Manila Update

Tagalog Word of the Day: Magkano? = “How much?”

When I first came to the Phillipines, the one thing I had my heart set on doing was going to a water park called Splash Island – I read online that the entrance fee was only 250 pesos, which is a bit more than $5, and I figured it was just the kind of break I needed. Unfortunately, when I landed, JB and JC set me straight – Splash Island is a good 90 minutes out of Manila, too far to travel by anything but bus.

I realized as soon as I mentioned it I had made a bit of a cultural (or at least regional) faux-pas. It was like flying in to Miami and asking to go to Wild Waters – they just kept suggesting various historical places and museums, and I felt stupid for wanting to go on a water slide. I realized my half hour of research on the internet hadn’t really prepared me for all the possibilities Manila had to offer, let alone the rest of the Phillipines.

Still, there was one other place I had on my list, and tourist-haven or not, I had to check out – the Mall of Asia. It's the third-largest mall in the world by square footage, and I felt it would be a welcome respite from shopping in Palm Terrace every day.

On Friday morning I set off with JB, walking down Arlegui street to the corner where we could catch me a taxi. As I walked down this street, I could barely take it all in – there were places where the poverty absolutely takes your breath away. There was a burned down husk of a building, now just a forest of unstable pillars with the floor piled high with trash, and yet people walking through it, shoveling piles from place to place – why I don’t know. People were living on the street, sometimes in the small shops they ran there. It was a kind of squalor I have never seen in Pohnpei

On the other hand, there is color everywhere. Not merely the anthemic colors of our big chains – the Target red, the Chick-Fil-A white, the Wal-Mart blue on every corner – but whatever wild and mismatching colors the owners of this pedicab, or that soda stand, decided to brighten up the street with. Everything is hand-painted and no one takes themselves too seriously. In a way, its incredibly beautiful.

The streets are crammed with pedicabs (sidecars attached to small motorbikes or bicycles) and jeepneys (converted WWII-era jeeps, painted wild colors and carrying a dozen or two people in each). They jostle past each other, moving in and out of lanes and driving at seemingly insane speeds, but the drivers someone avoid each other, as though communicating telepathically – riding in a cab here will take ten years off of your life.

Eventually, JB managed to hail a cab for me, and I sped off for the MOA. When I got out of the cab and paid the driver his 100 pesos ($2), I was confronted with the most incredibly beautiful sign I have ever seen: “Hypermarket”. Imagine a Super Wal-Mart on steroids, only so colorful that it is actually pleasant to walk around it – then imagine how it must feel to do that after five months of shopping in the same poorly stocked, tiny supermarket and you’ll get the idea.

The mall itself is absolutely insane – several hundred stores, the hypermarket, an IMAX theatre along with a regular eight-screen cinema, a science discovery center, and a giant ice-skating rink. I spent the whole day there, playing in the arcades, eating in the food courts, watching The Day the Earth Stood Still in the largest movie theatre I have ever been in – honestly, I did very little shopping. Most of my Christmas presents were bought in Pohnpei, but I did manage to walk away from the MOA with a package of cigars that the salesperson said were the best in the Philippines.

The next day, I decided to visit the Intramuros, a historical district in Manila. The word means literally “between the walls” – the walls in question were constructed by the Spanish during the colonial period, at the site of an old Muslim trading post. The same walls housed MacArthur’s administration building, and the region inside them was designated a historical district and restorations were begun under Ferdinand Marcos.

Fortunately, the Intramuros is not far from the apartment I am staying at, so I decided to walk there. The walk took me over a canal, brimming with garbage (mostly old bleach bottles) and lined with tiny slum tenements… I could see children swimming in the fetid water, less than a kilometer from Malacañang palace, the residence of the president of the Philippines.

After I crossed the Ayala bridge and hung a right on Natividad Almeda-Lopez, I found myself once again in the other Manila as I passed yet another SM mega-mall. After passing the Bonifacio memorial, I found myself near the entrance to the Intramuros district. I grabbed a passing pedicab and had the driver take me around the perimeter until we came to Fort Santiago.

From there, I shared a tour of the historical district with a couple from Canada – we split the cost of a thousand pesos. Our tour guide, George, was hilarious and very thorough. The tour wound through the Intramuros on a horse-drawn carriage, and eventually ended back at Fort Santiago, where we walked through a museum dedicated to one of the heroes of Phillipine independence, Dr. Jose Rizal.

After my tour, I headed south through the Intramuros to the adjacent park named after Dr. Rizal. I found a free concert set up there, with thousands of people standing about watching. All of sudden, two Phillipino women walked up and began asking me questions about my tattoos. Soon we were all heading down to the Baywalk, where I captured the amazing picture of the sunset above.

While we waited on the Baywalk, these women were soon joined by a group of their friends. It was one of their birthdays, and they were planning to celebrate with some karaoke and disco. We all piled into a Jeepney (my first ride) and headed to the karaoke place, but it was closed, and so we headed to the birthday-girl's house for a traditional Phillipino dinner her mom had prepared. At some point, a 40-oz bottle of San Miguel was brought out and shared, and then another.

Afterwards, we went out to the disco, but I don't really remember much about it. I was so exhausted at this point that I kept nodding off mid-conversation. Finally, one of the guys carried me out of the club and hailed me a taxi. I would think they had drugged me, but none of my cash was missing... it was probably just delayed jet-lag.

The next day I took it easy - the biggest event was my breakfast with JC and JR's girlfriend, at this place called Heaven n' Eggs. I stayed around the apartment most of the day watching my House DVDs. At some point I hit the bootleg DVD market down the street – I got two seasons of Prison Break on a single disc, for 50 pesos (about $1), along with a lot of other similar bargains. Did you know Quantum of Solace is already out on DVD? ;)

On Monday I returned to the Mall of Asia to mail my christmas presents home – the process ended up taking me forever! I got them wrapped in one shop, bought cardboard boxes to mail them in, then I had to go online to get some addresses and finally hit an ATM for the cash to send them. It ended up taking a few hours, and by the time I was done I just headed home to watch more bootleg DVDs.

The next day, I visited the Manila Ocean Park – it definitely wasn't worth the 500 pesos I paid to get in, but it was still pretty cool. The most interesting part was the Fish Spa, where you put your feet in a pool with little reef fish that come and eat the dead skin off them – it tickles like you wouldn't believe. At the end, I got a "glass bottom boat" ride across the giant tank I had walked through earlier in a tunnel. I went through the whole place in an hour and a half.

After the Ocean Park, I hailed a taxi to the Manila Zoo. This was way cheaper - only 40 pesos to get in, and considerably more worth the price. They didn't have many animals, but it is just a tiny urban zoo, and they did have a tiger. Check out the video.

The next day, I chilled out at the apartment again to watch some bootleg DVDs - I'm bringing home like a dozen. Right now I'm staying in the Hyatt downtown - I checked in last night to give myself a little break from the tiny apartment in Quiapo. I'm leaving for the provinces soon, so I'll probably be out of touch until after Christmas. Anyway, that's all for now – enjoy this video of my last Jeepney ride about town, and have a happy holidays if I don't post before then! :)

Welcome to Manila!!!

Tagalog Word of the Day: Malagayang Pasko! = "Merry Christmas!"

Well, my first semester is finally over!

