8/20
Getting to Vatia from Samoana
Lying in the bed of a truck, waiting for “5-10 minutes,” which has definitely been an at least an hour at this point. What the hell. Island time sucks. The uptight, productivity-obsessed American culture definitely gets to me, but I still appreciate a little timeliness. Sitting next to reeking football gear, with an unsupervised, bawling child in the cab. Could’ve gone to the damn library and used internet with a decent connection speed and had her call me when I’m done.
I came into town on the bus earlier today for a teachers’ workshop at Samoana High School, and I agreed to take a ride home from one of the other teachers. But from now on, I’m going to do everything possible to avoid getting rides from people. It doesn’t mean anything but inevitable delays. At least with a bus you know what you’re going to get—a bumpy ride, some blasting music, the smell of the canneries, and a $2 fare. None of this being taken on errands, waiting for people in meetings. I should have been home an hour ago, knocking out lesson plans and quizzes for tomorrow so I could have a little time to unwind with the house to myself, but no.
And then her kids climb into the back of the truck with me, and things aren’t so bad. There’s something serene, something that puts my frayed nerves at ease, about having this kid here, sharing my boredom, wanting to sit next to me on the tailgate just because I’m something new and different. There’s also something awesome about seeing a two year old who can’t speak take a swig of cold Mountain Dew and exhale with a big “ahhh!” After trying to make small talk with the kids for a while, the meeting finally ended and we got on the road. Seeing American Samoa from the back of a pickup truck is a great thing, and began to make up for the long delays in our departure. But then, of course, we stop for another half hour to rent a movie.
In the end, when I got home at seven, from my workshop that ended at four, I wasn’t at all upset. The cool air on the ride home, seeing the harbor and the mountains in the failing light, sitting in the back of the pickup with those kids—it made none of the delays matter. And I realized that if I lived here permanently, the lack of punctuality would probably drive me crazy eventually, but for the time that I’m here I think I can learn to live with it if it means forcing me to take time to sit back and stop worrying so much about time.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Early Teaching Struggles
The following two entries were written as rants in my journal that I then typed up to share online. I haven’t yet had a chance to write another long post about all the more fun stuff I’ve done, but I will soon.
8/18/09
Observations after Seven Days of Teaching
Tuesday afternoon, after seven days of teaching. Things had gotten better, but today might’ve been the worst. Definitely the worst since the first two days, when I felt more overwhelmed than I have in years. Last week I established that the kids didn’t know anything and decided to teach based on that, but I don’t think I really comprehended what that meant, or how hard it would be, until today. I tried to teach a music lesson about beats, where we clapped along to songs and I led us in Old MacDonald, setting the pace with the clapping. It went fine (except for some of the kids getting a little too enthusiastic with their clapping or singing and disturbing the other classes) until I tried to explain, in a basic way, how you count beats. The concept of beats per minute was just impossible. I tried to begin with 60 beats per minute, or the speed of the second hand on the clock. When I was asked how many seconds there are in a minute, I was met with “1,” “2,” and closest, “4.” When I tried to take a different approach, and talk about it in terms of rate, I again met with failure. They didn’t know what miles per were, so I didn’t have any kind of jumping off point.
In health class, my attempts to teach the Food Guide Pyramid crashed and burned when they didn’t know what “serve” meant, let alone understand the concept of a serving. Steve’s discussion on the scientific method fell apart when he tried to talk about the results of their paper airplane experiment and found they didn’t know how many inches were in a foot. When asked what they thought a ruler was for, they responded “For drawing straight lines!”
At this point, we’re left wondering—what the hell have they been doing for six plus years of school? They can write a complete sentence, sometimes. They can read, but all that means is that they can say the words out loud—there’s no level of comprehension. They can memorize definitions, but they forget them a week later and can’t come close to actually utilizing the vocabulary words. From what I’ve seen so far, it seems all they’ve done so far in school is copy things out of textbooks and mindlessly memorize. They haven’t been trained to think at all. Changing that will probably be my biggest challenge this year.
The upside of being here—this entry was written in my journal after a tough day of school, sitting against a rock out at the point, watching the sun go down on the mouth of the bay and taking in the waves hitting the rocks and rolling them back towards the sea with a sound like tearing earth.
