Freezing in 70 degrees

11.7.09 Saturday

I had a pretty funny moment while running with Pshell today. Peter has been a really excellent motivator to get in shape…his high fitness level was a little disheartening at first, but I’ve gotten to the point where I can keep up with him for most of the route. We really only have one place to go running here, which is south, to the end of the airport runway and back. In some places, any deviation of more than ten feet either way from that course would have us waist-deep in the ocean or lagoon. On Tuesdays and Fridays, we have to watch out for the plane landing on our heads, so we keep an eye on the sky (“White People on Strange Running Ritual Slain by Plane,” the local paper might say). Some days we’re too busy to work out, but I manage to run 3-4 times a week, which is pretty good for me. But I digress.

As we were running out of Jabor heading toward the runway, we passed a few little boys playing near the town dump, which is just a cleared space next to the road just outside Jabor. They had found some empty cardboard 12-packs of Coca-Cola, and one of them had put a box on each leg and arm, and he was small enough that they covered his entire extremities. Man, I wish I had had a camera. He looked like a kickass Transformer, if the Transformers had run into financial difficulties and found it necessary to take on a corporate sponsor. Then he started running with us, and was able to keep up for a little way, despite his encumbrances. He really made my day, not only because he looked sharp in his fresh Coke kicks, but also reminded me of how much fun it is to be a little boy.

11.10.09 Tuesday

I would say I spend a majority of my time and energy in class figuring out what the students already know, and what they don’t. If they don’t know something I expected them to know, I scramble to come up with an explanation that they will understand, which works less frequently than I would like. If they already know something I planned to explain, it means I wasted my fairly limited time planning a good way to teach it. It was suggested that I give pre-unit tests to establish what they know, but committing to another level of test-writing and grading is daunting, and the range of academic ability within each class might make the pre-testing useless anyway.

Sometimes I envy Peter a little for teaching physics and chemistry, because he can pretty much count on the fact that none of them will have previously learned any of it, so he knows he has to start at the beginning…at other times, however, it’s nice to find out that the students have an English base on which to build.

11.11.09

I just had the most amazing coconut. Considering that we are surrounded by coconut trees, every day risking a fatal nut to the noggin, we get surprisingly few, primarily because the Marshallese are far more able and wily gatherers. When we get them, they are so delicious that I am very close to giving extra credit in my class for every coconut delivered to my door. Today, after a short run and workout, I broke the seal of one that I had been keeping in the fridge, and I am here to tell you that there is NOTHING like fresh, chilled coconut milk after working out.

11.13.09 Friday

Friday is the day that the students do a general cleanup of the campus after school. They divide by grades, and as a “class advisor” to the juniors, I help supervise them during the 20-30 minute cleanup (I “advise” them to pick stuff up, and that’s about it). Apparently, though, the Marshallese seem to find the browning leaves that drop from the trees extremely aesthetically displeasing, because they’re all the students pick up, at the encouragement of my co-advisor. Well, this would be all well and good, if the students didn’t completely ignore the Styrofoam, metal and plastic that is scattered among the detritus. The artificial refuse, which is so offensive to my Western sensibilities, just doesn’t seem to bother them as much. Consequently, I end up spending most my time picking up the wrappers and cans, while the students squat and pick up the things that would disintegrate in a couple weeks, moving them to a bonfire. I have to admit, the team effort makes things a lot tidier.

Last week, a representative of the Ministry of Education visited the school to see how things were going, and apparently he said that JHS is one of the cleanest campuses he’s seen. Upon hearing this, though, I wondered whether we actually have the least trash or if we are just the most bereft of vegetable matter.

One of the WorldTeach girls came by today, almost always a welcome change of routine. However, I realized today how little I like talking shop. I remember a reading from a class at Dartmouth that described a teacher’s lounge as a nest of tired people, hunched over coffee and making dry, ironic comments about their students, and I also remember how repugnant that sounded to me. I try to limit the negative things I say about people around me, and that should certainly include my students. I certainly break my own rule, usually when I am frustrated, and Peter and I regularly vent to each other, but no more than is necessary for our sanity.

However, I’m getting slightly off-topic…I was trying to say that when we have WorldTeach visitors, inevitably we talk about our respective experiences. No surprise there, but I think about school and talk about it with Pshell so much that when I’m talking to another person, it’s really the last thing I want to deal with. I think my ideal teacher’s lounge would prohibit talking about students or school in any way. It might be that this school is a bigger part of our life than is the case with other teachers, though…we simply don’t have much else going on, so it’s all we think about. Maybe the case would be different in Majuro, where we might have a life outside of school.