The last few weeks have been completely insane – I taught all day during the week and graded all weekend. I didn’t visit the Doses at all, or see any new Pohnpei sights… I need this break more than I’ve ever needed a break in my life! Three whole weeks without any responsibilities at all – I need a vacation from my vacation. :)

My classes ended fairly well – I ended up failing about a third of my students, but I can confidently say that everyone who got an F worked very hard to earn it. I collected some 70 grades for every student, so nobody can complain that a bad score on one or two tests drove their average down. Most of those Fs are students who only came to class two or three days a week (we meet for five), and when they did come to class they spent most of it chatting with their friends or sleeping.

On the other hand, I did give four or five students in every class an A, and I can confidently say that these were equally well deserved. Although some of these students were obviously very skilled in math, and may have been taking a course below their level, there were also a bunch who obviously worked very hard and spent a lot of time studying and improving themselves. They will definitely succeed in their next class.

I have already begun putting together my schedule and syllabus for MS 95 next semester – one of the mistakes I made last semester was not doing enough long-term planning, so that I was only really aware of what I planned to talk about the next week. I want to do a lot more activities and fewer lectures with my COM students, like I’ve been doing with my TSP students. Also, I’m giving fewer assignments so I won’t be swamped with grading – I only plan to give my MS 100 section four monthly tests, and maybe a short quiz once a week.

As for TSP, that has been going very well, although it has been completely draining me of energy. The timing of the class really sucks – most of the time, I have just enough time after teaching my COM classes to rest and recuperate, and then I have to rush off to TSP, after which I’m too exhausted to do anything else. If it were right after my regular classes (like it is for Tanja) I would probably be able to do more work during the week, and spend my weekends having fun.

I have made a real connection with my TSP students that has evaded me at COM… because I don’t feel under any pressure to cover a set amount of material, I take as much time as they need and make myself more open to questions. The students really like me, and we usually spend some time before class chatting, so I’ve gotten to know them better on a personal level. On my birthday, they sang to me, and everyone was disappointed when I told them last night that I was leaving for Christmas in Manila.

So, besides classes, what else has been going on? Let me see… it’s been a while since I posted anything here.

I was the Joker, à la Heath Ledger, for Halloween. I died my hair green with Kool-Aid and food coloring – it worked better than you might think (my hair is still a little green actually), although I had to spend a night with my head burning and wrapped in Saran Wrap, wondering if all my hair was going to fall out in the morning. I also got a makeup kit from Yoshie, and I made sure to put it all on before my first class that day. My students got a kick out of it (although most of them didn’t know who I was supposed to be), and fortunately I was just proctoring a test that day – I never could have taught in that get-up.


(By the way, The Dark Knight is officially my favorite movie this year, although there were some parts I didn’t like – namely, those with Christian Bale in them. What was that guy doing in a movie about the Joker anyway? Two words, Christopher Nolan… “more Joker”! Oh, and make a sequel to Memento… or would that be a prequel?)

Pohnpeians do Halloween in style – they’re not exactly big on elaborate costumes (I saw a few kids with just a towel on their head), but the kids love the free candy aspect. As soon as it got dark, they come out in groups of a dozen or so – strolling along the main road without adults (except for the really little ones), gleefully oblivious to the threat of oncoming cars, neighborhood pedophiles and satanists who put razor blades in Hershey’s bars. It’s the kind of trick or treating nobody does in America anymore, and it ran on late – I still saw big groups knocking on doors at ten o’clock.

A few days later, I had my 22nd birthday. Mom got me a giftcard from Amazon, and I bought a bunch of the DVDs on my wishlist. Dad got me the iPod speakers I wanted, much to the annoyance of my poor roommate – now I can watch shoot-em-ups and really feel the walls explode. The day of, I wanted to go to Joy and have myself a Pohnpei Pepper Steak (which is, yes, as good as it sounds) – but I slipped and fell in some mud walking home from TSP, and so I opted against it and went the next day.

Because of the international date line, my birthday here was actually the same day as the election back home. They announced the results in the afternoon (for us), and a group of volunteers met up at Oceanview Café to watch the news coverage. When I walked in, they were already there, beaming from ear to ear. Erin told me she had two great birthday presents for me – Obama won, and Florida went blue. I wonder what the return policy is on those gifts, in case I don’t like them…?

Despite the fact that I think his election is to politics what the Atkins diet is to nutrition (a sexy, celebrity-endorsed quick fix with no real evidence of its efficacy), I wish Barry the best of luck – I hope he is everything the American people hope he will be. All of the other volunteers (raving liberals to a man) seemed excited and relieved, but I told them the results were never really in doubt for me, and shouldn’t have been in doubt for anyone remotely familiar with our love affair with tall, dark and handsome politicians – for me, the interesting part will be the cabinet picks and the first hundred days. I hear he’s thinking about Hillary for state… if he really goes with her, I take back everything I just said.

Personally, I predict that Michele Obama turns out to be an inspiring first lady, the true moral and intellectual center of her husband’s efforts. She will take an active role in the administration, and be constantly derided for it with accusations of her being “co-president” and not spending enough time baking cookies for her children. Barack will have a series of unimportant affairs which will be blown way out of proportion by the opposition, but his charm will still be impossible to overcome, and Obama-Biden will defeat Palin-Keyes to earn their second term in 2012. After they leave office in 2016, Michele will enjoy a successful career as the junior senator from her home state of Nevada.

Meanwhile, the tremendous success of the Obama administration will have left the world a more peaceful and prosperous place, so Americans will naturally stop giving a hoot about politics and elect a Bush again – let’s say Jeb this time, but I’m not ruling out the possibility of Neil. Terrorists will attack us again, and Michele will naturally bow to the political reality of the public’s irrational fears and vote to invade Iran. The war will turn out to be a great disaster, and she will soon begin to speak out against it. Eventually, she will run for president in 2024, when her previous sixteen years of moral but practical opposition will be spun to make her look like a “beltway insider”. She will put up a good fight, but eventually be defeated in the primaries by… Chelsea Clinton.

Which will make my 38th birthday rock.

A few weeks later, the Pohnpei rotary club held a trivia night at the PCR Hotel. I have never seen so many people at a trivia night – there were at least a hundred or so, broken into six-person teams. Unfortunately, I didn’t hear about it until the actual night, so I got stuck with people who didn’t care much about the trivia, and were more interested in buying raffle tickets. We came in around tenth place, but we still won a bottle of wine each. The ambassador from Australia was sitting behind us, and her team won first place – a hundred bucks each, but they donated it back.

Nic (from Kitti) and I have started an unofficial Friday movie night. We usually watch action movies (like Max Payne and Hitman) or nerdy movies (The Neverending Story and Zombie Strippers), because we’re probably the only two people in the group who would enjoy them. Often, this is the only socializing I do during the week, and I’ve come to really look forward to hanging out.

So, that was the last couple of weeks… yesterday, I was finally finished with all of my grading, and just in time to jet off to Manila. I arrived at the Pohnpei airport early, so I only had to wait half an hour or so to have my bags inspected – they do that to every checked back, by hand. Of course, PNI only has one gate… there is an “Arrivals” area, which I’ve been to a couple of times, and a “Departures” area, which I had never seen. Fortunately, it was air-conditioned.

When we flew into Hawaii on our way here in July, I was seated in the exact middle of a 747, so I didn’t get to see any of the island from the air. On all of the other island landings or takeoffs, it was already too dark. So you can imagine how excited I was to get a window seat on all my flights to Manila, since the flight left on a sunny day in the afternoon.

