January 5, 2010
Day 6:
Yokwe injibbon. I’m blogging much earlier in the day today than usual. Second period is my free period so I don’t have to be in the classroom. As far as Teacher Terry, STILL haven’t met her. I officially just executed my first lesson plan. Ben was upstairs with Teacher Rosita being tutored and led through the profession while I was in a class of 22 by myself teaching them the purpose of a subject, verb, preposition, article and noun. The children are smarter than I thought. They have the innate ability to understand English I just feel like thy haven’t been challenged to push their limits. Based on what they were learning in their text books, I devised a lesson plan last night to explain the purpose of a subject, verb and preposition and then show the relation between the three. I ended up completing my lesson plan in about 12 minutes and spending the rest of the lesson doing examples of what I had learned and trying to stump the children with irregular verbs and such. Before class was over, I had gone over subject/verb agreement, emphasized the importance of the preposition, explained the difference between definite and indefinite articles, explained commands and quizzed the class over irregular verbs in the past tense. The kids had to notify me that the period was over and that a different teacher would be teaching them social studies.
I got great class participation today from both the laddik (men) and leddik (women). Many of the women were shy when I looked at them but I heard many of them speaking up when I had my back turned to the class. The boys were pretty much the same, VERY shy and avoidant of attention. There was one boy who sat in the front that clearly wants to learn. He was usually the only one who raised his hand when I asked the class to respond to something and he gave me most of my examples. A few boys played around in the back of the class a couple times but every time I gave them “The eye” ( I can’t believe I have “an eye” now) they returned to their seats for the time being. It was a very good feeling to feel like I had gotten through to the children.
I had just finished up explaining subject/verb agreement and I was writing a sentence on the board with the verb space blanked out so that the children could fill it in. Michael ________ in his bed every night. “What verb could fit in the blank? What action?” I asked the class. They were all relatively silent so I began cluing them in on the answer, “Swim?”
They all shouted, “No.”
“Run?”
“No”
Just then one of the boys in the back of the class yelled, “Sleep.”
“Sleep would work.” I wrote sleep in the blank. I expected this to be a teaching opportunity again for me. Before this example I had only used he/she as the subject of my sentences. When I put a name there it caught some of them off guard just as I expected. However they caught on to the concept MUCH quicker than I expected and when I wrote sleep in the blank, they all shouted in unison, “S”. They really did melele (understand) that subjects and verbs had to agree and any third person singular subject requires an s on the verb. Granted the aforementioned terminology would have them more confused than me in Marshallese staff meetings, they understood the concept. I even got one of the boys to answer the question “why?” When speaking to some other rebele (Western people) teachers they were telling me that the question “why” and the command “explain” were off limits. I refuse to believe that the mental capacity of the Marshallese is that much less than that of other developed nations. I plan to push that envelope and encourage these children to learn more and more each day and not be content with mediocrity. Actually mediocrity would be a success, but you get my point.
This is going to be a LONG ten weeks for me. Especially if Teacher Terry gets wind that the kids behave for me and are learning something. To be honest, I don’t want to work all of Teacher Terry’s classes today because if I do it now then Principal Lennja might expect me to do that for ten weeks and that’s just simply not in my job description. I’m supposed to be merely observing for the first three days yet I’ve officially executed my first lesson plans within 20 minutes of my second day on the job. And I don’t even have anyone to observe. While I know that this will be hard I can also see the potential for great reward. I still don’t have the 7th grade curriculum but I was given a guideline for the MISAT (Marshall Islands Standard Achievement Test), the test that determines whether or not the children get into high school. My goal is to introduce at least a quarter of that information to my 7th graders so that they can have a chance at graduating to high school. For now I will have to devise one more lesson plan because apparently my first class was an English reading class and my next one is an English writing. I’m thinking I’ll just have a series of sentences written on the board and I’ll have the class proofread it for me. I’m usually really good at stalling and killing time but in front of 20+ students it’s not easy at all and any sign of weakness on my part could prove fatal, especially this early in the quarter. I couldn’t wait to tell you about my first day. Slash, I have a free period with nothing to do. Until later, barloeok.
I write the following from the morning after the events. After dinner, during my normal blogging time conversations and lesson plans ran high and energy ran low.
