9/2/07
It’s been over a week without any blogs. That is not because things aren’t happening. It’s because too many things are happening. And because there is never power. And when there is power, the internet never works. So… I do it when I can.
The day after I wrote the last blog, the second day of school, school was cancelled because the schedule was not working and because the vice principal decided he wasn’t going to work. The next day, Friday, was the first real, complete, day of school. I talked about rules to 5 silent classrooms.
Last week, however, was a different story. I started out -- wait, I just want to pause for a second to say that I am sitting outside the locked school right now trying to tap into its “wireless” and two dogs are drooling all over my laptop and a kitten just jumped into my lap and another one is sticking its entire face into my pocket. Ok, so I started out the school week talking about rules in the classroom, which they seemed to be okay with, then moved on to covering chapter 1 in both of the textbooks I had been given – chemistry for my chem/physics 11th graders, and biology for my 10th graders. This was not a well thought out plan. I have no curriculum, so I can cover anything I want, and the teacher last year just listed out all of the chapters she thought I should cover. Unfortunately, these kids are in no way equipped to read, comprehend, or even physically use American textbooks, or textbooks at all for that matter, so they are pretty much a waste of space. The academic level is about 5th or 6th grade, but the problem, as one of the veteran American teachers here put it to me, is that they were never taught elementary procedures – like how to wait patiently and hand in your worksheet one at a time at the end of the class instead of all throwing your worksheets at him at the end of the class as your trample anyone and everything running out the door as soon as the hammer hits the rusted oxygen tank (the bell). So, while I am trying to do a unit on scientific measurement, it might be more useful to just practice basic procedures. Lab groups were a disaster. I set up measuring stations for mass, volume, time, temperature, and length (even though I have no thermometer and they broke the scale on the first day), but they would shout “FINISHED MISTAA” every time they wanted to move onto the next station and then would just wander around the class distracting other people. So, I have already had to lay down the law a few times and given kids the option to leave my classroom if they wanted to continue talking, singing, dancing, or whatever it was that they were doing. The problem is they all have a language that they can speak to each other in that I don’t understand, so it makes monitoring the groups really difficult. Demonstrations rather than labs may be a prominent feature in my teaching.
In terms of housing and all that fun stuff – it has been chaos. Our principal is still not on the atoll, so Laura runs the school. The problem is, the ministry of education decided they didn’t want Laura to be the guidance counselor this year, and so they hired one who hasn’t arrived yet, but if he comes, Laura is quitting – she hasn’t gotten a paycheck for the last 3 months already. And if Laura quits, so does our principal. To make things more interesting, we were grocery shopping in Ebeye last week and ran into a white guy, and so we asked him what he was doing. He said he had just flown in, and was supposed to teach at the high school on guegeegue. Hm… so, this other guy, Tristan, who no one was told was coming (it wasn’t through worldteach) just kind of showed up, and is now sleeping on my couch. And oh, by the way, his wife is coming soon, and they were promised a place of their own. Staci, my real housemate, finally got here yesterday, so Boomer, Ashley, Alex, and Connor are all crammed into housing meant for 2 without a working stove. Also, my house is a sauna without air conditioning, and while they have promised to come fix it about 4 times now, no progress has been made. I would leave the doors open but the mosquitoes think I’m tasty.
To de-stress yesterday I went spearfishing with Connor – I didn’t catch any fish, but I wasn’t really trying (we already had a dinner thing to go to so there wasn’t really a reason to kill anything). Connor, however, did catch a fish, and so while he swam the 40 yards back to shore to drop it off (Marshallese people just tie them around their wastes with hanger wires), I looked up after diving down about 20 feet and was about 15 feet away from a 4 foot whitetip reef shark. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before, and they aren’t dangerous unless you are bleeding or have a bleeding fish tied around your waste, but for that half a second where you don’t know what kind of shark it is, especially if you are alone, it’s petrifying.