The first leg was a 40-minute island-hop to Chuuk – I got some beautiful footage of Pohnpei from the air on takeoff, and more footage of Chuuk when we landed. Chuuk itself is just a couple of small islands scattered through a gigantic lagoon, and you really got a sense for the size of the island that must once have been there when we flew over the reef that originally grew up along its shore. In a few million years, all of its remnants will have eroded away, and only an atoll will remain.

After that came a 90-minute flight to Guam, which didn’t have nearly as spectacular a view from the air, despite being a positively gigantic island. Partly, this was because it was cloudly, but mostly Guam itself is just kind of ugly. There’s a lot of deforestation that is evident from the air, and most of the land area is urbanized. They have the world’s largest K-Mart there.

When we landed, I had the surreal experience of being back on American soil again. After getting off the plane, we all had to go through immigration… I handed my passport to the Chamorro there, and I was home! Then we had to go through TSA screening again – apparently they didn’t trust the thoroughness of the Pohnpei screeners, who neither made me take off my shoes, nor randomly searched my backpack to swipe my external hard-drive and camcorder for bomb chemicals. God bless America.

When I turned the bend after TSA, I was greeted by the most awesome sight known to man, or at least to a man who has been on Pohnpei for four months... a real, honest to god, Burger King. I made a quick decision on that for dinner (beating the close second of Domino’s) and ordered the largest size of value meal that I could get. I swear I started humming The Star-Spangled Banner while they were nuking my nuggets. As the grease and salt and sugar sunk to the bottom of my stomach like a rock, I began to cry… partly from the indigestion, but mostly from the patriotism.

Then it was time for the flight to Manila, which was about 3.5 hours. We landed at 9:40 local time, on schedule, and I deplaned to find myself in the largest and best-designed airport I have ever seen. The walk from immigration, to baggage claim, to customs, to the money changer, was a straight shot of maybe 200 hundred yards. Then I headed down to the area where people come to meet you, and Evelyn’s sons immediately found me.

We piled into a taxi, and I was soon looking out on the most urban place I have been in a long time. There are neon lights everywhere, which remind me a lot of Miami. Parts of the city are extremely up-scale, with big buildings and casinos and fancy restaurants. But, unlike Miami, there are also the poorer neighborhoods with corrugated tin siding on tiny tenements and people sleeping the street.

I am staying in one of these, with Evelyn’s three sons: John Rieman (JR, 26), John Bernoulli (JB, 23) and Jose Carlo (JC, 16). The apartment itself is the smallest I have ever seen – a sort of townhouse crossed with a dorm room. There is a downstairs and upstairs, each of which is a single room with a bed on the floor filling up half of it. Not much space for four people – I am sharing a bed with two of them. But, it’s free, and I am definitely getting the real Manila experience.

The apartment is on the seventh and top floor of the building, and the hallway is actually open to the air because it has no roof… All of the apartments have windows that open out on the city and in on the building, and when it rains it actually rains right outside the front door. It has the effect of making you feel like you are on a city street, seven stories up.

This morning JB and I grabbed some breakfast at the place right outside the lobby downstairs. I got two meat dishes, neither one of which I can remember the name of, as well as a sausage for JB, each of which came with fried rice and an egg. This whole meal, along with my orange drink, cost me 101 pesos, which is about two dollars and change. Granted, it wasn’t much fancier than a microwave 7-11 burrito, but even those cost more than two bucks if you get a soda. I’m going to like it here. ☺

Anwyay, that’s the time zone I’m in now – three hours behind Pohnpei, thirteen ahead of Florida. Stay tuned!

As If I Wasn't Busy Enough Already....

Pohnpeian Word of the Month: doadoahk = “work”

I suppose I should start with the usual mea culpa about not posting in forever, although my excuse has changed. It’s not so much that nothing has been happening recently, but more the opposite – I’ve been so ridiculously busy I haven’t had time to breathe, let alone post. The main reason for this is that I’ve just taken on two extra jobs which take up every available second of my time.

First, I’ve been tutoring a high school calculus student, a menwai from Massachusetts. She goes to a very progressive performing arts school, and her teacher essentially agreed to let her learn the material on her own – they signed a “contract”. Originally, her parents (one of whom teaches at COM national campus) ordered a video series to help her, but it is on the slow boat and won’t get here until after they leave. The company gave them a rebate, and now that money goes to me. :)

We meet three hours a week for $15 an hour – a lot less than I usually charge, but way above average out here. Fortunately, she’s very intelligent and easy to tutor, and they’re leaving in two weeks anyway. By then, I should have gotten her through the equivalent of a one-semester college calculus course.

The second job is the really tough one – I began my tutoring with the Talent Search Program last week. I work every night, Monday through Thursday from 6:00 to 8:00 PM. Since I have my masters, they are paying me $10 an hour, and apparently I can bill an hour of prep time for every hour of teaching as well, so I should make about $160 a week before taxes. That effectively triples my income here from $300 a month to $900 a month – so I should have a little more to chose from than ramen or hot dogs every night.

I wasn’t really looking to take on so much – when I first applied for TSP I thought I might be sharing the load with a few other tutors, but I soon realized I was committing to a regular 8-hour week between now and June… also, “tutoring” isn’t really the best word for it, seeing as I have 41 high school seniors divided into two groups. Basically, it’s an extra class (actually two extra classes). I’m still not 100% sure this is a reasonable choice, but I’m going to give it my best shot.

Frankly, the extra money will be really nice – I should be able to put away quite a bit before my trip to the Philippines for the holidays, and I might even be able to take another trip somewhere else later. I can take hot showers, and order a pizza now and then, and that definitely will make the next few months a lot easier.

More importantly, the work for TSP feels a lot more like what I signed up to come here and do in the first place. I’ve begun to wonder how much I can really help people at COM – with a certain set of objectives for each course, I have a lot less flexibility to adjust my curriculum to my student’s abilities, and by the time they get to me they have either been well prepared by their high school experience (in which case they don’t need my help) or they haven’t (in which case there is little I can do but watch them struggle).
However, with TSP I can take as much time as my kids need to discuss whatever we need to discuss, without a syllabus hanging over my head. The atmosphere is a lot more informal and personal, and it is a lot more conducive to real teaching, as opposed to just lecturing. We can (and will) focus more on application and strategy and less on concepts and theory.

The students are a lot of fun too. High school students, especially those in college prep programs like Upward Bound and TSP, still have that spark in their eyes, that deep down desire to accomplish their goal of getting into college. College students, by contrast, feel as though they’ve already accomplished that goal, and now they’re only coasting through the next step. Apathy sets in quickly after graduation – I experienced the same thing back home.

The first day, I told the group that my main goal was to improve their scores on the College of Micronesia Entrance Test, or COMET. I later discovered that math is not actually on the COMET itself, but there is a separate math test given at the same time for placement purposes, so same difference. At any rate, they seemed very enthusiastic about my stated desire to get them “out of Kolonia and into Palikir”, where the national COM campus is located.

After introducing myself and giving them an idea of our mission, we spent the rest of the first day playing a game I borrowed from Tanja – you put a 7x7 grid of random numbers between 1 and 9 on the board, and challenge the students to make some target number using a line of three numbers from the grid and addition, subtraction, multiplication or division. She told me this was a big hit with her kids, and mine really enjoyed it too. I even upped the ante by putting up a new grid halfway through the game with negative numbers.

The next day we talked about test strategy – I gave them a 10-question multiple choice test, and then we discussed how to triage questions, find answers by the process of elimination, work backward, etc… I plan to use my experience teaching test prep at Kaplan as much as possible.

