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.

…

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