Still Teaching

Prizegiving 2010

Amanda, me, Tafale.

Standing room only in the Great Hall.

Me with a couple of year 12s.

Suasami and Bernie are also leaving after this year.

Me with a bunch of 11.1s.

A couple of year 11s stopped me outside the hall and requested I take their picture.

Colleen wins best in computers for year 11.

A bunch of the 11.2s.

Staff meeting after clean-up.

Talking to No One

There was one day when Ms. Yarbrough went berserk. Back in 7th grade English and Social Science, it was the last period of the day, and we were reading some textbook aloud as a class, and out of nowhere, she snorted. She laughed and flailed her arms and talked to imaginary people on either side of her. She leaned back in her chair and let out bursts of blithe incomprehensible gibberish. When she came to, she told us it was all an attempt to show us what our behavior looked like from her perspective. And now, 15 years after the fact, I finally understand.

I’ve heard a bunch of reports on NPR about how the human brain isn’t fully formed through most of the teenage years and how this can at least partially account for why teens act as though they aren’t in control of their bodies. And watching them day in and day out, I can believe it.

Trying to keep 9.3 under control yesterday, I warned them that the next person I saw talking would have his or her test taken away and that person would receive a zero. This worked for about 30 seconds, and then one boy across the room from where I stood turned and yelled something at the kid behind and to his right. As soon as the words had left his lips, he got this stunned expression on his face and snapped his head toward me. The look was less contrite and more bewildered, as if to say, “What was that?!”

The talking to imaginary people is a real thing as well. My 8th grade teacher Ms. Barton used to make fun of us. She observed that at certain moments, everyone in the class was talking to each other at the same time, and absolutely no one was listening. She looked out and saw not 15 different conversations, but rather a cacophony of 30 separate impromptu soliloquies being performed for 30 different imaginary audiences. Everyone is talking, no one is listening. “No one is listening to you!” Ms. Barton would mock. “You’re talking to the world, but no one can hear you because they’re busy talking to you.” I’ve seen it over and over this year, particularly with my year 9s (who would be 8th graders in America). It would be funnier if it wasn’t so obnoxious.

And it’s amazing how the kids grow out of it. Collecting the exams once the testing period was over yesterday was chaotic. I told the kids to quietly raise their hands if they were finished, and I would come around and collect everyone’s paper. The result: 46 kids babbling to no clear listener.

But when the same system is used with the year 11s, who take exams as one collective group of ~150 students in the assembly hall, they’re impressively patient and orderly about the whole thing. Certainly the acoustic reverb in the classroom makes things worse, but there’s still much to be said for how much more self-control the year 11s have in comparison to the year 9s.

Grow up.

I hope you’re well. Picture below.

My school's secretary, Fa'alau, asked me to take this picture of her next to the bulletin board.

Mufti

The closest I ever came to wearing a uniform to school in The States was sophomore year of high school when our water polo coach required us to wear ties to school on the day of one of our post-season regional championship games. And that doesn’t really count. I still wore jeans. Our starting defensive hole set Will wore a clip-on tie on the collar of his T-shirt. So I make no claims to knowing the joys and pitfalls of wearing a uniform to school, but I can assume that free-dress days are an exciting treat.

I vaguely remember friends of mine who went to private school talking about free-dress days as rewards in some sort of scholastic or behavioral incentive scheme. Here in Samoa free-dress days come at a different price: literally a price. On occasion schools will use free-dress days as a fundraiser. From what I hear, the fee tends to be nominal—the one my school had last week was $10—though some students’ families have a harder time paying for this than others, of course.

The free-dress fundraiser is referred to as a Mufti. Since this is definitely not a Samoan word (two consecutive consonants is a linguistic impossibility in Samoan), I can only assume the term comes from Kiwi influence. Oh good. As it turns out, Wikipedia has an insightful article about the Mufti’s etymology. Apparently the term is Arabic.

In any case, I have to say from what I hear from other volunteers, my school deals with financing really well. School staff runs a small profit off the student canteen, and that tends to cover nearly all extracurricular expenses. This is a rare arrangement in this country, and it explains why in all the time I’ve been here, last week’s Mufti (to subsidize school magazine printing costs) was my first. In fact, when Koa texted me about a Mufti at his school back in February of this year, I had no idea what the term meant. Blakey had to explain it to me.