The two days after that we spent on critical thinking. This is a big problem for Micronesian students – it just isn’t cultivated by the culture. If you think about it, critical thinking is essentially the ability to think through new and unfamiliar situations using past experience and patterns of reasoning… but people who live on a small island where the day length never changes and the weather is more or less constant don’t encounter new and unfamiliar situations often.

It isn’t a matter of intelligence – that is distributed here the same as it is everywhere, with a few people at each extreme and the vast majority in the middle. It has more to do with their mode of thinking, which is predominantly concerned with social matters. Again, this makes sense in an island culture where even small conflicts can be a big problem if allowed to develop. When I ask my students a question which is supposed to make them think about a concept, I sometimes get the impression they are really only trying to figure out what I want to hear by judging my body language and the emphasis I put on various words.

My first crack at developing this skill in my TSP students was probably too ambitious. I broke them into pairs, and gave everyone a list of “brain teasers”, with each pair assigned to a specific one. For example, one of these puzzles read:

“An Arab sheikh tells his two sons to race their camels to a distant city to see who will inherit his fortune. The one whose camel is slower will win. The brothers, after wandering aimlessly for days, ask a wise man for advice. After hearing the advice they jump on the camels and race as fast as they can to the city. What does the wise man say?”

Of course, I didn’t actually expect any of them to figure these out – the answer to this one, for example, is that the wise man told the sons to switch camels (since the son with the slowest camel wins). What I was hoping was that the puzzles would spark a lively debate in each pair, and I wanted to see how they would try to think them through.

What actually happened was that more than half of them didn’t understand the questions in the first place, and even once they did they had no clue how to begin (assuming they were motivated enough to do so). For example, some of the problems clearly suggested drawing a picture, but I don’t think I saw any of them do this. I had hoped we could reconvene the group to discuss the problems after a few minutes, but it soon became clear they would need the whole hour to really contemplate them.

The next day, I went through some of the answers, focusing on what factors made each difficult, and what strategies could be used to make them easier. For example, since English is a second language for all of my students, unfamiliar words like “sheikh” can give them more pause than native speakers. Also, some real-world problems are beyond their real-world experiences, such as a brain teaser which referenced a ten-story building with an elevator – a show of hands showed that only two of them had ever been in an elevator, as there isn’t one on Pohnpei.

I have to send status report e-mails to my boss at TSP each day, and she was very pleased with this initial focus on strategy and critical thinking, which made me feel better considering I wasn’t really sure how best to approach the tutoring when I began. When the first week was over, I decided it was time to get down to business and start discussing specific math problems. I asked them each to bring in one that had been giving them trouble.

This week, I had them work these problems on the board in front of the group. I am trying to break them of their unfortunate habit of simply telling each other the answer, and so I made a rule that the students watching could help, but only without saying any numbers at all. I have tried this approach before, although never with such a large group, and it usually takes a while for the students to warm up to it – they would rather just give me problems and watch me do them, but I know that won’t really help them, and besides which they do that all day at school anyway. Put the marker in a student’s hand and sit far from the board, let them make mistakes and then fix their mistakes, insure that they write no faster than they can think, and you will soon see them truly improve.

In one of the sessions, no one volunteered to do any problems, so I was forced to pick a victim at a random and make her do a problem of my own invention. I have emphasized to them that everyone will have to do it at some point, in hopes that they will be less timid if they are not alone in being embarrassed. The poor girl was up at the board for the whole hour working one problem, and I am sure she was mortified – it can be pretty intimidating working a problem you don’t understand in front of a group of people shouting suggestions left and right.

I was, at one point, trying to find a convenient way to get her out of there, but then I noticed she was actually getting more confident and doing certain things more easily than before. It was just the sort of thing I was hoping to see, and it was reassuring to see that my intuition was once again correct.

Last night, I decided to take a break from doing problems and have a little more fun again. I put together a game of bingo – their cards (which, by a little computer wizardry, were all random and distinct) had phrases like “x subtracted from five”, and I put up pieces of paper with the corresponding expressions, i.e. “5 – x”. First price was a bag of Skittles, and after that Chick-o-Sticks. They loved it, and it was also a really good lesson. I promised them we would do this every week – work Monday through Wednesday, and have a more fun activity on Thursday.

So, that’s TSP… I think I’m going to have a lot of fun doing it, as long as I can manage my time effectively and not get overwhelmed.

As for my regular classes at COM, they’ve been pretty tough recently. As I said last time, we’ve been discussing polynomials in MS95, and we just finished that chapter off with the test yesterday. I just don’t think we needed to discuss all that, since they won’t even be solving quadratic equations – basically, I just taught them a whole lot of things they can’t or won’t use to do anything very useful.

I found out that, as I requested, they are going to give me all the sections of MS95 next semester, and I intend to change things up a lot in the Spring. Polynomials, if we talk about them, will come at the end, and I’ll introduce decimals and negatives a lot earlier. I also want to talk about logic at some point – nothing symbolic, just sentences with “and”, “or” and “if…then” and basic syllogisms. We’ll be doing some fun labs, too.

There are only two sections of MS95, so I have to teach one section of MS100 in the Spring as well. That’s the College Algebra course, and it's the highest level we offer at Pohnpei campus. George said he told the Instructional Coordinator, Maria, that I could teach anything – I am very proud to instill such confidence. The higher level course will be a nice counter balance to the basics I’ll be teaching in Prealgebra, but it does mean having to plan two different lectures every day. Of course, the syllabi I write next semester will not have nearly as much grading as I’m doing now. :)

As for my current higher-level course, MS 96, we just finished the most unpleasant few weeks of the whole semester – a whole chapter of nothing but word problems, including the infamous “a train leaves Cincinatti at 9 AM traveling 50 miles per hour”-type problems. I tried my best not to rush through these examples, but I had only so much time to discuss them.

Of course, nobody ever seems to like word problems, but they are particularly difficult for these students because of the language barrier and the critical thinking problem. I made detailed handouts, and kept the test questions almost identical to the homework, but they still did pretty bad on the last few exams. Even the concept of using a variable to solve for an unknown is still not connecting … a lot of them just add or multiply numbers in the problem at random.

Really, the only bright spot came this week when we discussed mixture problems, like “how much 30% alcohol should you add to 120 milliliters of 20% alcohol to get a 25% solution?” To illustrate the concept, I brought in 1-liter soda bottles (which I somehow managed to find ten of lying around my bedroom floor) filled with various mixtures of water and green food coloring, which I called “substance X”. It was a fun little demonstration, even though the math involved was just way to complicated – I could tell on the last day I lectured on them that I was the only person in the room with the faintest clue what I was talking about. Still, I just grinned and bore it, and now all that is over and we can start with graphing, thank heavens.

Aside from COM, all I have time to do is the cross-stitch that mom sent me. I didn’t ask for one, but I guess she sensed I needed it. Of course, it does have dragonflies on it, so I have a feeling she already has a spot picked out for it on a wall somewhere ;)

I haven’t been able to go to Japanese class as much lately – that time of day is the only real break I have on Tuesday and Thursday, since I finish teaching at 5:30 those days (only half an hour before TSP starts). This is not good, since we have started to really step up the grammar by learning verbs and their conjugations. I need to make an effort to go back and start taking better notes.

Takuya loaned me a first-grade math book in Japanese, which is an absolutely precious treasure. It is full of colorful pictures, and all of the writing is in hiragana (since they don’t learn katakana or kanji until later), so I use it often to practice sight-reading. Once I get my hands on a good dictionary (see below) I want to start translating it, since all of the sentences have really simple vocabulary and grammar. He says he has other grade levels when I’m done with it.

