Catch Up Post 3 - October 16, 2007

I have started to feel more comfortable at school, but still find each day to be a challenge. Even my best students are inconsistent with attendance and their classroom behavior. Our attendance policy is extremely strict - only five unexcused days of absences are allowed, and skipping one class or showing up more than 15 minutes late counts as half a day absent. This has resulted in a bunch of my students landing on the brink of getting kicked out less than halfway through the semester. And if we kept better records, I’m sure the situation would be worse. One of my students was dismissed a week ago after missing class for three weeks – apparently a pregnancy. Then on Monday, I had one of my hardest experiences here. The smartest student in any of my classes, a senior who might actually have a chance to go to CMI (College of the Marshall Islands) and eventually a junior college elsewhere, was told he was being dismissed yesterday. I had no idea this was being considered and found out when I saw him standing outside of class 1st period but refusing to come in. He started crying and told me he was “fired.” Usually, he is a happy and clever student, and something about his demeanor yesterday was just devastating. I came back into class feeling exhausted and demoralized and put my head down on my desk in front of the students – definitely not something a teacher should do here. It was really hard for me to teach lessons during the day for some reason. After talking to a few teachers, I started to reenergize and decided that I will not allow this student to remain dismissed. I spoke to our counselor about it and she agreed that we need to reach out to his parents (who are on another island) and guardian and bring everyone in to school before taking such a drastic action. The situation was a little tough to manage since we don’t really have a Principal right now – since he just got a new job at the Ministry of Finance and is helping us out on an unofficial part-time basis until we get a replacement.
…

The student was allowed back in school yesterday and he is living with a relative of one of the teachers as a guardian. I am a bit worried now that we are being too easy on him though, it seems that treatment of students varies between extremes here sometimes.

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Five of my students have now joined the national band and I am teaching two of them to play the saxophone, which takes a lot of patience but is really fun. I am nearly back to my old skill level and am finally starting to sound pretty good in a lot of our pieces. Band takes a lot out of me every day but I am really happy to be playing again. Plus, it’s great to have a way to interact with students outside of class. The students who give me the hardest time in class are always really happy to see me anywhere else and love to hang out. Whenever they see me on the street they always want to stop and talk and introduce me to their families. In band, they all cling to me like I am an older brother instead of the stern teacher that gave them a detention earlier that day. After school on Tuesday, a bunch of students started taunting me by singing Marshallese love carols outside of my classroom about me and Lisanne, another teacher at my school who was a volunteer last year. Then they hung out with us for a while and we all listened and danced to music from my laptop. It was a ton of fun and completely different from the constant stress I have from interacting with kids in class and keeping them in line. I am always amazed by how different it is spending time with students in real life than it is inside the classroom.

All of the faculty-housing based volunteers finally met our assigned host families last night, it was great. We had a big group potluck / barbeque at the house of one of the families and had our host families revealed to us one by one. I got to meet my host mom and am really excited to spend time with her whole family. She actually has a son that is in college in Hawaii and a grandson in 3rd grade at one of the private schools close to mine, who I am planning on tutoring in math and am excited to get to know.

A ton of other stuff has happened in the last month and a half that I will try to write about at some point soon. Till next week.

Students performing a dance at NVTI's opening ceremony

Some of my students singing during the opening ceremony
Sunset outside my house 1

Sunset outside my house 2
Sunset outside my house 3

Catch Up Post 2 - October 8

Monday, October 08, 2007

I am now in my fifth week of school. Things are really busy here. My typical daily schedule:

6:00 a.m. Get up, wash face, watch the sunrise
6:30 a.m. Go for morning run
7:15 a.m. Get breakfast (bagel), rush to school, prep for class
8:00 a.m. Classes start
Noon Done with classes for day (on mon, wed, fri), lunch (PB&J or Ramen)
1:00 Grade papers, make lesson plans for class and band, run errands
3:30 Head to band practice
4 to 7 Band practice: teach new kids, play with band, instruct wind section
7:30 Dinner (Ramen, Easy Mac, or Rice & beans) / movie / free time / grade more papers (usually the latter)
9:30 Read and sleep

Band is really a major commitment but is probably the most fulfilling thing I do. Nevertheless, it keeps me way busy. Practice is 4-7 Monday through Friday and 3-6 on Saturday. So it is basically a second teaching job. I still think it’s weird sometimes that I managed to create an 11-hour work day in the Marshall Islands.

