Day 12 and 13

January 12, 2010

 

Days 12 and 13:

 

            Today’s entry is about the last two days. Sorry, I’ve been slacking but all of my spare time the last two days has been dedicated to lesson planning.

            Yesterday, morning I woke up and made some good old Jimmy Dean’s sausage. Ben said he had never had sausage patties like that before so I made him some. He made some scrambled eggs just as usual and we had sausage and eggs. It reminded me of being back home.

            At school, things went great. I taught the kids which word order to use when asking a question in the present progressive. After school, it was the first day of play rehearsal with an established cast. Being that, I’m not terribly involved with the text or acting in the play, I was excused to leave. I left school, went to the resort for some internet and a voluptuous burger for lunch. I had nothing to do when I got back to the apartment so I worked on lesson planning for today’s class. I looked through the book and decided that it would be VERY hard to teach these kids how to form these questions. I asked Professor Garrod to help me out with the lesson plan, he led me in the right direction and I was pretty comfortable with the lesson that I had planned. Professor Garrod also informed me that he wanted to come observe me in class today. I advised him that today would not be a good class to observe but he insisted. So I acquiesced.

            I was pretty restless sleeping last night, I woke up several times with random things on my mind. I’ve had a series of dreams the last week or so that all involve prominent athletes that I’ve been in contact with over the last year or so: Greg Oden, Dwight Howard, Mike Conley, Chad Ocho Cinco. I even had a couple dreams about college athletes like my cousin DeVier Posey and Dartmouth grad Alex Barnett. I’m not sure what they mean yet, I’m still playing Freud and trying to figure all of that out.

            Anyway, I woke up about 6 and laid in bed until 6:30. I made some more sausage and just ate it with syrup this time. No eggs. I got ready for school and proceeded to catch a taxi to school. It took us about 15 minutes to catch a taxi when it usually takes about three minutes tops. The only good thing about that was that we had walked far enough down the street as we tried to flag down taxis, that we saved ourselves $.50 by getting picked up on the other side of the bridge. Edie and Anna were with me in this particular taxi and we picked up a Chinese man a little further down from where we got picked up. When the driver pulled off to the side to pick him up he asked Edie and Anna to squeeze together in the back to make room for him. In case you don’t already know, the taxi system here works where the drivers drive and they pick up who ever flags them down. If that’s only one person, the next three people to flag him down will get into the taxi as well and then they’ll just alert him when to pull over. It’s more like an American public bus system except there are no bus stops. Everywhere is a bus stop. Anyway, the driver pulls over to pick this man up, and after he asked Edie and Anna to make room, I heard him under his breath say “This fucking Chinese”. Now, I had been warned of the Marshallese resentment of Chinese but this was definitely my first encounter of this kind. I knew the Marshallese don’t really care for the Chinese because they move onto the island buy out their businesses and then send their money back to China. Also, the only brothel on the island is a Chinese owned brothel. I just thought that was an interesting interaction and one that I had never before witnessed.

When I finally got to school I was greeted by adolescent giggles from the girls and head nods from the guys. I went in to the teacher’s lounge and began typing up the lesson plan so that I could print it for Teacher Terry. She had warned me that she needed Principle Lenja to approve the lesson plans for her classes at least once a week. I gave her Monday – Wednesday lesson plans and they were signed off on in minutes. I sat around for a few more minutes in the teacher’s lounge until Professor Garrod came. I then walked him into the classroom and showed him where he could sit and explained some of the things on my lesson plan. Then class started, of course it was late because half of the class was still straggling in from recess, but gathering the troops is Terry’s job not mine. Whatever. I started the class and I felt like everything went well. I had put a lot of work into the lesson plan and, although there were many steps to my lesson, there was a “method to my madness” (to throw in  a Hamlet reference). By the end of the class the kids understood the object of the sentence and how to form questions when the questioning word (who, what) is the subject. Garrod informed me that we would talk about class later and then he left. My fourth period class also went well. While my fourth period class isn’t as intelligent as my third period, they are much more enthusiastic overall. I think it’s because that’s the class right before their lunch. Anyway it was a good day in the classroom.

After class I went to the high school to use their internet and mingle with some of the other teachers. The internet was slow so it took me quite a while to check Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo Mail. After that I was pretty drained from academia, I felt very much like I often do at Dartmouth actually, so to change the pace, I decided to sketch some drawings in my notebook. After that got old, I went to the resort for some chicken wings and basketball and then headed back to the apartment.