Sadly, the extra load has taken away from my time with Floid. The last time I saw him was two weeks ago, when I gave him a comic book on the Odyssey that mom sent me (a reward for going to school all week). He absolutely loved it – once I gave it to him, it was like nothing else was in the world except that book. It was the first time I had seen him not be super-talkative. He flipped through and looked at all the pictures, and then apparently unsatisfied with the incomplete story they gave him, he began reading the words – they are not at a low reading level, but he was determined and I think it will really help him with his English. Way to go mom!

The weather here is starting to change, albeit subtly. We are entering the rainier season, and though it hasn’t been pouring every day, it has been considerably stronger when it does rain. On Wednesday, it was coming down so hard that they cancelled TSP – Sandy told me that some of the students have to cross a river to get here, and the water had risen too high. Of course, I’m sure the weather back home is changing even more – I can hardly believe it will be Halloween in two weeks, without that crispness to the air that usually declares the beginning of Fall weather.

Of course, there is another big event coming up – I turn 22 on November 5th. I have a wish list on Amazon, in case anyone wants to get me something :D. To be honest, the things I will get the most use out of are the DVDs, but I know they are kind of expensive... Once again, I don’t expect anything, and I will be extremely thankful for anything I should get, even if it’s just a card – or better yet, a postcard. The drawings from Ms. Lyon’s class are now nicely balancing out the photos of Ljubljana, but there is always room for more.

Anyway, that’s life in the tropics for now – busy, busy, busy. Stay tuned.

The Prodigal Blogger Returns

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: ansou = “time”

Another few weeks have passed here in the tropics, and I haven’t put anything here at all. Mostly, that’s because there hasn’t been much to tell, but here we go anyway…

The last time I posted was just before September 11th, which is Pohnpei Liberation Day. The night before the holiday, Beth came up from Kitti – her roommate, Nic, was in Kosrae for the long weekend and she was beginning to get pestered by the neighbors without him. We drank some Red Horse and discussed philosophy until she eventually crashed on our couch.

The next morning, we got up and went to Namiki for breakfast, where I discovered I could eat relatively cheaply by ordering everything individually. I’ve really been pinching pennies lately, so even the $5 tab for some bacon and an egg hit pretty hard, but it was nice to eat a real breakfast with company. While we ate, we worked on Meghan’s birthday cards – she turned 22 the day before. Mine was one of those tacky cards where you make a word starting with each letter of the person’s name:

Mini soooda (she’s from Minnesota)
Eco-friendly
Goofy grin
Hippy
Athlete
Natural diplomat

When we finished eating, we walked to PICS to see the Liberation Day track meet. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many Pohnpeians in one place – half of Kolonia must have been there, and I’ll bet Madolenihmw was completely abandoned (I hope somebody remembered to turn off the lights). All the high schools on the island fielded teams, and Kitti apparently won most of the events.

Meghan and Michaela were officiating at the long jump, and when everyone took a break for lunch, I had a chance to give Meghan our cards. After that, I left… I’m not much for watching sporting events, and did I mention how hot it is here? Like, really hot. I don’t think it would have been soooo hard for PICS to put a fan or a couple of misters by the stands – or maybe hold the whole thing at night.

That was the last major event to report, judging by the tape in my camcorder. The only other thing worth noting was the time they cut the power on the whole island for a Saturday. They were having all sorts of problems with the generator – the power kept going off several times a day, for up to an hour at a time. For some reason, they managed to time it so that this was always right in the middle of one of my lectures – if Pohnpeian students weren’t already restless enough, having all the lights and fans off will definitely do the trick.

The worst part about a power outage is that all the computers in our office are hooked up to Uninterruptible Power Supplies (or UPS’s for short). Don’t ask me why, but even though we all have five-year-old computers and no one can ever get toner for the copiers or markers for the transparencies, every single computer at COM is hooked into a UPS. When the power goes off, these little buggers all start wailing simultaneously, as if to say “I’m here, it’s dark, and I can only keep this thing running for a minute or two!” It makes quite a little racket.

Last weekend they announced that they were going to shut down the whole grid at nine in the morning on Saturday, to do some diagnostic stuff I guess. Of course, in true Pohnpeian style, it didn’t actually shut off until ten, but it was thankfully back up at three. Then off again at five, and back at six. Since then, the lights have flickered now and then but they stay on. Here’s hoping it stays that way – or I’ll have to chuck my UPS out the window.

As for my classes… my morning class, Prealgebra, is going pretty well. More than a third of my students have legitimate A’s (that is, going my the grade scale in the syllabus, without any curving). This is despite the incredibly odd order that the book goes in – after we finished our discussion of negative numbers, we launched right in to polynomials! For those of you that don’t know much math, that’s a pretty big leap. Usually, you talk about solving linear equations and such before you get into that kind of thing, but they seem to be taking it in stride.

I don’t know if I just have more energy in the morning or something, but this class always seems the friendliest, which is odd considering how simple the material is and how slowly I teach it. I haven’t had too many discipline problems – which is nice, since I’ve never really had many discipline solutions – but maybe the real troublemakers haven’t really woken up yet at 8:30. There are even a couple of high-performing students in this class that come to my office hours, and I have started to become friendly with them.

My later classes, two sections of Elementary Algebra, are another story. Both of these classes have more B’s than any other letter grade, with only 15% of the students having A’s. I have a lot of discipline problems in these classes, ranging from students talking and giggling loudly, to yelling out answers before I ask for or want them (in hopes that this will somehow make class end sooner), to one student who always announces loudly that time is up (usually five minutes before it really is).

My biggest pet peeve is the chairs. Half of them show up late to class – I’ve tried my best to curb this by giving the daily problem the very minute class begins, and collecting it no more than five minutes after – but the fact that I have clearly begun my lecture doesn’t stop them from noisily picking up chairs and moving them all the way to the other side of the room to sit by their friends. The problem is that both of the rooms I teach in are significantly larger than the space required for an orderly grid of chairs, so we end up with them backed up all the way against the back wall, and then grouped in little clusters all around the rest of the room, with a huge empty space in the middle.

A lot of the time, when I’m teaching these Algebra classes, the brighter students try to give me the impression that this is all really boring and trivial, which makes me feel like I should move faster – but then they do miserably on the daily problems and exams, so they don’t understand as well as they pretend. Of course, I’ve experienced this before as a teacher, but usually I can tell from the facial expressions of the other students whether or not the majority really does “get it”. The problem for me is that these kids are impossible to read – I’ve never seen anything I would call “confusion” on their faces, just a totally blank stoic stare that could mean anything. Of course, that’s the ones that are awake.

The biggest problem with the MS 96 Algebra course, for me, is that my stopping point is set in stone because the class is the first part of a two-semester series. If my students are going to have a chance of succeeding in MS 99, I absolutely have to finish all of Chapter 6 before the semester ends. That will be hard, considering I just started Chapter 3 last week (and I spent a whole week on one section, 3.1) and the semester is nearly halfway over, but I can do it as long as I keep up the pace.

I’m starting to regret having given them so many graded assignments in the original syllabus. Every week, I give each class a test and three daily problems, as well as collecting a homework – and I have 94 total students. My stack of grading to be done never goes away… as soon as I finish one major assignment, another one rolls in. At least I do stay ahead of it now – I usually get the homework assignments and tests back within a day or two.