Free-dress comes with all the excitement one would expect. Girls wear earrings and make-up. Boys find their own ways to accessorize—hats, sunglasses, and for some, make-up.

The event seemed like a bigger deal for the lower levels. The 9s and 10s were all about it. The older kids, particularly the student prefects, seemed rattled with adolescent indifference and shrugged off the day as though it simply meant they didn’t have to worry about ironing that morning. By nature of their position, student prefects are on campus outside the normal school day pretty often, and much of that time is spent out of uniform.

And now that I think about it, my year 12 computer class was a bit of a fashion show. One girl Taeone, the pebble in my teaching sandals, was dressed to the nines with vinyl gold sandals and designer sunglasses. Legalo wore her hair down. Vincent, who tries his best to channel Michael Jackson, was in top form. It was a crack up.

I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

Fautamara and Taeone.

Fanua and Eddie (who wore Vincent's sunglasses for this picture).

Boys from my year 10 English class. Vailima (in the middle) wore eye-liner. It was so punk rock.

Girls in my year 9 science class.

Akari from year 10. I have no idea what the 74 means.

Lock Down

Last Tuesday my year 13s begged me to open the computer lab during the open-study period from 9:30 p.m. until bed time at 11:00. While I was more opening the lab to the masses at the beginning of camp, I’ve lately been a little over camp, and sitting in the corner with a classroom full of year 13s looking at pictures on their flash drives and listening to the latest from J Boog isn’t my idea of a restful weekday evening. But I agreed to open the lab anyway. And none of them showed.

That’s right: I was stood up by my students. A few of the year 12 boys who live on campus came into the room around 10:40, and I let them use the computers for the final 20 minutes. As you can expect, I was cranky about the situation.

But then Amanda apologized the next morning, “Sorry about last night, Mista,” she said. “But they wouldn’t let us out of the classroom.” The idea that some overzealous teacher put the kibosh on the computer lab made more sense. Amanda went on, “I was so angry they wouldn’t let us out of study hall, I just didn’t study. They wouldn’t let me out. So I just sat there.” And then I was completely won over.

It’s totally something I would do. I’m all about irrational, pseudo-subversive responses to arbitrary rules. Would it have benefited Amanda to have spent that time studying rather than trying to make some pointless statement about the tyranny of the supervising teacher? Sure. But it’s much better to sacrifice studying in the name of a principle; it’s always a thrill to be the martyr.

Fast forward to tonight. The supervision rotation found all the players in the same spot for the first time since last week’s episode. And the year 13s were at it again begging me to open the lab.

“We’ll come this time, but you have to pick us up,” they told me. “[That teacher] is mean.” Speaking the name of the teacher in question, of course. Until this afternoon I hadn’t realize which teacher had been holding them in. The news was slightly surprising because I was under the impression it had been someone else, and yet not surprising at all because the story made much more sense now.

See, the students in question are all trustworthy. Most of them are student prefects. They don’t fit the profile of the cigarette-smoking rebels looking to sneak out and raise hell. To deny them passage to the computer lab seems a little extreme. But then again, what is the entire Hall Pass system, but a way of asserting one’s power? A hall pass is completely function-less except that it reminds students about the Rule of Law.

The entire situation became more ridiculous when I actually went to pick up my kids from The Big Bad Wolf tonight. The teacher coarsely acknowledged me as I approached, and then I said in a quiet tone, “Can I have the computer studies students?” The teacher, looking to hang on to the asserted power, barked at the students a bit before allowing them to go. But I didn’t stick around to listen.

I figure getting between Amanda the Martyr and The Great Authoritarian is no way to spend a Monday night.

I hope you’re well. Picture below.

Did I already post this picture? If I did, it's worth posting again. It's from a few months back when a student borrowed my camera for an event. I think the girl on the right is her little sister. They're darling.