When I got to the apartment there wasn’t much going on. After a while Eric, Ben, Robyn, Derek and I decided to play Bananagrams. It was quite the experience. Especially when Ben got excited about picking another letter and jumped up from his chair. When he sat back down in his chair, the back right leg of the chair just snapped a the seat. So the next thing I know, Ben’s chin is rested on the porch table and his face was at a weird transitioning place between excitement of having great words to play and the fear of a short free fall. It was HILARIOUS!!! Needless to say, that was the end of the game, we couldn’t focus on being creative after that.

Edie and Ally made a delicious pasta sauce of tomatoes, onions, peppers and some special spices. We put it over spaghetti noodles and matched it up with spinach and it was great. It was the first time I’ve been full since I’ve been here. After that we had a discussion about our housing situation which, even on Day 12, we still haven’t resolved. For those of you unfamiliar with the situation, right now the ten of us (the 9 undergraduates and Professor Garrod) are living in an apartment that is owned by a friend of Anna Zalinsky, the field director. The Minister of Education (MOE) was supposed to have housing prepared for us by the time we got here, but in perfect Marshallese fashion, it wasn’t done. So we stay here at “Scott’s House” as the whole island knows it, as we wait for the trailers to be fixed up. The trailers are actually on the campus of the schools which is great because we won’t have to taxi to school anymore. We can just walk out the door and go to class. That kind of sucks for Eric and Ally because they work at the Elementary school which is about a 30 minute walk from where we are now, but they’ll just have to deal with it. Well, next to the trailers are the dormitories and in the dormitories is where the World Teach and Dartmouth grad teachers live. The dorms are the worst living conditions Garrod’s ever seen. They’ve complained about roaches, rat dropping all over the place, leaking air conditioners and a few have even reported waking up to rats in the kitchen sink on several occasions. Not at all suitable living conditions. So clearly, they should be housed in nicer accommodations. Well some parents of some of the Dartmouth teachers have been pushing Garrod and the MOE to get them nicer housing. The only available housing is the trailers that we’re supposed to be moving in which even still aren’t done. So now we know that the grad students get dibs on the trailers and we’ll have to make do with what’s left. The problem is that the grad students want a room to themselves and their own bathroom which they currently have in the dorms. If you ask me, beggars can’t be choosers. Either live with the rats and shut up about it because you have your own shower, or maybe share a room with someone else and a bathroom and not have to worry about whiskers tickling your feet at night. Okay, it’s not that serious they haven’t encountered any rodents during their sleep as far as I know but that’s just the point I’m getting at. And for those worried, the trailers are much nicer than the dorms. They are currently being renovated and so they’ll have new A/C units, and any existing holes will have been patched up and resealed before anyone moves into them.

So we debated the possibilities of our living situation at dinner which got heated and Garrod called to an end once Derek “threw up his hands in despair and stormed into the house”. Of course, that was a great segway into presenting Robyn her birthday cake! LOL. But we set aside our tempers and presented Robyn with the cake that Edie and Ally baked for her today. The change in air pressure from inside the house and outside the house caused the candles to go out as soon as we opened the door but it was nice nonetheless. We then cracked a bottle of Andre champagne (you can take us out of Dartmouth, but you can’t take the Dartmouth out of us!).

After that I spoke with Garrod about class today. He had a lot of good things to say about my control of the classroom and my presence in the classroom. The weaknesses he saw were valid points, but I must defend myself by saying that I advised him not to attend this particular class because it was unlike the rest of my classes. I basically lectured the whole class. Granted I got some responses from the kids, it was mostly a lecture-filled class. I explained to him during our meeting that usually, many of the components of the classroom that he noticed and didn’t particularly like, usually those issues are taken care of. But it was a successful meeting, I took a lot away from it. Now, here I am. Trying to catch up on two days of blogging and waiting on Eric to start up another episode of Planet Earth. Tonight we’re watching Jungles. We finished up grasslands a little earlier today. With a full stomach, I’m more than ready to pass out for tonight. I’m realizing that teaching is a very tiring job. Even though I only teach two periods a day, the preparation I put into each class is actually a pretty draining process. Whisper voice: good thing I don’t want to be a teacher after these ten weeks are over. I’ve told this to Garrod but I have a feeling he thinks he can still convince me otherwise. Don’t get me wrong, this is a great experience, but I can’t see myself being subjected to a classroom for 8 months out of the year. Anyway, future plans can be saved for another day. I’m heading to bed soon.

Next entry I’ll talk about the track meet this weekend. I think I might run, just for the heck of it. But really, I’m out.

Love you and miss you precious!! From Majuro, until next time, barloeok!