," she said, and carried on talking. I looked at her dubiously. My mind is still running on science fiction. Was this perhaps some robot impersonating a human being? Or if not, and she was for real, did this mean bad things for my assessment, could a woman who could refuse tea really understand the challenges of life with three differently abled children, I mean if she didn't need tea then what else didn't she need? Oxygen? Sleep? After a few minutes' thought, I realised dimly that possibly this was a cultural difference rather than a REALLY WEIRD PERSON WHO OUGHT NOT TO BE IN MY HOUSE - and then, thinking about it, realised that everyone who had accepted a cup of tea on arrival came from Europe or the UK. (Except the South Africans, who wanted rooibos). New Zealanders, they just don't do tea in quite the same ubiquitous way.

The culture shock didn't stop there.

"But you have to park properly:" Battlestar Galactica at the Kindy

At the weekend my husband showed me the first episode of Battlestar Galactica. I lasted for about twenty minutes, until it became obvious that the entire human race was about to be wiped out in a nuclear attack. I decided from behind my cushion that there were better ways to spend an evening. Because I am a wimp, I spent the next twelve hours waking fitfully, looking at my husband lying beside me and wondering if possibly he was a well-designed robot from another hostile civilisation, which would at least explain his telly addiction, possibly these robots need to remain constantly attached to remote controls to survive. These robots look like people, but underneath they are all machine and no heart. (That's the first episode at least, Wikipedia tells me it gets more complex later, after a sleepless night I am in no mood to find out more)
I am glad I didn't have today's kindy conversation straight after viewing Battleship Galactica, because if so I might have just run screaming into the road shouting "They ARE coming to get us! Save yourselves! The nuclear holocaust is coming! Do not listen to a word they say, they are inhuman machines!" and other sentiments that do not tend to help maintain a constructive working relationship.