8/18/09
Observations after Seven Days of Teaching
Tuesday afternoon, after seven days of teaching. Things had gotten better, but today might’ve been the worst. Definitely the worst since the first two days, when I felt more overwhelmed than I have in years. Last week I established that the kids didn’t know anything and decided to teach based on that, but I don’t think I really comprehended what that meant, or how hard it would be, until today. I tried to teach a music lesson about beats, where we clapped along to songs and I led us in Old MacDonald, setting the pace with the clapping. It went fine (except for some of the kids getting a little too enthusiastic with their clapping or singing and disturbing the other classes) until I tried to explain, in a basic way, how you count beats. The concept of beats per minute was just impossible. I tried to begin with 60 beats per minute, or the speed of the second hand on the clock. When I was asked how many seconds there are in a minute, I was met with “1,” “2,” and closest, “4.” When I tried to take a different approach, and talk about it in terms of rate, I again met with failure. They didn’t know what miles per were, so I didn’t have any kind of jumping off point.
In health class, my attempts to teach the Food Guide Pyramid crashed and burned when they didn’t know what “serve” meant, let alone understand the concept of a serving. Steve’s discussion on the scientific method fell apart when he tried to talk about the results of their paper airplane experiment and found they didn’t know how many inches were in a foot. When asked what they thought a ruler was for, they responded “For drawing straight lines!”
At this point, we’re left wondering—what the hell have they been doing for six plus years of school? They can write a complete sentence, sometimes. They can read, but all that means is that they can say the words out loud—there’s no level of comprehension. They can memorize definitions, but they forget them a week later and can’t come close to actually utilizing the vocabulary words. From what I’ve seen so far, it seems all they’ve done so far in school is copy things out of textbooks and mindlessly memorize. They haven’t been trained to think at all. Changing that will probably be my biggest challenge this year.
The upside of being here—this entry was written in my journal after a tough day of school, sitting against a rock out at the point, watching the sun go down on the mouth of the bay and taking in the waves hitting the rocks and rolling them back towards the sea with a sound like tearing earth.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Eighteen Days in American Samoa
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Eighteen Days in American Samoa
Hey everyone, I think it’s about time to write an update about the beginning of my Samoan adventure in case anyone is curious. I know it’s long—I’d recommend taking it at a few sittings. I arrived in American Samoa two and a half weeks ago on the night of Sunday, July 19, after fourteen hours of traveling. Tafuna International Airport is a little one runway airport, and we deplaned down a set of steps out on the tarmac. The first impression was pretty stunning—a blast of warm (not as hot as Texas), sticky (but way more humid) air, and a clear view of the mountains, lit up by the moon. After waiting half an hour for our luggage to come around the carousel, we went out through customs and were greeted by a welcoming party of Department of Education staff dishing out shell necklaces and young students holding up a “Welcome World Teachers” banner. Then it was on to Nuu’uli Polytech High School, where we had some fresh-baked cookies, dispersed into classrooms (girls’ rooms, boys’ rooms, and one for married couples), and crashed on the floor on our foam pads.
Monday morning I got up bright and early to take a freezing cold shower in the makeshift shower room, and then we were off to a little Samoan natural history museum where they hold a sort of cultural summer school for kids. We participated with groups of 7 and 13-year old in classes on traditional dancing, grass weaving, carving, and painting. I got my first lava lava (essentially their word for a sarong, but tied a little differently) in the dance class. In the afternoon, we toured the island in a school bus, but we didn’t get to drive up to my little town, Vatia, because in order to get there you have to take a side road up over the mountains that dead ends in Vatia after about 30 minutes.
The next few days were filled with six to eight hours a day of classes led by the Department of Education and PICED, an organization devoted to improving education in the Pacific islands. We learned all about curriculum—in every possible subject, whether that’s what we were slated to teach or not—some tips about lesson planning and classroom management, and a bit about Samoan culture and language. One highlight—or rather lowlight—was a woman who came to talk to us about teaching Correctional English, or English for students who don’t quite get it through normal instruction. She seemed to think that in order to tell us how to teach this program she had to actually teach us as if we were in the program, so we spent an hour and a half repeating vowels, consonants, syllables, and words on queue as she snapped her fingers at us and shouted “Eee-yah!” (she never explained what the hell that meant) and “Next word!”. Overall, the program probably prepared us to teach as much any two week program could, although some more instruction in Samoan language would have been good.
