Life Lately

It feels like it’s been forever since I last posted, and things are starting to get crazy around here. It’s the end of first quarter, which is totally unreasonable given that we have only had 3 full 5-day weeks of school. The school gives us a grading scheme that we have to use, which includes three tests and a final exam for each quarter. How they expect us to get through enough material to give three tests is beyond me. I barely got through my introductory unit by the end of the quarter. And then to have finals every quarter? That’s just ridiculous. For a place that is so relaxed about everything and cancels school randomly all the time, it’s very strange that they have a system for how we have to grade. Then to top it all off, we found out on Thursday that the governor was cancelling school on Friday as a reward for doing so well academically over the past year. There are two giant problems with this: 1. It totally sends the wrong message about the purpose and importance of education by making it a reward to not have school, and 2. We didn’t even do that well academically. Kosrae is doing a little better than the other islands, but that doesn’t mean we are doing well. A lot of the grade levels have below 50% performing at the level they are supposed to be at. All of the Worldteach teachers have commented on how crazy this is, but it’s a perfect example of how backwards education is here. So basically it’s been a little crazy since first quarter ends next week. In a different way of thinking about the end of the quarter, it means the school year is a quarter of the way done, which is crazy to think about. Christmas break adds some time to it, but aside from that, I’m almost a quarter of the way through this adventure. Time is flying! Once I got settled into being a teacher here, things have felt like they are moving crazy fast.

This week has definitely been the toughest one yet for me. I’ve come down with a little bit of a cold and a really painful ear infection that has made going to work every day a little harder, and then got some difficult news from back home. I can’t bring myself to write very much about it here, but I’ll just say it has been difficult to be so far away from home this week. My heart is definitely back home with Harvard Softball and the Ricciardone family. I’ve been doing my best to channel the strength and spirit of Lisa and teach for her this week. Laura, I’m sending as much love as I possibly can your way.

Even with the tough week, I am lucky to have a wonderful job and be working with some amazing students. One of my classes really made my day, and they probably didn’t even realize it. It wasn’t a huge deal for them, but I was so happy for a minute because of them. They were just being the normal selves, but I had a moment towards the end of class where I just took it all in because they were having so much fun learning and were so excited to be learning. It was one of those times where you realize how important your job is and you actually understand why people say that their students teach them more than they taught them. It was amazing to see them so happy and having fun in class, but that’s how learning should be. When you are a teacher trying to shove all this information into your kid’s heads, it is really special to see them actually want to be there and be enjoying it. So even though none of you will probably ever read this, to all the students in my 4^th period, thank you for being the bright spot in my difficult week.

I’ll end with something totally hilarious that happened to me in class on Monday as a result of the language barrier. I was teaching mixtures and pure substances to my chemistry classes, and one of the types of mixtures is heterogenous. When I first said that, my entire class erupted in laughter. I figured out pretty quickly that it meant something in the local language that must have been funny, but I couldn’t get anyone to say what it meant loud enough for me to hear, so I just moved on with the lesson and talked about how this will probably happen again, but we need to be able to move forward and use this new vocab term throughout the class so we need to get over it. My kids got over it pretty well, but then I was worried about my next two classes. I was debating whether to warn my second chemistry class, but decided not to and I got the same reaction, but it lasted a little longer. They thought it was absolutely hilarious every time I said “heterogenous,” and they would whisper it to each other and laugh hysterically. Again, they wouldn’t tell me what it meant, so I went on with the class and again used it as a teaching moment about maturity and being aware of the language differences. After this class, I had lunch, so when I saw a couple of my students walk by, I went and asked them that I needed to know what it meant. They kind of stared at me for a second, and then one of them said “penis” pretty quietly. No wonder they were all laughing! I was basically standing up there saying “penis, penis, penis” in their language. After that I went into my final chemistry class at the end of the day totally prepared, and I warned them ahead of time that they were going to hear something inappropriate in their language, and that it was okay to laugh, but we would need to be mature about it after, and they were still surprised when they heard it. They took a second longer to react, and I think they were just surprised to hear that come out of their teacher’s mouth in class. Then after a second of processing, they all died laughing. I got a few good laughs out of this, and am still laughing thinking about it. This is a hilarious teaching story that I’ll remember forever. This takes “you learn something new every day” to a whole new level.