Cultural Exploration 50: Fe’au

At my middle school and high school, students were allowed to take one period off in their schedule to be a Teacher’s Aide. While TAs in college were usually graduate students who would assist in teaching lab classes and take on other teaching duties, TAs in middle school and high school would do menial tasks like marking multiple choice tests based on an answer key or walk around collecting attendance sheets. While this isn’t the same sort small-time job as would be asked of a student doing a Samoan fe’au, the diminutive nature of the task is as close a parallel as I can find.

The literal translation of fe’au is an “errand” or “something to be done”. Within the context of school, this usually means an errand a student is running for a teacher. At my school it’s not unusual for a teacher to pull aside a trusted student, hand that student $5, and have the student walk across the street to buy Digicel phone credit or a cup of Ramen noodles. Often when asking a student to fulfill such a task, a teacher will ball up the $5-bill and toss it in the student’s direction, and the student will pick it off the floor.

Though fe’aus don’t always involve retail transactions, most involve moving a object from one place to another. Having a student do some heavy lifting or sending a message to another teacher via carrier student are both acceptable uses of fe’au; I’ve heard other volunteers talk about sending a student to retrieve items from the volunteer’s house.

Rules also differ from place to place. I heard from another volunteer that at his school, if a student is sent on a fe’au to buy phone credit, and the fale’oloa down the street is out , that student needs to keep walking until he finds phone credit. He’s essentially not allowed to return to school until the fe’au is completed. This mentality of not resting until the job is done is okay though because running a fe’au is a completely acceptable excuse for not showing up to class on time.

I am fascinated by the fe’au phenomenon for 2 reasons. First, most tasks seem either too menial or too risky to warrant a student’s participation. I don’t feel justified in asking a student to carry a stack of books thirty meters when I could just as easily do it myself, and I’m always a little terrified some kid is going to get hit by a car crossing the street to buy me phone credit.

My second fascination is choosing the student to run the fe’au. When I have a task in mind, I will think of a specific student and then seek out him or her. Whereas other teachers seem willing to trust any random kid to run an errand.

I guess what I’m trying to say is I never could have implemented the fe’au system in Oakland Unified. I would have been fired for child endangerment, and I would have been out $5.

Tomorrow’s Cultural Exploration: The Question Melody

I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

This kid approached Dan and me to sell us pens. We chatted with him.

Jackfruit growing at Blakey's pule's house.

At the Zoo

I’ve been teaching my year 10 English class Simon and Garfunkel’s “At the Zoo”. For those unfamiliar with the piece, the latter verse of the short song is a rundown of the state of inter-species politics at the Central Park Zoo. “Zebras are reactionaries / Antelopes are missionaries” etc. The effect is that of a children’s song written for adults, and I feel like there’s got to be some good English lessons to be taken away. So all week I’ve been using the song for more than just singing.

It’s not ideal though. For one, Samoa doesn’t have a zoo, so the concept is obscure if not baffling to my kids. Going along with that, I don’t think most of my kids have seen a giraffe in person, or an elephant or very many of the other creatures in Simon and Garfunkel’s menagerie. But there are occasional nature shows on TV here. My host family had a few books with pictures of various animals from around the world. So we’ve been making do.

This posed a problem yesterday when I had my kids try and draw the animals the way the song describes them. Monkeys standing for honesty went okay, and portraying a kindly-but-dumb elephant was easy enough, but the kid who drew the reactionary zebra was clearly taking shots in the dark. The class corrected him, but I so loved his original picture I had him re-draw it after he erased it.

It’s difficult describing an animal to a person who’s never seen one before. How do I explain an antelope? “It’s similar to a skinny goat, and it can run very fast.” And an orangutan? “It’s like a gorilla with longer arms. It’s from Indonesia.” And a hamster? “Similar to a mouse.”

Today’s lesson was my favorite though. We wrote our own bizarre personifications of Samoan animalia. The animals we came up with were less “zoo” and more “petting zoo”—dogs, cats, cows, pigs—but that didn’t hinder the assignment.

At first the kids had a difficult time wrapping their minds around the concept. I got a lot of sentences like “The dogs don’t like the cats, but they do like bones.” I told them to separate themselves from real life, and to try to think of something funny.