My second class of the day went just as well as my first. The children were all the same, they stay in their classroom for the first three periods. I continued upon the lesson in the first class. The second class consisted of learning pronouns, possessive pronouns and contractions. When I said the word contraction they had no idea what I was saying, but after I explained that “cannot” can be condensed into “can’t” they all blurted out about 15 different contractions, ten of which I copied onto the board.
After my second class, Ben and I went to the high school, its on the same campus as Majuro Middle School, for a gospel choir practice. I had heard the gospel choir practicing on our first day in Majuro. They sounded phenomenal. So Ben and I went and sat in on the practice that they have during fourth period lunch in the office. For the fifth period lunch we moved upstairs to a different classroom and there Ben and I sang with the choir. It was great. The most amazing part about the choir is undoubtedly the instructor. His name is something like Mawalupe, I’m not 100% sure but he’s a fairly large man, Samoan, with pretty, curly, black hair. He instructs the gospel choir completely a capella and he sings all three parts. But the thing is, when he sings the soprano and alto parts, not only does he memorize the harmonies and recall them at will, but he sings their parts in his voice. No falsetto. His natural voice range, from what I heard yesterday, is at least four octaves. He would sing the soprano part with the sopranos, come down sing the alto part with the altos and then sing the tenor part with the tenors just as easily. I hadn’t sang in a group in quite some time, since 8th grade choir with Linda Gartner. It was great to be apart of a choir again. Edie and Ben are apart of Gospel Choir at Dartmouth and they’ve convinced me to join that as well when I return in the spring.
After gospel choir Professor Garrod and I had lunch at Tide Table. I bought some internet time and spent most of my time Skyping or unsuccessfully trying to upload photos while Garrod conversed with some of the graduate teachers and worked some more on Hamlet. It began raining pretty hard as soon as we left Tide Table. I completely misjudged one puddle and ended up stepping right in it. The good thing about the island is that all water evaporates in world record time. Before I got comfortable at the school my pants were dry again.
We left Tide Table to go back to school for auditions. The turnout wasn’t as great as we expected but more people trickled in as the auditions went on. Eric took everyone’s names and whether or not they wanted to play a large or small role then sent them to me. I took pictures of them so that we could see who we were talking about in our debriefing session. Auditions went well. It took the kids a while to get the hang of what we wanted. When we let them improv and speak in Marshallese they were for the most part, all pretty good. Reading Shakespeare, not a strong point. It’s okay though because reading Ancient Willy isn’t my strong point either.
After auditions Robyn and I returned to start dinner. We made chicken fajitas and spinach. Everyone seemed to love them, even the four vegetarians. After dinner we all talked about our days in the classroom and the auditions. Edie is in a similar boat as I am as far as teaching. Her teacher left school to run some errands and ne’er returned, leaving her to teach three classes all by she onesy. Everyone else is in a pretty good situation, comparably speaking anyway. Ally’s third graders are quite unruly so she’s pretty frustrated about getting them to behave and stop walking on tables across the room to punch each other. I feel bad for her, and she’s got a mentor teacher. Robyn is worried that her teacher won’t let her do enough teaching which is a rare problem for this program. She’s also passionate about reorganizing the library into some logical fashion. I’d love to explain the situation of the others but frankly I don’t have time this morning.
I did hear from My Love yesterday. I’m assuming she read the poem I wrote her and I’m hoping she likes it. The message she sent me only consisted of five words but they were just the five words that I needed to hear.
After our discussion we all spent about an hour lesson planning for today’s classes and once all that was done, we were all too tired to watch Ratatouille as we had planned. So instead the ladies went into their room to crash while the guys all stayed out in the living room to crash like we always do. But before falling asleep we watched Michael Jordan’s Top 10 toughest shots of all time and Michael Jordan’s Top 10 dunks of all time. That was a great 6 minutes of video to end the day.
I woke up at 6:15 a.m. to watch the sunrise and pray before the day started. It’s so easy to thank God for his creation when you’re here. It’s just so beautiful when you look away from land. The clouds. The water. And when we look inland we can be so thankful that we have running water and air conditioning and so many of the other things we take for granted. I prayed for my students prayed for my family, did some pushups and came inside to write this blog. Thank you all for following and until I see you again, barloeok from Majuro.
No comments:
Post a Comment