School is incredibly challenging. The students vary wildly in ability and willingness to work. Two weeks ago, I was reassigned to a new schedule that I really like. I teach English on Monday, Wednesday and Fridays, with 4 hour long classes straight through in the morning. I am always exhausted by the end of fourth period, but it’s great to finish off class by noon. I usually have two hours or so of prep work and grading to get done each day so the schedule works out well. On, Tuesdays and Thursdays, I teach Consumer Math to the same students, with three classes in the morning and one in the afternoon. I was really excited to get this class. The students are in serious need of some practical knowledge about money management. I’m finding teaching the class really difficult so far because I always want to teach important concepts but find that the building blocks are not in place to get there yet. For instance, I wanted to go over different per-hour wages and corresponding salaries, and realized that many of the students could not calculate how many hours a person works in a day or a week. I spent over two classes going over how to tell how many hours are between two times (e.g. 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.) and how to tell how many days to multiply this by to get a weekly hours. We just got through with getting weekly wages, and haven’t even done annual salaries yet. So basically I have to spend a lot of time teaching basic skills and trying to make them intuitive. This is going to be a tough class. I am hoping to teach them how to save money, make a household budget and balance a checkbook by the end of the year.

A week ago, we had a three day weekend with a Friday off for Manit Day, which is basically a Marshallese cultural celebration day. It was pretty typical of my experience in the RMI. The National Band was slated for a performance beginning at 9:00 a.m., so I had to wake up early on a holiday and get to band by 8:00 a.m to help move all the equipment. Once we actually got to the Alele museum, the site of the performance and a bunch of cultural activities, we waited around for a while before playing a few warm-up pieces before anyone came. We had practice for two weeks for the performance and had a set planned that was a little longer than an hour. Starting at 9:30 a.m., a bunch of officials started giving speeches. They were all in Marshallese and I could understand very little of what was said. Each speech lasted at least half an hour, and the speakers just kept on coming. Eventually, the conductor and I agreed to reduce the length of our set since it was getting so late. As the speeches went on, we went from planning a set of 10 songs to 3 songs, and then eventually decided to just play the national anthem. At about 12:30, with people still at the podium, we even decided to scrap the national anthem since all the band members were getting hungry and just went home. After getting all the equipment back to band HQ, I was definitely feeling really disappointed. We had practiced a new set for weeks, set up for the gig way early in the morning, all of the kids got really excited to play in front of everyone, and we ended up just doing some warm-up tunes. After a little moping, I ended up going back to the Alele museum to watch the afternoon performances. Typical of any day here, I went from feeling really low to having a great time. We watched a bunch of performances, I had some good Marshallese food, hung out at a friend’s place that houses both air conditioning and a PS3, and went to the resort for a nice swim in the lagoon and some free happy hour food. I ended the day with a great bike ride through the neighborhoods where I stopped to talk to a bunch of my kids and their friends & family.