At the end of the two weeks, we started to cut loose a bit. The last Thursday, we all grabbed the bed sheets off of our mats and had a toga party in the large kitchen of the high school (not entirely sure why it had a kitchen…perhaps for cooking classes since it was a technical high school, or for cooking the students’ lunches). After waking up painfully early Friday morning to be introduced at a conference of all of the principals on the island, we went to $2 Beach for the afternoon. Fortunately PICED covered the $2 entry fee for us. I went out to a little rocky island right off the beach and attempted to scale it with another volunteer, Raj. We gave up about ten feet from the top after Raj tried to pull himself up by a little palm frond and instead just pulled the thing up by the roots. All in all, a very good time. Friday night we went to a local bowling alley/batting cages that’s also a bar at night and did some dancing with the locals. The next day everyone split up to go to their towns and take up their assignments.
Vatia is a small bayside village on the north side of the island. The first time I went out to visit it was the second Thursday we were here. I went with my roommate, Steve, and we had to wait two hours for the bus because it had apparently just left when we got to the bus depot. The bus fleet in AS does not run on timetables or anything. It is a collection of pickup trucks converted into small buses run by independent drivers. Only one bus runs to Vatia, so there are only a few trips each way throughout the day. The driver is a cool guy named Craig who gave us his phone number to check with him about bus times. He may have “the best sound system on the island” (2,000 watts running through the bus—very impressive), but his sense of time is a bit off and his predictions about arrival times are not quite accurate, to say the least.
On our first trip, a big Samoan in his late teens sat down across from us an asked if we were teachers. When we responded that we were, he asked if we were Alex and Steve. A bit taken aback, we told him that yes, we were, and asked how he knew that. He said that there had been an article in the newspaper, the Samoa News, that listed the names and assignments of all of the WorldTeach volunteers. He introduced himself as Marx, a recent graduate of Samoana High School, where he had some contact with last year’s WorldTeach volunteers. When we got to town, he showed us where our house was and introduced us to the secretary of the school. It was pretty awesome having a local guide showing us around and explaining who we were to people in Samoan. He has since taken to stopping by the house every night and we tell each other about our respective cultures.
Steve put it well when he observed that our living situation was a bit like staying in a beach house for a year. We are about 30 yards from the water in a little bungalow without air-conditioning or hot water. Everything is pretty much always wet, so our first purchase was a couple of fans to dry out clothes and keep the heat down. Once we did a fair amount of shopping (cooking utensils, pillows, a month’s worth of food), we were able to really make it home. It’s been wonderful to be able to finish up with training at our school, walk five minutes down the street back to our house, throw on our board shorts, and go out snorkeling. The bay doesn’t have the clearest water, but there’s some good coral and a few kinds of beautiful tropical fish.
A quick word about dogs on the island. They’re everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. I had one try to walk into my classroom while I was getting things together at school today. Many of them are pretty mangy and bark wildly at you as you go by them. They also bark at each other at all hours of the night, which can make sleeping difficult, especially when you have to sleep with the windows open and they bark right outside your bedroom. If they act threatening and come near you when you’re walking, the locals recommend yelling “Ahlo!” at them, and if that doesn’t work, throwing rocks. I didn’t have to resort to the latter until last night when Steve and I walked down to the end of town to look at a trail that runs out to the point at the edge of the bay. We walked by a pack of dogs on our way out and had to yell a few times and fake like we were going to throw at them to keep them away. We got by them successfully on our way back, but then I heard a couple of them coming up the road behind us. I whirled around and got off a quick throw that popped one on the shoulder. He let out a yelp and they both fell back. I’d be hard pressed to find a better way to get your adrenaline pumping than fending off wild dogs.
As far as the actual teaching goes, I’ll post some pictures of the school on shutterfly. It’s a tiny six building school with a basketball court in the middle. I’ll be the sixth grade teacher, and then all of the 5th-8th grade students will rotate between teachers and I’ll teach all of them Social Studies. The classes are all incredibly small-no grade has more than ten kids. I feel alright about the beginning of school next Monday, but the prospect of writing out lesson plans for so many classes is rather daunting.
I hope things are going well with all of you!
PS: if you want to check out pictures, go to http://alexinsamoa.shutterfly.com/
Eighteen Days in American Samoa
Hey everyone, I think it’s about time to write an update about the beginning of my Samoan adventure in case anyone is curious. I know it’s long—I’d recommend taking it at a few sittings. I arrived in American Samoa two and a half weeks ago on the night of Sunday, July 19, after fourteen hours of traveling. Tafuna International Airport is a little one runway airport, and we deplaned down a set of steps out on the tarmac. The first impression was pretty stunning—a blast of warm (not as hot as Texas), sticky (but way more humid) air, and a clear view of the mountains, lit up by the moon. After waiting half an hour for our luggage to come around the carousel, we went out through customs and were greeted by a welcoming party of Department of Education staff dishing out shell necklaces and young students holding up a “Welcome World Teachers” banner. Then it was on to Nuu’uli Polytech High School, where we had some fresh-baked cookies, dispersed into classrooms (girls’ rooms, boys’ rooms, and one for married couples), and crashed on the floor on our foam pads.