I finally set up my grade book in Excel to automatically calculate all the pertinent totals and percentages, and with a little tinkering I figured out how to export these to Word. Now, every time I grade a major assignment and put the grades in the computer, I can easily print out a series of slips, one for each student, already filled out with all the data straight from my grade book. I cut these apart and staple them to the assignment, so that each student knows exactly what grade they have at that moment.

All of this is basically just for good old-fashioned CYA. None of my students will be able to come to me, as they usually do, at the end of the semester to complain about their low grades – they will have seen them coming from a long way off. CYA is also the main reason I have so much grading in the first place – I like the idea that each student’s final letter grade is based on so many individual assignments that it is impossible for a bad score on just a couple to severely impact it. When I finally turn in my grade book to my superiors at COM, I will have a lot of data to point to in case any disputes arise, especially if I end up failing half of my class – which I, of course, hope not to do.

I spoke with my immediate boss, George Mangonon, about the possibility of teaching all Prealgebra sections next semester. I like the lower-level course better, mostly because there is no pre-set ending point… everyone I have spoken with says you have to put all nine chapters in your official syllabus, but that you can really teach it at whatever pace is appropriate to the students, and how much you actually cover depends on them.

If I had the opportunity to focus on a single course like that one, I would rearrange the topics (polynomials before fractions?) and add more fun activities. The Tuesday and Thursday extended periods are supposed to be for “lab”, but most teachers use them to have the students do seat work – I use mine for lecture and exams. I can think of tons of fun things I would do to reinforce various concepts … but I need the time to prepare for them, and I need to be free of this crazy grading cycle, so they will have to wait for next semester.

Aside from COM… well, I have stalled on War and Peace. I rarely have time to type out a blog, let alone pick up a book, but if I do find time it’s hard to get back into the dry Napoleonic Wars. I keep staring at Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, which I got in a trade with Jim for The Road (take that, Cormac McCarthy), but I feel like I should finish what I start. Then again, I have managed to listen to every last one of the couple dozen audiobooks I ripped to my computer before leaving (they are great when you’re grading), and I’ve got to have something new to think about.

I’ve been trying to visit Floid more regularly, with little success. Usually, I’m so wiped out by the end of the day that I can’t even think of walking down to Ohmine (20 minutes away), where I will invariably stay at least a few hours in the un-air-conditioned house. I don’t feel terribly selfish in opting not to go, but I still regret it a bit.

However, when I do make it down there, I always find him to be an inspiration. The kid somehow manages to put a good amount of honest effort into his schoolwork, despite the half-dozen toddlers screaming and running around him at all times, and the adults who occasionally interject with answers he can get himself or snap at him for making a mistake. Spending time with him feels like the sort of thing I came here to do, a feeling I don’t frankly get as much at the college.

I’ve been trying to motivate him to work hard in between the times I can make it there. Two weeks ago, I told him I would bring him a surprise present – a bootleg copy of The Dark Knight, which I must have watched two dozen times by now – if he went to school for a whole week, Monday through Friday (he skips a lot). He didn’t make it, but I made him the same offer for this last week. I’m going over to the house today to follow up, and hopefully he’ll get the DVD and we can do some math together.

Floid’s biggest interest is in mythology – he is always asking me questions I can’t answer about Zeus, Pan, the Minotaur, etc. – and my next plan is to try and use this to improve his English. I’m going to make up “Myth Investigation” sheets, and part of his “assignment” for next week, in addition to going to school every day, will be to fill one out. The idea is for him to pick a local Pohnpeian myth, and find out everything he can about it (who? where? why? etc.) by talking to people.

After he fills out the sheet, I’m going to have him write the story down (in English) using all the details he collected. Then we do a second draft, and finally he can type it on my computer. It’s an elaborate plan, but I’m hoping it will be something that interests him – he says he wants to be a mythologist, after all, but he thinks he can do it without going to high school. I hope to give him some practice with writing this way.

I feel like I need to get more involved with this individual tutoring – it breaks down many of the walls that go up around Pohnpeians when they are in large groups. Fortunately, I got the TSP tutoring job (as if there was any doubt ☺) so that should help. It will also help to get paid $10 an hour – all that cheap Chinese merchandise in Manila isn’t going to buy itself.

To get the TSP job, I had to get an FSM social security number – all I had to do was bring my passport and $3 to the social security branch office. When I was there, a man on his way out greeted me and asked who I was with. After I explained that I was with WorldTeach, he said I was here to help his country. I said I hoped so, and he assured me that I will and shook my hand. I have one of these brief perfunctory interactions every once and a while, and they can be amazingly uplifting given the sort of reaction I get from my students.

As for Japanese, class is going well… the other day, we had finally learned enough phrases to have a somewhat unscripted conversation – unfortunately, it was as usual a conversation between a diner and a waiter:

W: O’kimari desu ka? 

       (Are you ready to order?)
D: Hai. Suteeki ni shimasu. 

       (Yes. I’ll have the steak.)
W: Suteeki wa ikaga nasai masu ka? 

       (How would you like your steak cooked?)
D: Midiamu de. 

       (Medium.)
W: O’nomimono wa ikaga nasai masu ka? 

       (What would you like to drink?)
D: Juusu wa nani ga arimasu ka? 

       (What kinds of juice do you have?)
W: Painappuru, orenji, sutoroberii ga arimasu ga… 

       (We have pineapple, orange and strawberry…)
D: Orenji juusu o kudasai. 

       (Bring me an orange juice.)
W: Kashiko marimashita. Shooshoo o’machi kudasai. 

       (Certainly, sir. Just a moment, please)

I took great pleasure in transcribing these conversations into hiragana, in which I am now pretty fluent, and katakana, which I am starting to learn – my teacher even complimented my handwriting at one point. The katakana characters are used for words of foreign origin, such as suteeki (ステ—キ) and midiamu (ミディアム). Frankly, I think katakana is a bit ugly compared to its sister, which is more cursive and intricate, but you need both. Just for fun, here’s how I would write the above conversation (the katakana is underlined):

W: おきまりですか｡
D: はい｡ ステ—キにします｡
W: ステ—キはいかがなさいますか｡
D: ミディアムで｡
W: おにものはいかがなさいますか｡
D: ジュ—スはなにがありますか｡
W: パイナップル､オレンジ､ストロベリ—がありますが｡
D: オレンジジュ—スをください｡
W: かしこまりました｡ しょうしょうおまちください｡

Note that there are no spaces between words – once you put in kanji and use the kanas less, it becomes clearer where one word stops and the next begins. Also, there is no equivalent to the English question mark “?” because the particle ka (か) always indicates a question at the end of a sentence. Oh, and the commas are backwards – what’s up with that?

So my birthday is November 5th, and I will soon be putting up another “wish list” on the blog in case anyone wants to send me something – Ms. Lyons’ 4th grade class, I’m looking in your direction ;). Mostly, it’ll be books – I want some Japanese children’s books (anything for the first grade won’t have any complicated kanji in it), some dictionaries and maybe a couple of English novels and such. Anyway, stay tuned … I’ll put up a full list probably in my next post.

Signs have been posted all over COM reminding everyone to “Speak English”. On these signs two people, who are either albino Pohnpeians or just not Pohnpeian at all, communicate in speech bubbles – one says “What’s the skinny?” and the other replies “I’m cool.” I have never heard anyone younger than my mom’s generation use the word “skinny” as a noun, but I guess it’s coming back in the third world – so consider this post to be the skinny on me lately, and accept my apologies that it took so long to write it.