The band waiting on Manit Day

My classroom

Students gathered for student government election speeches

My school

Catch Up Post 1 - September 20

I have been doing a terrible job of posting to this blog. I’ve been keeping occasional journal entries, but have not had much chance to get on the internet. I am going to try to post at least once a week from now on, and definitely no less than every two weeks. So here are the catch-up posts from the last month and a half:


Thursday, September 20, 2007

I can’t believe it’s been less than two weeks since my last entry. So much has happened. School started on Monday last week, and has occupied a lot of my time since then. I am teaching English to all the juniors and seniors at my school – the National Vocational Technical Institute (NVTI). The school was founded with a few missions: to provide students who aren’t in the mainstream high school a chance to still learn, and to train ‘alternative-achieving’ students for entering the real world after school (hence, “vocational”). In reality, we do not have much of a vocational program yet. It’s basically a school for students who didn’t score highly on the national test given at the end of 8th grade to all students. Previously, students who didn’t make the cut weren’t offered any chance for an education. Now, they can enter NVTI through our “Pre-9” program and retake the test in a year, and if they pass can continue to 9th grade at Marshall Islands High School (MIHS), which is on the same campus and is the primary high school for the entire country. Students who don’t end up transferring to MIHS stay at NVTI and can graduate with a degree. We are on our way to getting certified and had the first senior class graduate last year.

All of this amounts to a very challenging experience in the classroom. All the students are very eager to learn, but are at a really wide variety of skill levels. Classroom management is definitely a challenge, and I have worked really hard at implementing some classroom discipline and procedures over the first two weeks. Still, there have already been numerous occasions where I think I have gotten every student in class on board with relatively simple tasks, and discover a few have no idea what is going on. I only teach four real classes a day, starting at 8 a.m. and ending at 12:30, After the fourth class, all I have are two periods of prep time and one study hall to monitor, and then I am out of school by 3 or 4. Despite this relatively easy schedule, I usually feel completely drained by the last class. Right now things are being reshuffled and I might end up teaching math as well all afternoon.

One of my saxophones arrived in the mail, and I have started going to National Band practice every day from 4 to 7. I really enjoy playing with the kids. It’s amazing that even though I haven’t sat and played with a band for so long, it still feels natural seven years later. It’s a feeling that I really missed, and at least so far, whenever I feel frustrated in class (i.e. several times a day), I think of playing in band with the kids later in the day.

I bought a bike at the hardware store last week. Riding around here is a lot of fun, but fairly dangerous. There are very, very few people who ride bikes here (I have only seen one Marshallese biker and three or four ribelles), and drivers and pedestrians have absolutely no regard for them. I have almost been hit a few times and one of my roommates was hit by a cab a few days ago. Still, it’s great to ride a bike again, particularly for someone who couldn’t finish off a bike ride two years in a row at the annual Greenhill analyst bike outing. Riding around definitely gives me some of my “island highs.” There is a little neighborhood by us that I usually cut through that is always filled with people on the street, including some of my students and other Marshallese families I have met.

Last weekend, I moved out of faculty housing (“the Dorm”) and into a little house also on the Ministry of Education housing compound on school campus. The Dorm offered a lot of modern conveniences – air conditioning, several layers of security, kitchen appliances and modern plumbing – but I was feeling a bit stifled living with so many Americans and didn’t feel like I was actually living on an island. The house I moved into is really cozy. I am living there with another volunteer – Tim – a really chill guy who is one of the three people from Portland in the program. The house lacks many modern conveniences: there is no air conditioning, the plumbing doesn’t work, all other water uses a pump that can only be turned on for 10 minutes at a time, there are way more bugs, few kitchen appliances, and there is only a tiny wooden door with a flimsy lock securing the place (it was broken into twice last year). However, it’s a great change from my perspective. There is an amazing view of the ocean from my room, and I love falling asleep to the sound and breeze from the water. It feels like an actual house rather than a prison-like compound, and I feel like I am living in a chill island home. Just trying to keep it real I suppose. Hopefully I’ll be able to acclimate to the tropical weather soon.