Monday morning I got up bright and early to take a freezing cold shower in the makeshift shower room, and then we were off to a little Samoan natural history museum where they hold a sort of cultural summer school for kids. We participated with groups of 7 and 13-year old in classes on traditional dancing, grass weaving, carving, and painting. I got my first lava lava (essentially their word for a sarong, but tied a little differently) in the dance class. In the afternoon, we toured the island in a school bus, but we didn’t get to drive up to my little town, Vatia, because in order to get there you have to take a side road up over the mountains that dead ends in Vatia after about 30 minutes.
The next few days were filled with six to eight hours a day of classes led by the Department of Education and PICED, an organization devoted to improving education in the Pacific islands. We learned all about curriculum—in every possible subject, whether that’s what we were slated to teach or not—some tips about lesson planning and classroom management, and a bit about Samoan culture and language. One highlight—or rather lowlight—was a woman who came to talk to us about teaching Correctional English, or English for students who don’t quite get it through normal instruction. She seemed to think that in order to tell us how to teach this program she had to actually teach us as if we were in the program, so we spent an hour and a half repeating vowels, consonants, syllables, and words on queue as she snapped her fingers at us and shouted “Eee-yah!” (she never explained what the hell that meant) and “Next word!”. Overall, the program probably prepared us to teach as much any two week program could, although some more instruction in Samoan language would have been good.
At the end of the two weeks, we started to cut loose a bit. The last Thursday, we all grabbed the bed sheets off of our mats and had a toga party in the large kitchen of the high school (not entirely sure why it had a kitchen…perhaps for cooking classes since it was a technical high school, or for cooking the students’ lunches). After waking up painfully early Friday morning to be introduced at a conference of all of the principals on the island, we went to $2 Beach for the afternoon. Fortunately PICED covered the $2 entry fee for us. I went out to a little rocky island right off the beach and attempted to scale it with another volunteer, Raj. We gave up about ten feet from the top after Raj tried to pull himself up by a little palm frond and instead just pulled the thing up by the roots. All in all, a very good time. Friday night we went to a local bowling alley/batting cages that’s also a bar at night and did some dancing with the locals. The next day everyone split up to go to their towns and take up their assignments.
Vatia is a small bayside village on the north side of the island. The first time I went out to visit it was the second Thursday we were here. I went with my roommate, Steve, and we had to wait two hours for the bus because it had apparently just left when we got to the bus depot. The bus fleet in AS does not run on timetables or anything. It is a collection of pickup trucks converted into small buses run by independent drivers. Only one bus runs to Vatia, so there are only a few trips each way throughout the day. The driver is a cool guy named Craig who gave us his phone number to check with him about bus times. He may have “the best sound system on the island” (2,000 watts running through the bus—very impressive), but his sense of time is a bit off and his predictions about arrival times are not quite accurate, to say the least.
On our first trip, a big Samoan in his late teens sat down across from us an asked if we were teachers. When we responded that we were, he asked if we were Alex and Steve. A bit taken aback, we told him that yes, we were, and asked how he knew that. He said that there had been an article in the newspaper, the Samoa News, that listed the names and assignments of all of the WorldTeach volunteers. He introduced himself as Marx, a recent graduate of Samoana High School, where he had some contact with last year’s WorldTeach volunteers. When we got to town, he showed us where our house was and introduced us to the secretary of the school. It was pretty awesome having a local guide showing us around and explaining who we were to people in Samoan. He has since taken to stopping by the house every night and we tell each other about our respective cultures.
Steve put it well when he observed that our living situation was a bit like staying in a beach house for a year. We are about 30 yards from the water in a little bungalow without air-conditioning or hot water. Everything is pretty much always wet, so our first purchase was a couple of fans to dry out clothes and keep the heat down. Once we did a fair amount of shopping (cooking utensils, pillows, a month’s worth of food), we were able to really make it home. It’s been wonderful to be able to finish up with training at our school, walk five minutes down the street back to our house, throw on our board shorts, and go out snorkeling. The bay doesn’t have the clearest water, but there’s some good coral and a few kinds of beautiful tropical fish.