The People You Meet in the Middle of Nowhere

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: aramas = “people”

I seem to have let another week go by without posting anything – I wish I could tell you I’ve just been lazy, but the truth is that there hasn’t really been much to say. My life these days mostly consists of teaching and grading, teaching and grading, teaching and grading… it’s good to be busy, since it keeps me from being homesick, but it doesn’t leave much time for anything else.

Also, Pohnpei is a very small place and I’ve already seen a lot of the tourist-y sights (Sokehs, Kepirohi, Salapwuk, Nahlap, Nan Madol etc…). There’s still a couple major waterfalls I’ve missed, and the Pohnpaip petroglyphs near Madolenihmw, but I guess I have to save those for a rainy day – well, a less rainy day anyway. :)

My classes are chugging along well enough – I put in a couple of late nights this week and managed to catch up on all my grading, so maybe if I just stay on top of it I can start relaxing in the evenings. We just finished talking about negative numbers in Prealgebra, and we started solving linear equations in Elementary Algebra. The lower-level class is actually testing much better than the higher-level one, and they honestly seem to be putting a little more effort into it as a whole.

Of course, they roll their eyes at me a lot when we talk about basic things. The way they see it, they already know how to do this stuff – what I keep trying to impress on them is the importance of knowing why, but it's a hard sell. For example, on the last MS96 test, I had a fill-in-the-blank section for important vocabulary like “solution” and “identity”. Everybody did very poorly on this part, mixing up terms left and right (even putting adjectives or verbs in blanks where a noun was clearly required, and so on) – even if they did fine on the calculation part of the exam.

They try their best to push me forward during class, but I can’t assume this means they understand. I did half a dozen problems on distributing with them, but a good quarter of them still didn't realize that you have to multiply the factor by both terms. At least I can start giving them more immediate feedback, now that I’m on top of my grading – that’s really the point of the daily problem (besides making sure they show up on time).

On Nialim (Friday), I cancelled one of my MS96 classes. I’m teaching two sections, and since one of them started on the third day of the semester it has always been a bit behind. By canceling the other one, I finally have them lined up, which makes lesson planning a lot easier for me. Now I give the same lecture twice every day, and I only change the daily problem a little bit.

On Rahnkaulop (Saturday), I treated myself to dinner at Joy for the first time in weeks – I’ve been watching my funds a lot more closely, eating hot dogs at lunch and so on. While I was there, I was approached by an older (middle-aged?) menwai named Jim Fenton who noticed I was reading War and Peace (288 pages down, xxx to go). We struck up a conversation, and I found out that he is on a ten-island tour of the Pacific. His last stop was Kosrae, and he actually met a couple of the WorldTeach volunteers there. Within ten minutes of meeting, he proposed that we go on a hike or something the next day.

At first, I was a little weirded out – after all, I barely knew this guy, and I couldn’t tell if he was trying to scam me or hit on me or something. Plus, he’s got quite an eccentric personality (30% insane, as he puts it) … during the dinner, he asked me everything from how to hitchhike around the island to whether I had any advice on robbing banks. However, it turned out that he had just landed on Pohnpei a few hours earlier, he was only staying a few days, and he figured I knew the lay of the land well enough. I decided to take him up on the hike, and I suggested Sokehs ridge since it has a view of practically the whole island.

That night, Matt and Lucas were up visiting from Madolenihmw – they don’t come up as much as Beth and Nic, who seem to be here every three or four days, but then again Kitti is a lot closer. Erin cooked some sort of vegetable noodles, and Meghan and Michaela brought over sashimi. I wish they had told me they were going to have a meal, or I wouldn’t have gone to Joy and paid $6.50 for the same thing, but I guess I should have asked. At any rate, it was a nice visit.

The next day, I walked down to the Palm Terrace grocery store to meet Jim at the appointed time. When I saw that hey had brought only a half-empty water bottle, I suggested he buy another one – I had brought four of my own. Physical exercise plus saturated humidity plus tropical heat equals rapid dehydration.

We headed off to Sokehs for a pleasant little hike. I had suggested we start at ten, figuring it would be cooler in the morning, but then again “ten” isn’t really the morning. The sun comes up at 6:30 or so, and the temperature hits daytime levels within an hour, so it was already hot when we left. Also, it was noon by the time we got to the top, and there wasn’t much cloud cover, so I got a moderate sunburn. Normally, I don’t bother with sunscreen on hikes because the trees offer a lot of shade, but not on the Sokehs hike.

This time around it was a lot easier, partly because I had done it before and partly because Jim is apparently in worse shape than I am and had to take a lot of breaks. Along the way, I learned more about this odd man. He works as a substitute ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher in Los Angeles, which I’m guessing must be a good business, because the FSM is the 147th country he has visited. At first I didn’t believe him when he told me that number (he also said he was a former police interrogator and championship water polo player) but I started to believe it when he described various places.

There are, by the way, 192 countries in the UN. I would have thought that if you wrote them all out and scratched out all the ones too unsafe for westerners to travel in, you would have a lot fewer than 147 left, but I guess Jim is proof that the world is a much safer place than the TV news would have us believe. He says there are only about ten countries that he would never go to – Iraq, for example.

At some point on the hike, I talked about my little sushi experiment a month or so ago, and he asked me to show him how it’s done. I said we could have dinner Tuesday (Niare) night, if he promised to buy me lunch at Sei in exchange. With that, we parted company and I returned to my grading.

Come Niare, I trudged down to the fish market only to find it difficult to obtain tuna. There was one table with a lot of smaller yellowfins and skipjacks, but that guy was only selling the whole fish – I definitely didn’t need (and couldn’t afford) thirty pounds. I decided to try using the smaller reef fish that they sell in plastic ice-filled coolers – these sell for about $.75 each, and I’ve eaten them raw before. I bought two blue parrotfish, and four other fish that I think were wrasse, but I’m not sure. This turned out to be a bit of a mistake.

I bought the fish at lunchtime, and tossed them in the freezer for a few hours to kill off the surface bacteria. When I got home after work, I put them out to thaw and started on the rice. It wasn’t as sticky as I would have liked – the bag has been sitting out and the grains have gotten a bit stale – but at least I flavored it right this time. Jim said he wanted to make the rolls himself, so I left all the fish and vegetable-cutting up to him.

Of course, neither one of us had ever cut up a little fish like that. Following Sandy’s suggestion, I scraped off the scales with a fork, and then did my best to cut a filet off the ribs. This turned out to be a very thin filet, and skinning it would have been impossible, so I just left the skin on ¬– I’ve eaten it like that before, but sushi demands that the fish not be so chewy. The first fish I tried this with, I ended up with two pieces of meat each about the size of a quarter, but I kept at it and did a bit better with the next one.

I had invited Takuya over for dinner, and he arrived while we were cutting the fish. We asked if he had any clue how to do it, and he said he didn’t, but it soon became apparent that he definitely knew more than we did. While Jim and I had hacked away at the fish randomly, hoping to get some meat where we could see it, Takuya had a definite plan of attack, and managed to produce some much larger filets than either of us had. Eventually, Takuya cut up three fish like this, which was enough for a couple of rolls.




I had never had too much trouble actually rolling the sushi, but when I tried to teach it to Jim I realized how hard it really must be. He kept squeezing too hard in one place or too soft in another, getting the mat caught in the middle of the roll, or failing to get the nori to stick on the another end. At any rate, the rolls still came out okay, if a bit lop-sided. We made some with cucumber and carrot, and others with mango.