Their reactions were entertaining. “What if you walked up to the fale’oloa, and there was a cow behind the counter?” I asked. “Would a cow be good with money?” I asked this question to several times to several different groups of students, and each time they answered with a confident, “No.”

It took a while, but the concept slowly dawned on a few. As a class we came up with, “Cats are lousy drivers.” A couple other highlights included:

• Cows often play rugby, but they’re slow;
• Chickens are very cheeky (which I liked for the consonance); and
• (My personal favorite:) Pigs are strong and silly, and they always want to play dress-up games.

Now that’s the spirit.

I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

It's a nice pigeon. The hamster looks a little like Sonic the Hedgehog. The antelope looks like an unidentified giant microbe. Maybe Listeria?

The beautifully drawn orangutan, the zookeeper, and the amazing zebra, which is amazingly reminiscent of Trogdor (Watch the whole video.).

Year 9 Nakisa wins my unpublished magazine award for best smile.

Camp

It’s 10:35 p.m., and I’m sitting in the computer lab listening to a barrage of Rhianna, Justin Bieber, and Glee. All the year 13 students are camping here on campus for the next two weeks in order to cram for the Congregationalist school common exams in early October. For the next 2 weeks I’ll be teaching an extra 75-minute period Monday through Thursday. Yup. Year 13 Camp is on once more, and I’ve decide to embrace the teeny-bopper music aspect.

In effect, it’s the beginning of the end: 2 weeks of camp, 2 weeks of tests, 2 more weeks of camp, 2 more weeks of tests. From there it’s a short trot to Prizegiving. There’s that feeling in the air I vaguely remember from my last semesters of high school and college, where one suddenly realizes things aren’t going to last forever.

It’s true: I’m probably more in tune with that feeling because my year 13s’ end is my end too. Let’s not dwell too much on this.

Camp is exciting. Everything about it seems new. Some things feel like breaking the rules: the students wear street clothes rather than uniforms, I wear shorts and a t-shirt rather than my typical Hawaiian shirt and ’ie faitaga. It feels like rules are being broken; like we’ve gone behind the scenes a little. I went running tonight, and I admit I thought a little more about walking past everyone to get off campus. They’re going to see me go running, I thought. That’s weird.

It’s the other side of that teacher mystique. I remember thinking it bizarre to imagine my teachers going home and performing menial tasks. Buying groceries, washing the car on Saturday, feeding the dog. Weird.

But now, as I said, I’m on the other side. I can’t have students know that I go running. Or that I occasionally wear the same t-shirt 3 days in a row. Or that I can’t help singing along to “Don’t Stop Believing” in my own terrible, shrill voice. Oh well.

I’m not wholly convinced that Camp makes much of a difference in the kids’ performance on the tests. Right now I can hear several playing Mavis Beacon and two looking at pictures from someone’s flash drive and giggling. But it’s hard to believe the alternative is better necessarily.

Staying at home has its own distractions with feaus and TV and little brothers and sisters to look after. At least staying here offers a quiet place to study. Provided you’re not in earshot of whichever Beyoncé song is on right now.

Although tonight is the first night, which means everyone’s going to stay up until at least 3 o’clock in the morning, and then show up to my class exhausted tomorrow.

Meh. Whatever. It’s camp.

I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

My year 13s wanted to take a class photo after tonight's session. I really like this picture. I almost printed it tonight.

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Okay. So these next photos are so creepy, I've decided to link to them rather than display them. If you want to take a peek, you're going to have to click. That way I'm not to blame. Proceed with caution.

Last night before I went to meet up with some guys at the movies, I went to use the bathroom before I left, and I noticed the floor in front of my shower was covered in ants. Covered. I'm estimating well over 20,000 ants. I sprayed them with Mortein and headed to the movies to clean up the mess later.

Photo 1

This is the carnage 24 hours after the fact. The edges of the floor are still dense with ants.

Photo 2

This is a slightly closer view of that density.

Photo 3

Even closer.

Photo 4

The pile of ant cadavers after sweeping. My estimate of >20,000 ants comes from the size of this pile. Gross.