A quick word about dogs on the island. They’re everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. I had one try to walk into my classroom while I was getting things together at school today. Many of them are pretty mangy and bark wildly at you as you go by them. They also bark at each other at all hours of the night, which can make sleeping difficult, especially when you have to sleep with the windows open and they bark right outside your bedroom. If they act threatening and come near you when you’re walking, the locals recommend yelling “Ahlo!” at them, and if that doesn’t work, throwing rocks. I didn’t have to resort to the latter until last night when Steve and I walked down to the end of town to look at a trail that runs out to the point at the edge of the bay. We walked by a pack of dogs on our way out and had to yell a few times and fake like we were going to throw at them to keep them away. We got by them successfully on our way back, but then I heard a couple of them coming up the road behind us. I whirled around and got off a quick throw that popped one on the shoulder. He let out a yelp and they both fell back. I’d be hard pressed to find a better way to get your adrenaline pumping than fending off wild dogs.
As far as the actual teaching goes, I’ll post some pictures of the school on shutterfly. It’s a tiny six building school with a basketball court in the middle. I’ll be the sixth grade teacher, and then all of the 5th-8th grade students will rotate between teachers and I’ll teach all of them Social Studies. The classes are all incredibly small-no grade has more than ten kids. I feel alright about the beginning of school next Monday, but the prospect of writing out lesson plans for so many classes is rather daunting.
I hope things are going well with all of you!
PS: if you want to check out pictures, go to http://alexinsamoa.shutterfly.com/
Meeting with the Chiefs
Hey everyone, I decided to start up a blog to keep y'all up to date with my goings-on in American Samoa. I have a really long post to leave about my first couple of weeks here, but the computer at the library tagged it as virus-infected when I tried to open it off of my flash drive. So this little tid-bit will have to do for now. Hopefully I can take my laptop somewhere with internet later today and post my main update. I hope things are going well stateside!
Thursday, August 06, 2009
A meeting with the chiefs
Last night while we were hanging out at the local Mormon church playing basketball and getting acquainted with some of our future students, Steve met one of the village matai, or chiefs, named Moaga. He told us the matai meet most every night and invited us to come by that evening to meet them. When we got there, Moaga wasn’t there, but we told a man standing nearby that we would like to meet the chiefs and he led us over and introduced us. There were five of them sitting in a half circle in a fale, or open air guesthouse, by the side of the road. They spread out a grass mat for us and told us that we had to learn how to sit properly. We sat down cross-legged, covering as much of our legs as possible with our lava lavas (sarongs).
They asked our names and where we were from. The tulafale, or high talking chief (who is second only to the alii, or high chief), whose name was Laoti, told us that he had been in Washington, DC, where Steve is from, two weeks before for a conference. He had also been to San Antonio before, but wasn’t really a fan. Another chief told me that he lived in Texas for a while back when he was in the army. Laoti expressed how grateful he was that we had come to help his village, and told us we should learn their card game, a Samoan version of gin-rummy. He said we should stop by from time to time to check in with them and then sent us on our way. It was a very cool little exchange and gave me a greater sense of a connection to the village. I look forward to playing cards with them this year.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
A meeting with the chiefs
Last night while we were hanging out at the local Mormon church playing basketball and getting acquainted with some of our future students, Steve met one of the village matai, or chiefs, named Moaga. He told us the matai meet most every night and invited us to come by that evening to meet them. When we got there, Moaga wasn’t there, but we told a man standing nearby that we would like to meet the chiefs and he led us over and introduced us. There were five of them sitting in a half circle in a fale, or open air guesthouse, by the side of the road. They spread out a grass mat for us and told us that we had to learn how to sit properly. We sat down cross-legged, covering as much of our legs as possible with our lava lavas (sarongs).
They asked our names and where we were from. The tulafale, or high talking chief (who is second only to the alii, or high chief), whose name was Laoti, told us that he had been in Washington, DC, where Steve is from, two weeks before for a conference. He had also been to San Antonio before, but wasn’t really a fan. Another chief told me that he lived in Texas for a while back when he was in the army. Laoti expressed how grateful he was that we had come to help his village, and told us we should learn their card game, a Samoan version of gin-rummy. He said we should stop by from time to time to check in with them and then sent us on our way. It was a very cool little exchange and gave me a greater sense of a connection to the village. I look forward to playing cards with them this year.
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