Disclaimer

The ideas and views expressed in the blog are mine and do not reflect the ideas and views of WorldTeach.

Friday, August 5, 2011

Teaching Practicum

The last few days, me and my teaching group of 5 people have been designing lesson plans and talking through assessments to get reading for the Practicum. This sounds scary but really it's a summer school type thing for 3 hours Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Each person has to teach a lesson alone with no help from the other teachers. we had about 17 kids on each day. This would have been fine, except most of the kids were lured there by the promise of candy. This meant that they weren't all that into being taught and sitting in a classroom all day when they could be back on the playground pushing and shoving and generally causing mayhem. The way these kids were recruited goes against everything we were taught in America such as, Stranger Danger, "never take candy from strangers", etc. But nevertheless, there we were a bunch of ripelles, foreigners, on the playground waving suckers and gum at kids trying to lure them into the classroom. In the words of one of our directors, "The Marshall Islands is the only place on earth where this is okay."

Once they were in the classroom, the real challenge began. Most of these kids weren't forced to be there so they made sure we knew that by walking in and out of the classroom, wrestling on the ground, and overall being behavior management nightmares. Finally by the third day we figured out that if we give them a break, have them run around in the hot Equatorial sun and then bring them inside and read a book, then they will be calm and obedient. This worked really well, to the point that these kids were zombies. I learned that there is a fine line between obedient and comatose.

Overall it was a good experience and now I know what to expect on my island. I'll be leaving next Friday for Wotje. This may or may not happen since according to our field directors, the Air Marshall Islands is wishy washy at best. They keep their flight reservations in a composition notebook and the people on that list may or may not have paid, so the number of people on the plane may or may not be accurate. Also, they only fly the plane if there are enough people to make it worthwhile and since the list of reservations isn't accurate, we never know if the plane is going to fly. We could be sitting at the airport waiting to board and it's cancelled. We also could be told it's cancelled and then be woken up at 4 am with our directors honking at us in the truck telling us the plane is leaving. I've summed it up to this: If we're on the list we might go but me might not, if we aren't on the list, we still might go but we might not. You don't know if you're going to your island until your feet are on your island.

Hopefully my feet will be on Wotje by Friday but apparently they are having some weed control problems on the airstrip there soooooo we might take a boat. Oh and the above information goes for the boats too. I'm really learning how to be flexible here.

No comments:

Post a Comment