The Missing Article

The magazine is almost done, save for a few glaring gaps I have no control over. One teacher has decided to be a stickler about students in his class photo making various benign hand gestures—despite the ubiquity of such hand gestures in the rest of the magazine. Another decided too many of her students were absent the first time we took the class portrait, so she also wants a re-take. And the head of each department is supposed to submit a report; I’ve received one so far: my own.

And then there’s Tauinaola.

Before the break I hand-picked my own student yearbook committee and tasked each student with one article per person. From my calculation, there were 9 articles to be written, and I chose 9 students from years 12 and 13, each of whom:

• I like; and
• Was personally involved in the subject s/he was assigned to cover.

I asked one of the biology students, Sera, to write about the biology field trip; I asked Rubgy player James to write about the rugby season; I asked year 12 Sam to write about English Day; etc. I assigned the articles, and since most of the school is quietly anticipating the magazine, my prospective committee members were all eager beavers.

I gave them a 2-day deadline, which made them all grimace slightly, but most handed it in no problem. Sure, there were a couple of stragglers, but I’d chosen my team carefully, and many were participating in the Tahitian-hosting over the break. So there was ample time to badger them about the article.

But Tauinaola is a special kind of straggler.

I know because I am one myself. How often does the blog go up way after deadline? The 8:00 p.m. post time is fudged far more than 50% of the time. Sometimes if it’s posted late at night, I’ll change to an 11:00 p.m. post. If it’s the day (or days) after, I’ll give it an 11:59 p.m. tag. You can go back and count all the times I’ve been late.

So because of this, I’ve been a little more persistent with her. Every time I’ve seen her since I gave her the assignment, I’ve asked for it, and every time she’s told me she’d give it to me the next day. Whatever.

This morning Tauinaola is about 4 weeks late with getting her article in, and since I can do little else for the magazine at this point, I decided to track her down this morning. During my free period, I headed toward the 12.1 classroom.

Compared to my high school, my school here is pretty small. It’s pretty much one long building, so it’s just a matter of finding out where someone probably is, and making sure you don’t run into him/her before you get there.

As luck would have it, Tauinaola came to the top of the stairs at the end of the year 12 wing when I was about 20 yards behind. She turned in the direction opposite me, and started walking at a quick pace. I assume she’d been sent on an errand of some kind that she was returning from.

She walked with purpose, and even though I quickened my own gait, I could not catch her. She briefly swung her head to the side to look out at the field, and I thought for a second she saw me out of the corner of her eye, but her expression didn’t change if she did.

I could have called out to her, but there were a lot of people around, and singling a student out—particularly a female student—is a little taboo. 12.1 is at the end of the bloc, and I figured I’d catch her there.

But she kept going. She passed 12.1 and went down the stairs at the end of the building without slowing. There was a boy at the top of the stairs, who I didn’t know, who said something to her, and then chuckled at her reaction. When he turned to face me, he desperately tried to hide his smile, and I immediately knew what was going on.

Despite the broad daylight, the whole situation had a noir-ish feel. Her over-the-shoulder glance, the quickness in her step, the cryptic smirk of the kid at the top of the stairs. I’ve read enough detective novels. I put the clues together.

So I wasn’t surprised when she wasn’t on the stairs when I rounded the corner; nor when I reached the bottom of the stairs, looked both ways, and didn’t see her in either direction.

But I got Sam Spade skills. As it turns out, I am a master at Hide and Seek. I have a wealth of experience in the game, and I’m as good a hider as anyone. But there are two sides to the game, and as good as I am at hiding, I’m terribly good at seeking.

I crept slightly around the bottom of the stairs and saw a pair of feet in Jandals trying desperately to mold to the cement staircase. So I quietly turned around and snuck around in the other direction.

At this point, the absurdity of the situation hit me. “Are you seriously hiding from me?” I couldn’t help laughing.

She burst into giggles.

Long story short: she didn’t have the article. Maybe tomorrow. Either that or she’d better look for a better hiding spot.

Update! The day after the Hide and Seek incident, Tauinaola turned in her article. I think she also though the incident absurd.

I hope you’re well. Picture below.

Fautamara on the left, Gasologa on the right, and Tauinaola in the center on the landing of the staircase she would later use for a hiding place.

