We’re shifting flats and my stepdaughter found today’s picture – it’s a class picture of her in primary school. Danielle is the blonde in the front row, she laughed when she showed me the picture because there was some kind of fiasco a few weeks beforehand and her dad had to cut her hair so it was just growing back.
New Zealand’s school system is a bit different from the U.S. but there are a lot of similarities too. NZ has primary (what I would call elementary), intermediate (middle school or junior high in the U.S.) and secondary school (high school). To make it confusing, they sometimes call their secondary schools ‘college’ and sometimes ‘college’ means a university-level school. Danielle attended Otumoetai College in Tauranga as secondary school for example.
I’ll post more about education in the future but I especially loved this picture because of the shoes — or lack thereof! I wrote about the Kiwi affection for going shoe-less early on in my blog but I still laughed when I saw that NONE of the kids in the class picture had on shoes. Some of the ones in the rows you can’t see well have socks on but I don’t see any shoes except on the teachers! You may note that everyone has on long sleeves and some are wearing jackets so I am guessing it wasn’t even summer time.
Wendy's Gone Walkabout 