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.
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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