School (...kind of) 12/2/10

My official purpose while undertaking this daunting two-year task of living in a third world country is to teach English. People all over the world are yearning to learn the English language to give them job opportunities and the chance to move beyond their poverty-stricken lifestyle. In particular, Micronesians have a very strong bond with America and encourage English literacy with enthusiasm. Most of the people here have the goal of pursuing further education or jobs in Guam, Hawaii or the mainland. (Interesting side note: people in Guam have official US citizenship, so everybody over here just calls it America).

The school that I am assigned to has slightly over 100 students for grades K-8. My job is to teach English to the 5^th through 8^th graders. The main upside is that I only have about 10 or 15 kids in each class. Unfortunately, there are many more disadvantages that I am faced with. The school has two buildings. One is decrepit and crumbling to the ground as the tin rusts through and the wood rots. The other building is a two story concrete building. It has the potential to be a legitimate structure, buts it’s lacking a few things. The top floor is unusable because the floor is caving in. This floor could collapse at any moment and crush all of us down below, but we just pray that the day wont come anytime soon. There are no railings, no walls, and just a big empty space that has yet to be used since its construction. The bottom floor is a little bit better. There are windows with partial screens or plywood covering them up. Fortunately they let in enough natural light to let us see (because of course there is no electricity).

Some of the classes have a few metal chairs with desks attached, but most kids just sit in plastic chairs or wooden benches with no desk. Recently, my predecessor built \ bookshelfs for each room, so now we have a place to put things like books….but we don’t have many books. The books that we do have are American textbooks that are far beyond the language level of any of these students. Most students can’t even spell “cat” but they are learning about “endoplasmic reticulum’s” and “mitochondrial DNA”.  It makes absolutely no sense to any of them, but they memorize the phrases and definitions and can mindlessly regurgitate them. Even the teachers don’t understand what they are teaching.

There are no reading, writing, or grammar books. And my job is to teach reading, writing, speaking, and listening in the English language. This presents a unique set of challenges. Fortunately, I am awesome and can handle it. Haha. I have developed a system where I will not need books to teach. I will be basing everything that I do off of a series of themes. Every two weeks I will have a new theme; such as the “forest” or “ocean” or “home”. I will give the kids vocabulary words that relate to the subject matter and use those as the basis of my lessons. I will develop dialogues for them to practice, I will write stories about the theme, and I will come up with activities that integrate writing and grammar.

This may sound like a lot of work, but I think it might be easier than it sounds. The English language ability level of these students is incredibly low and the extent of activities that they can handle is rather simple. I can come up with 10 fill-in the blank sentences for the kids to do, and it will take me about 30 minutes to do that activity. Everything that I teach ends up taking a lot longer than in any American classroom. For example, I made up a story the other day and read it with my kids. The story was only 8 sentences but it took two days to read it and analyze it. I think I am creative enough to come up with activities that will fill the time for each grade level. The biggest challenge will be preparing things for the huge variation in skill level. The differences between 5^th and 8^th graders are huge and the individual differences within classes are even starker. It will be very hard to accommodate all levels.

The students are just as intelligent as American students, however they are extremely limited by their remedial English language skills. Students in Chuuk are supposed to be taught everything in English from 3^rd grade through high school. But Chuuk has one of the worst school systems on the planet, so this is not a reality. Teachers do not teach in English. Most teachers don’t even come to school. And when they do, most don’t give a shit. I am not saying that they are no good teachers in Chuuk, there are just few and far between. The students have not been given a fair chance to be at the level that is expected of them. I was surprised to see the low level of comprehension when I taught in Pohnpei, but Chuuk is far below even Pohnpeian students.

I am supposed to teach in entirely English, but this is very difficult because most of the kids don’t understand English. The 7^th and 8^th graders can comprehend most of what I am saying, but the 5^th graders have absolutely no idea. They have an amazing ability to memorize and repeat words and dialogues, but they aren’t actually learning any of it. It will be my task to change the style of learning that they have been doing their entire lives. I am not going to teach them in the “teacher centered” rote-learning environment that they are accustomed to. Instead, I will utilize all of my tools to get them interactively involved in the classroom. They say that many volunteers who have teaching experience in America are actually at a disadvantage, because teaching in Micronesia has no resemblance to US classrooms. Nothing that works in the US works in Micronesia. None of the strategies can actually be used; and organized systems and structure are nonexistent. Those American experienced teachers have to learn to throw everything out the window and start from square one. So I guess its ok that I am starting from square one.

Behavior in the classroom is out of control. In my observations during finals week, I witnessed students standing on their chairs and throwing test papers at each other. I saw students get up and smack others in the back of the head. I saw multiple students stand up and walk outside to go spit or snot rocket. When Ben would ask a student to do something they would simply say no, then he would yell yes and they would yell no and he would yell yes and they would yell no. It was utter mayhem. The students basically did whatever they wanted. I also heard many stories about fights in class, teachers punching students, and every kind of disrespect that you can imagine.

 I decided immediately that it wasn’t gonna be like that in my class. So on my first day, I laid down the law and scared the shit out of the kids with my booming voice and confident presence. I implemented a punishment/reward system that motivates students through positive reinforcement rather than punishment. I instilled some of the ideas that I have learned in psychology that will hopefully manipulate the young minds of my students. To my pleasant surprise, and to the amazement of all the other teachers, my first weeks of teaching have been flawless. Not a single kid spoke out of turn, not a single kid got out of their seat, not a single kid did anything wrong. In just my first week, I have already turned these little devils into model students. But we will see how long that lasts.

Another big problem with the educational system in Chuuk is the overall attitude towards school. Some people care about school and learning, but most don’t. Most parents don’t, which means that most kids don’t. Kids miss school whenever they feel like it. And teachers miss school whenever they feel like it. Attendance at school is purely optional and is only mildly encouraged.

Let me give some examples of the rigorous schedule that they follow in Chuukese schools. I arrived in UFO during finals week. Finals week consisted of two hours of testing on just Monday and Tuesday. Finals were simply an informal mishmash of extremely simple activities. School was then cancelled on Wednesday because the teachers wanted time to grade the finals. School was cancelled on Thursday because the teachers wanted time to do their report cards. School was cancelled on Friday because the teachers wanted to have a meeting. The following Monday, school was cancelled because we had a PTA meeting. School was cancelled on Tuesday because we had a teacher lunch. School was cancelled on Thursday and Friday for the thanksgiving holiday. (Even though nobody in Chuuk has any idea of what Thanksgiving is). And school was cancelled on Wednesday, because we couldn’t just have school on Wednesday. So in summation, my first two weeks of teaching consisted of two half days of testing and lot of cancelled classes for worthless reasons. Welcome to Chuuk.

There are some upsides to the crappy resources and school system that I have to deal with. The best thing is that I can pretty much do whatever I want. I have free reign to teach these kids anything I want in any way that I want. I don’t have to follow a book, I don’t have follow directions, I don’t have to follow anything. It’s just going to be my mind and these kids. Scary huh.