After a week of teaching at PICS (Pohnpei Island Central School), I know that this is going to be a challenging year, but I look forward to overcoming the obstacles—and surely, there will be many ridiculous obstacles, if I’ve learned anything about Pohnpei in the past month—and getting to know my students, who are all amazing young people. Teaching is, it almost goes without saying, extremely tiring. I was prepared to work hard, but I’m not sure if I was expecting to be so exhausted at the end of every day. I’m teaching four classes of Algebra II, all students on the academic track (although the placement seems to be, to a certain extent, arbitrary). I teach from 8:30am to 3:30pm, with a 1-hour lunch break from 11:30 to 12:30. The classes are supposed to be 1 hour 30 minutes in length, but I’ve quickly learned that this is not the case. The “bell” is a SCUBA oxygen tank hanging from a tree in the center of campus. There’s a man who comes and bangs on the tank every so often, but regularity and timing don’t seem to be his specialty. On Tuesday morning, the bell to end first period rang at 9:30, cutting this class an hour short. The bell rang again at 11:15, making second period almost 2 hours long. Wish me luck when I have four classes that are days apart in lesson planning. Another puzzling aspect of the school schedule is that lack of time in between classes. Rather than including 5-minutes between classes so students can make their way across campus from one building to another, the next class begins immediately after the end of the previous class. So, everyone is, effectively, always late.
On the first day of class, we didn’t have any electricity. No lights or fans. This is a developing country, but we didn’t lack power because of a deficiency in infrastructure (at least not directly). Pohnpei runs on a cash power system; you go to the Pohnpei Utilities Corporation (PUC) and buy “cash power.” Then, you go to your home/school/office/etc. and type the number on your PUC receipt into the indoor cash power meter. Instantly, your power is recharged, until it runs out again. You can also buy cash power cards, just like phone cards, at bodegas, but you’re charged an extra 50 cents for each $5 card you buy. The going rate for cash power is 36 cents per kWh (kilowatt hour). If you run out of cash power, the power shuts off, and just like that you’re in the dark, without a fan, and the $18 gallon of ice cream you splurged on is melting in the freezer. (This has happened twice at my house already, the power outage not the ice cream melting; I can’t afford ice cream.) So, the reason why there was no power at school was because someone, whoever’s job it is to recharge the cash power, didn’t do it in time for the first day of school. However, there has been power since the second day of class and one day late is pretty good, if you’re existing in Pohnpeian time. There’s a phrase here, called “Pohnpei met” (pronounced “metch”), which basically means, “This is island time. Don’t hold your breath.”
I have about 120 students, give or take a few; students have been transferring in and out of my classes so I’m not sure of the exact head-count yet. Three of my classes have just over 30 students and one class is smaller, just over 20. I have a couple of students who are 15 years old (not sure what they’re doing in the 12th grade) and the oldest is 20. I was warned that I might have students as old as 25, so this was a pleasant surprise. I told my students that I’m 27 years old—hopefully they won’t ask me what I did after college. I’m trying to learn their names (among the 1000 other things I’m trying to do—teaching is a whirlwind of multitasking) and gauge where each one of them is in terms of mathematical skills. They actually know more than I thought they would. I gave them a pretest on Tuesday and they did fairly well. They know basic math for the most part, although a lot of students made simple mistakes when adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. But when I went over addition and subtraction on Tuesday, I know that a lot of them were bored.
My goal is to bring the stragglers up to speed—there are a couple of kids in each class who just bombed the pretest. A lot of them struggle with fractions, negative numbers, and solving simple equations. Hardly any of them know how to calculate the slope of a line, given two points on the line. So, I’m not exactly starting with Algebra II. The only textbooks I have (there are about 15 of them) are Algebra II textbooks, which they’re not nearly ready for. So, I’m kind of winging it. Last week I got through basic operations and my plan for this week is to cover prime numbers, fractions, mixed numbers, and decimals. I have my lesson plan done for tomorrow (Monday), but just a basic outline for the rest of the week. There is so much planning involved in teaching! At least, for now, I understand what I’m teaching them. I know I’m going to have to relearn a lot of concepts later in the semester—I’m not sure if I even remember what a logarithmic function looks like.
At least the ridiculousness of PICS and Pohnpei is amusing, sometimes even endearing. On Wednesday, I was reviewing pretest answers in second period when smoke started pouring into the room. My eyes were watering and all of my students were coughing. At one point the smoke was so thick that I could barely read the board. When I looked outside, I saw that the school was burning a trashcan full of garbage right below my classroom. It smelled awful—like burning plastic, hair, and the chemicals I used to perm my hair once—and my students begged me to dismiss them. If they hadn’t begged, I probably would have let them go, but I didn’t want to seem like I was succumbing to their desire to get out of class early. So we stuck it out, despite their argument that school was giving them cancer (and I could hardly disagree). Delightfully enough, this same trashcan was again set aflame on Thursday afternoon. I sure hope this isn’t a regular occurrence.
Unrelated to school, I got to SCUBA dive here for the first time last Sunday! I went out with five others on Sunday afternoon, to a long jetty in Awak (about 20 minutes outside of Kolonia). We lugged our gear to the end of the mangrove-covered strip of land and waded into the water, which got deep surprisingly quickly. The reef was in pretty bad shape—there was lots of dead coral; I did see a crown of thorns, a starfish that decimates coral, but I suspect that most of the damage is a result of human activity. There weren’t very many fish and the visibility wasn’t great. It had rained all night and all morning and we probably should have waited another half hour before diving; I think we caught the end of slack tide. We found our way back to our entry point by following a trail of beer cans littering the reef. However, I was just thrilled to be diving and all of my new gear worked perfectly. I have a 3 mm wetsuit, which probably isn’t necessary in the tepid water here, but I certainly wasn’t overly warm. I did manage to reset my dive computer while I was underwater (need to read through that instruction manual one more time), but it didn’t really matter because we were only doing a one-tank dive and my depth gauge and compass are separate from the computer. So the overall quality of the dive wasn’t great, but it only cost $8 (the price of the air). So I was very pleased with the experience and just happy to be 60 feet below the surface of the ocean.
One more update before I return to lesson planning: I’ve been eating fish! It’s so weird and chewing the flesh between my teeth really freaks me out, but the vegetarian options here are limited, at best. And if there’s any place to eat fish, this is probably it. Otherwise I’m going to get really fat eating rice and potatoes all the time. I feel bad about partaking in the consumption of the ocean’s ever-depleting resources, but I think it’s my only option if I want to be even remotely healthy here. So, I guess I’m a pescatarian for now. Not a title that I’m thrilled with, but maybe I’ll get used to it.
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