Primary School Tour

I’ve got new respect for the 82s. The Peace Corps office commission- ed Kaelin 82 to produce a video about co-teaching that can be shown to incoming PCVs and to primary schools where the new PCVs will work. Kaelin, in turn, employed me to head up videotaping and editing. So yesterday, along with language instructor Mafi and Peace Corps staff member Papu, the 4 of us visited 3 schools to get footage of primary school kids doing their thing, as well as interviews with teachers, principals, and volunteers. And I must say, I was impressed with what I saw.

Our first stop was at Jenny Uefa’s school. The plan was to tape the kids singing a song, and then to interview the principal and a few students. I’m used to my school, where we have over 30 people on staff, and more than 700 students. Though our campus is relatively compact, the amount of activity on school days is sprawling. Primary schools, on the other hand, tend to be tiny and intimate. Kyle 82’s school, has a staff of 4, and a student body of 85. I have nothing in my experience, as a teacher or as a student, to know what that’s like.

In any case, the small nature of the school means when a bunch of palagi visitors come rolling in with video cameras, it’s big news. Everything stops. So at Jenny Uefa’s, I setup the camera, and her kids sang a pretty good rendition of “We Are the World”. “We Are the World” was popular at my school even before the devastation in Haiti and the new version was released. So seeing a classroom full of Samoan kids singing it didn’t impress me. But then while we were interviewing the principal, the class started singing Bob Marley’s “Every Little Thing’s Gonna Be All Right”. Now that was something to warm the heart.

Next we were off to Corina’s school. Unbeknownst to me, Corina is quite the artist, and she’s spent much time decorating her classroom with amazingly stylized posters and activities. Her classroom could easily rival that of a good elementary school in The States. Phonics and vocabulary and grammar litter the walls to such a degree, I set up the camera to tape the interview, and then spent the rest of the time marveling. I took a lot of pictures. You can see them below.

Corina’s school fed us lunch. Apparently I made a good impression because I ate my fried fish with my hands rather than my fork.

Our last stop was Kaelin’s own school. Kaelin spent the day bragging about her kids’ English. “It’s certainly not because of my teaching,” she told me. “But when I got to my school, my kids just had amazing English.” And they did.

During their taped interview, Kaelin asked a couple of kids why they thought it was important to learn English. One girl answered, “It’s important to learn English in order to communicate internationally, with friends and family overseas.” None of my year 10s speak English that well.

Keep up the good work, 82.
Note: Frequently readers know I try to stay away from using last names. Note Uefa is not Jenny’s last name, but rather, her Samoan name. Since there are 2 Jennys in group 82, we use their Samoan names, Sieni and Uefa, to identify them. Anonymity is intact.

I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

Flashcards taped to the chalkboard.

Parts of Speech posters.

Vocabulary on the back of the door.

A cat writing a letter. Hey Corina, after the Peace Corps just go ahead and illustrate children's books. You're ready.

The Phonics Corner.

Kaelin interviewing Corina's pule in The Phonics Corner.

This girl scowled at me. So I took her picture.

Kaelin doing a ridiculous dance with some of her students.

Babel

“They eat with forks,” Thanpuii reminded the student who was laying out the silverware. This is just one example of many cultural nuances that surfaced in preparing dinner for the Tahitians. Between the Indian missionaries, the Samoan natives, the Tahitian rugby players, and my American self, the entire afternoon was a master’s class in culture and cross-cultural relations. It was chaotic and fascinating. And the food was all right.

My school’s staff and student prefects have been divided into 3 groups, which change duty each day. That is, group 1 prepared food yesterday, group 2 was on duty today, group 3 will come in tomorrow, group 1 the day after. As a member of group 2, I spent the late afternoon and most of the evening preparing dinner with teachers and a bunch of year 12s and 13s. While I’m not too keen on teaching, it’s extra-curricular activities like this where the setting is less formal that I relish the job.

Structurally, the schedule of events was Samoan: we cooked the food, watched the Tahitian guests eat, then the teachers ate, and then the students. I spent most of the day hovering in the background trying to help when I could, but mostly leaving the main thrust of the meal preparation to others. Too many cooks spoil the soup (or in this case, the curry), and I didn’t want to mettle with what seemed like a pretty organized system. So I laid back.