My new house

New living room and roommate Tim

Bedroom My backyard 1
My backyard 2

Let's Go Band

A lot has happened in the last two weeks. A good number of the outer island volunteers have started heading out on ships, and one of the national planes was finally fixed yesterday. Until now, outer islands volunteers that were determined to get to their islands have been traveling out on cargo ships on trips that can last several days. It is a really grueling experience. They basically sit and sleep on top of the deck crammed in with a bunch of other passengers and have to feed themselves with whatever food they bring on. The ships are really small and bounce around a lot in the Pacific waves. I’ve been really impressed by how brave so many of the volunteers were in deciding to take the ships instead of waiting for the planes to get fixed. One of them even took a boat to Utirik, one of the northern atolls, a trip that was expected to take longer than a week. Intense.

My school is finally starting on Monday. We were supposed to start last week, but had to delay another week for more teachers to be hired and for the school building to finish being renovated. We are still a little short staffed but everyone is going to teach extra classes until more teachers are hired. I was originally planning on teaching math class, but the lack of staff has forced me to become one of the English teachers at my school. It was a bit disappointing to have to change subjects, but I am going try to make the best of it and work hard to help my students.

The island has been a bit chaotic for the last couple of weeks. A large U.S. Navy ship docked in Majuro, and the town was flooded with visiting soldiers. The ship was here for sailors to rest, but also for them to lead a wide variety of humanitarian efforts on island. They also used the ship helicopters to fly over a bunch of Army personnel from the military base on Kwajalein to help. The soldiers even helped to renovate one of our school buildings and were generally much more civil than I had expected. Still, it was a bit strange seeing so many Americans around the island.

The military scheduled a bunch of events while they were here. The ship band played a few concerts, which were a lot of fun to watch, and their basketball team played a bunch of games against a few of the RMI national teams. There was even a rock concert last weekend with one local band from Majuro and one flown in from Kwajalein that a bunch of WorldTeach and military people went to. The bands played all cover songs, and it was fun to listen and dance to some live music. I also saw one of the basketball games, and it was a real spectacle. The crowd was absolutely amazed any time one of the military players blocked a shot or went to dunk the ball, and Marshallese kids flooded the court after the game to embrace the military soldiers. I found myself rooting for the Marshallese teams and was disappointed that we couldn’t pull off a win, the military team ended up winning all the games.

Probably the most random thing that has happened to me here occurred about two weeks ago. I was walking outside the resort hotel in town and heard the sounds of some live concert instruments. I walked across the street and up the stairs into some odd aviary structure, and saw a bunch of Marshallese kids playing in a band. I sat down and watched the rest of the practice, and found out that I apparently was watching the RMI National Band. The band is composed entirely of Marshallese high school students. The conductor is South Korean, and the band is sponsored by the RMI ambassador to South Korea. After the practice, I had a brief conversation with the conductor and the ambassador, and mentioned that I used to play the saxophone. They asked me if I had ever played baritone sax, which I confirmed, and suddenly I found myself given a bari sax and being asked to play it for them. I managed to get out a few notes and they asked me to come help out the band. They let me borrow the sax to practice that night, and I returned to band practice the next day. The ambassador introduced me as a new assistant conductor to the band, and I sight-read a bunch of music during practice. About an hour in, everyone started getting up and going to another room, which I found extremely confusing. I walked over and saw they were all putting on uniforms. I was under the impression that they were trying out new uniforms, but after about 15 minutes I realized they were putting them on for a concert that was apparently happening that evening. I was asked to try one on and the night went on from there. So, on my first full day as an assistant conductor / member of the National Band, I joined them to play at the national government’s welcoming reception for the Navy at the resort across the street. The RMI President and one of the Navy admirals gave speeches, and it was a very formal, diplomatic event. It was a really strange feeling to be sitting up on stage around the podium while everyone delivered their speeches. I found myself again somewhat resenting the American presence in the RMI, and wanting this country to reach a state where it does not need American assistance. Still, I certainly did not refuse the free meal given to the band members after the speeches were over, which was amongst the best food I've eaten in the last two months. I’ve been trying to practice the baritone for the last week on my own, but still have a lot of work to do. I haven’t played sax regularly since high school (seven years ago), and haven’t played baritone since 8th grade. My family is shipping both of my alto saxes from home, so hopefully I will have those soon and will be able to teach students with those. The staff even mentioned trying to bring me on as full-time conductor next year. An Indian-American leading the Marshallese National Band? Absolutely.