Tahiti was colonized by France, and the Tahitian rugby teams consequently speaks French. No English. Since our non-French-speaking staff has been charged with organizing the team’s logistics, language is a key issue. I’ve been on Savai’i since the team arrived, and hopes were high I would be able to communicate with the Tahitians. Sorry, everybody. I took four and a half years of Spanish, which is of no use in this situation. Everyone’s been getting by with pantomime and pictures though, which works well enough.

Communication has been a bigger problem with the Oceania Rugby Union giving our staff certain directives that haven’t gone over well in practice. For example, the union told us that the team should eat lots of fruits and vegetables. At last night’s dinner, the team barely touched the fruits and vegetables, instead opting for meat. I think some students and staff were miffed about this, but I think these sort of kinks will get worked out over the next 2 weeks.

It was hilarious watching students interact. My year 13 Amanda was a Chatty Cathy going on and on about how the Tahitians don’t like the food and only ate scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast and how the girls from group 1 got in trouble last night for being too cheeky with the players and how it’s strange that they drink so much juice and blah blah blah.

Dinner was served buffet-style, but the girls, who changed into pulatasis just before dinner was served, tripped over one another for the opportunity to go around to offer the players extra food or to fill up their drinks. Romance can be taboo in Samoa, and having a slew of athletic, exotic young men is a rare treat for a female adolescent.

Overall, I had a good time tonight, which is good because we’re doing the whole thing again on Wednesday when it’s group 2’s turn again.

I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

Girls serving the team.

Students flank Suasami, who is also in group 2.

Year 12 Gasologa.

Goof balls.

Rolling Out the Red Carpet

I slept through most of first period, as I am wont to do most Wednesdays. I don’t have a first period class on Wednesday, and since I literally live a stone’s throw from school, I can afford to wake up 20 minutes before second period and still get to work on time. When I opened my eyes, the cat’s eyes looked directly back at mine from not more than 4 inches away. The cat, as she is wont to do, wakes up most mornings around 6 a.m. and waits (im)patiently for me to feed her. But this particular morning, something was different: there was noise.

On Mondays, I listen for singing. When I wake up to the sound of one cohesive song, it means all of the students are gathered in the assembly hall, and I can take an extra snooze on account of first period starting a half-hour late. Most other mornings I awake to the quiet murmur of students in the schoolyard awaiting the first bell.

But today, there was more than a murmur. It was more than a stir. The sound was that of students jovially enjoying the morning, excited about a long day free of school. And that’s exactly what they were in store for.

Term 2 is finished. Tahiti’s Oceania Games Rugby Team arrives this Saturday at 4:00 a.m., and the rest of this week is officially devoted to rolling out the red carpet. Walking across campus this morning, I saw students bleaching walls and floors, sweeping, mopping, painting, carting desks, weeding, burning trash, raking grass clippings, et cetera. The art students were hard at work, half of them finishing assembly hall murals, while the rest worked on a welcome banner for the Tahiti team.

Over the last year and a half, I’ve seen my school put in a pretty good effort on so-called cleaning days, but nothing has compared to today. Later in the morning locksmiths came in to replace the doorknobs on several of the classroom doors—including the computer lab. As you may recall, the computer lab has been without a working doorknob ever since my year 13s and I were trapped inside last year. I’ve been lobbying for a new doorknob ever since to no avail, but one lousy rugby team comes out of the woodwork, and I get a new doorknob, no questions asked.

With all of this shipshape intensity, I find it difficult to find a good place to apply myself, so I’ve decided to work on my own small projects. There’s been a small backlog of student IDs I’ve been meaning to print, so I used some time this morning to get those in order. I was also able to print sample photos of each form class, which I passed out to teachers so they can give me a detailed list of which student is in which row.

On the whole, it was a rather productive day. And no more teaching for three and a half weeks. Sweet.

I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

Bananas hang outside the classrooms that will host the team.

Students scrubbing.

Students weeding.

Students taking a break from cleaning and banana-hanging to lean over the 2nd-floor balcony.

The year 12/year 11 building with students all over the place.