Me looking ridiculous in National Band uniform Pic 1

The military band being surrounded by Marshallese kids during basketball halftime. They also played at the high school, the girls literally screamed at them like it was a boy band.

JT, Ajay and the boyz

Me looking ridiculous in National Band uniform Pic 2

Kids grooving at the cover band concert

Pitcherz

The whole WorldTeach group

Laura, a region at the other end of my island

Riding out to Laura with Hannah, Connor and Courtney

Jelter I

Jelter II

Jelter III: The Camp

Jelter IV: Fish on a Stick, kind of

Jelter V: Dan and Marshallese dude doing some fish stuff

End of orientation dinner with Pete and Wang; our trifecta ruled our end of the trailer

The dorm

My new home

My new room

The backyard

The Last Few Weeks

A lot has happened since Practicum. During the last week of orientation, we had an overnight outing to Jelter, one of the outer-island like islands in the Majuro atoll. The island is beautiful and pristine. It was an amazing two days. We spent a lot of time kayaking, snorkeling and just chilling out on the island. I finally learned how to properly husk a coconut, which is a ton of work with the big, fleshy coconuts that have good coconut water. We took a boat out to some coral where there is a crashed bomber in the water from WWII. It was really cool to see, and the coral around there had more fish than I have seen since coming here. It was kind of daunting to get to the fish, since you have to basically float over coral in really shallow water, occasionally grazing against the anemones and pushing off on them with your hands. I saw several schools of really large fish and some small schools of really colorful fish, including some clown fish. On Jelter, we slept in little canopies set up on the ground after laying down some big leaves and putting some sleeping bags over them. The bugs still got to all of us and there was a bunch of rain from showers during the night and in the morning. For some reason, I still ended up sleeping really well. Overall, the overnight trip was one of the best times I’ve had here.

There were a few times during the trip where I definitely felt a little scared in the water. I am apparently not a very strong swimmer anymore, which is kind of ridiculous for living on an island. It’s a little sad that I’m so bad in the water now given that I was a (uncertified) lifeguard at a summer camp. We had little races between all the weak swimmers as a joke, it was pretty fun stuff except for the times I ran out of air and sank like a log. A few times on the trip, I have found myself fairly far out in the ocean with a malfunctioning snorkel and kind of freak out. It’s really kind of eerie snorkeling out in the deep water, it’s just a whole sea of clear blue in front of you with visibility limited to a few feet. Apparently there are also a few sharks around and a couple of guys in the group have run into them; they weren’t fazed, but it would probably give me a panic attack.

After Jelter, we spent a few days more in orientation sessions, and finished with orientation on Friday exactly a week ago. We ended with very end-of-camp style festivities. We had a closing dinner at one of the hotels, and a talent show and dance after dinner. The talent show was great – I was amazed how talented and funny everyone in the group is. I did a little rendition of Abbot & Costello’s “Who’s on First” with Rachel as a homage to summer camps gone by. We slacked off on preparing for the act, and ended up memorizing nearly the whole script the day of the show. Rachel has some experience acting and is part of an improv comedy group back home, which was definitely useful. At seven pages, the script was surprisingly long and actually a really hard act to memorize because of the all short lines and cues. We even tried to add a few improv sections of our own and included a Marshall Islands spin to the act by pretending it was a phone conversation with me calling her on an outer island. The act went well enough, and I am still impressed that we memorized it all in so short of a time. We all went out drinking after the end-of-orientation dinner and had a blast. We hung out by the water, sang a bunch of karaoke and all ended up at The Pub dancing till early in the morning. It was a great way to send everybody off.

The next day, 10 of us moved into faculty housing ("the dorm") on the school campus that includes two high schools and a middle school that most of my roommates are teaching at. It was really weird taking my first real shower in a month (though still with cold water) and sleeping on a real bed instead of a mat. Some of my roommates have already started school and everyone else is trying to find something else to do. Unfortunately, my school doesn’t start until September 3rd at the earliest. I have dropped by the building a few times to help set up the school, but there isn’t too much to do. Apparently, some of the teachers who were supposed to come to the school are at other schools, so right now we only have 3 out of 8 teachers (two of whom are WorldTeach). I’ve been keeping myself busy by fixing up the dorm and wandering around town. I am supposed to volunteer with a vet clinic next week, which I am really looking forward to. We are basically going to go around and capture a bunch of dogs. The dogs here are absolutely insane and I have already been chased several times - I'll provide some more detail in another post.

All of the volunteers on the outer islands were supposed to ship off this week. Some of them have left, but most are still here (a bunch are crashing in the dorm with us). There are two planes in the Marshall Islands used for inter-island transport, and as of now both of them are down. It’s pretty much a national crisis at this point since the only other way to move people or supplies are on a few ships that take a really long time. Apparently a bunch of wealthy tourists are stuck on Bikini atoll up north after one of the chartered scuba trips and a bunch more are stuck here in Majuro waiting to go to Bikini. It's a pretty bad situation given the economic hope that the Marshall Islands might at least emerge as a niche scuba adventure tourist spot. The government is looking into chartering a plane from Fiji to get back the tourists and help out with emergency situations. Some of the volunteers might take ships out to their islands, but a lot of the trips would take 4 days or more, which is a really tough thing on tiny cargo ships. It looks like it might be a while before all of our volunteers actually ship out to the outer islands. If anyone has a spare airplane engine, definitely send it over. Over and out.

Catch Up - Teaching Camp

This is a journal entry I wrote a few weeks ago, during the third week of orientation, but didn't get to post until now:

I just finished our second day of Practicum, a sort of summer camp World Teach holds for teaching kids and practicing lessons before the actual school year starts. My first day teaching actually went really well. I had prepped for a long time, reading a bunch and spending over three hours making maps for the unit I am doing (Geography). Our class was supposed to be a bunch of 8th graders, but it rained a lot on Tuesday and very few students showed up. We ended up with two 12th graders we stole from another class, who are apparently two of the best students on the Marshall Islands. They are both really smart girls, but definitely lack a lot of the knowledge star students in an American high school would have. We spent all of class identifying continent shapes (which were amazingly hard to trace and cut out) and putting them up on a globe and guessing their names. The girls had some concept of most of this, but struggled with a lot of the details. I found it very interesting that they could immediately identify all of the world’s oceans (a task I probably could not have accomplished before yesterday) but struggled to recall the names and/or locations of most countries. I guess that is what is to be expected in such a water-driven culture. The students couldn’t name any country in Asia besides China and had no idea where any country is located, which I thought was crazy for such bright kids, but I guess it is something that is just not taught here.

After the first session on Tuesday, I spent three or four hours prepping for today’s lesson and felt really prepared. However, today ended up as a much more difficult session than yesterday. I was trying to teach hemispheres and time zones, but overestimated the students’ prior knowledge. I basically spent all of class reviewing the locations of the continents and trying to explain why different parts of the world are different times. I forgot to bring balls to explain how the earth revolves around the Sun and it was way too abstract of a concept to explain in the short amount of time I had allocated. The class was supposed to focus on an activity / game I had created for learning time zones, but the students definitely were not ready for it. Overall it was a pretty exasperating class and I am wondering if I should repeat the lesson tomorrow or just accept that it was a bust.

-- I ended up having much more success with my last two days of class and was really glad to have spent the week teaching some of the best students in the country. It was a good chance to prepare for what I’m sure will be a very challenging year.