By the time we had figured all this out, we had man-handled the fish quite a lot, and they had been sitting out for too long and were beginning to smell, so everybody was a bit apprehensive about trying the rolls. They were definitely too chewy for my liking, and I had to be pretty liberal with the soy sauce to get them down. Overall, it wasn’t that impressive as a dinner, but it was a good learning experience for all.

Jim left around ten o’clock, and Takuya and I chatted for another hour or so, mostly about our respective native tongues. I had to miss my Japanese class that day to buy fish and catch up with the grading, so I was jonesing for a nihongo fix. These conversations are always a lot of fun – at one point, I was trying to explain what a “trial” was, and I drew pictures of a man in handcuffs and a courtroom with a judge and jury. Takuya talked about how the police in Japan don’t make suspects put up their hands when they arrest them, because guns are illegal there.

The most fun part of the chat was getting to use the hiragana symbols, which I managed to memorize last week - I've hardly mastered them, but I can in theory read or write any Japanese word this way. Hiragana is one of the two syllabaries of written Japanese, with each symbol representing a single spoken syllable. There are 46 basic symbols, and these can be modified with dakuten( ﾞ) and handakuten( ﾟ), or combined to yield the remaining 55 syllables. For example, the symbol ひ is pronounced “hi” while ぴ is “pi”, び is “bi” and ひゃ is “hya”. Takuya’s name in Hiragana is:

す  の  は  ら    た  く  や
Su-no-ha-ra   Ta-ku-ya

We took turns teaching each other words and discussing the history and grammars of our languages. Mom asked me in a recent letter if Japanese is anything like Chinese ... at first, that seemed like a silly question, but I've been finding out just how closely they are related. Basically, Chinese is to Japanese what Latin and Greek are to English. The Chinese gave the Japanese their writing system, much as the Romans gave us ours. Also, some Japanese words are composites of (Japanese translations of) Chinese words that have no inherent meaning in Japanese, just like we derive words like "anthropomorphic" from Greek words ("anthropos" and "morphos") that don't mean anything by themselves in English. 

In other words, a Japanese person can no more speak Chinese than an English speaker can automatically speak Latin. The languages are connected but have divergently evolved, partly through the way that one language adapts the other to fill its needs and partly through historical accident. For example, the Greek word isosceles and the Latin word equilateral have essentially the same meaning (equal sides) but have been adopted into English with two different meanings. Also, the English word "decimation" derives from the Latin word decem meaning "ten", but its meaning of "slaughter" comes from the historical Roman practice of killing every tenth man in a disobedient legion. I explained both of these examples to Takuya, and he shared similar ones (to the best of his ability, considering the main language we spoke was still English).

Today (rahnwet), I met Jim as promised for lunch at Sei restaurant, across the street from my apartment. They have a lunch buffet for only $6.50, which includes salad, pancit, chicken, fish and sashimi. Jim was not too impressed with the food, but I loved it, and the place has really nice hardwood decor. While we ate, he talked some more about his travels and his involvement with "hospitality clubs" like Servas and CouchSurfing.com which connect travelers with people willing to offer them a place to stay for free, in the interests of furthering person-to-person contacts between people from different cultures. He said that he had personally hosted over a hundred people at his place in LA through these clubs.

When lunch was over, we exchanged e-mails, posed for this photo and said good-bye. Although I wasn't sure what to make of him at first, Jim turned out to be yet another interesting and inspiring menwai that I've met here on the island, and I'm glad I had the chance to get to know him. Who knows, maybe I'll extend my stopover in LA on the way home and crash at his place for a while - the only other time I was there I hated it, but maybe he can show me the good side of the city. The side that doesn't look like an overcrowded strip mall with a fascistic police force. I think they call it San Diego.

Tomorrow (aio) is September 11th, which is a holiday (Liberation Day) here – it marks the anniversary of the day in 1945 that the Japanese occupation ended. We (the US) were not in fact the liberators, at least not directly ... although we shelled and bombed the island during the war, it was not until the fighting ended elsewhere that the Japanese were forced to leave. COM was supposed to take us on a faculty retreat to Ant atoll (which is normally a $75 boat ride), but they just postponed the trip not ten minutes ago. Pohnpei style, man. Hopefully they'll take us out before too long - the reef out there is alive, unlike the one at Nahlap, and it would be a new thing to see. Oh well ... stay tuned.

One other piece of good news - hot showers are back (sort of)! We discovered that if you turn the heater on for only about 15-20 minutes, its enough for a piping hot shower of about the same length. As long as you turn it off before you take that shower, you only use about a buck's worth of power. So, we set up a "hot shower jar" - if either one of us wants to take one, we put a dollar in the jar. When we go to refill the CashPower, we'll take that money in and split the rest of the bill evenly. Thank heavens - I never really feel clean after a cold shower, since all I can manage to do is stick my head under the water for a few minutes.

I Visit Kitti and Find Out Things Could Be So Much Worse

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: likan = “spider”

As promised, I went down to Kitti with the Doses family on Rahnsarahwi (Sunday). They go every week for church, and I’d been meaning to visit Beth and Nick.

When I arrived at the house in Ohmine at the appointed time, I was greeted by the usual entourage of kids, now dressed in their finest church clothes. The women were all wearing brightly colored muumuus, including Naki (who I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a dress) – in the Kosraean church, married women wear muumuus while the single women wear skirts to signify their status, but this rule apparently doesn’t apply to Pohnpeian churches.

Sousol had recently gotten a haircut – like a lot of the boys here, he has most of his hair cropped short except for a rat-tail in the back, and they had recently buzzed down the sides quite a bit, giving his head the distinct impression of a coon-skin cap. He began holding my hand as soon as I showed up – this was very affectionate, even for him. Normally he just does his best never to be more than three feet from me, but we don’t get to spend as much time with each other as we used to. When it was time to go, I heaved him into the back of the pickup and jumped in after him.

As we rode, I did my best to catch the interesting sights with my camera. The problem is that the road is hemmed in closely by palm trees, and you usually can’t see much beyond these. From time to time, you’ll pass a break in them and the landscape will open out into some lush valley or mountain ridge, but these picture-perfect views only last for an instant – by the time I would get the camera started, they were gone. Eventually I gave up and sat back for the ride, enjoying the wind roaring all around us, except for those moments when the truck would stop and the sweltering heat would close in again.

When we passed the house, I hollered for the driver to stop, only to realize that the church the family was headed to is right next door. It turns out that Beth and Nick usually attend the ten o’clock service there, mostly because everyone will know if they don’t – I might start coming down regularly and joining them. I haven’t been in a church (except for weddings or funerals) in at least five years, and while I swore never to step in one again, it can’t possibly be as bad when the whole service is in a language I barely speak.

Beth and Nick’s place definitely has one thing going for it – it’s huge. Two stories, and a spacious yard with their own nahs and a sort of greenhouse structure. There is, however, one thing it could really use – walls. Most of it is a woodwork lattice, so that essentially the whole house is open-air except the bathroom. Don’t get me wrong, I love being out in mother nature, but (as with any mother) from time to time we need some space from each other.

Although I had mentioned I might be coming down, they were pretty surprised to see me. Beth immediately proceeded to show me around, despite feeling a bit under the weather. The downstairs has a large kitchen (though they have to store all the food in ziplock bags to keep it away from the humidity and the local fauna), a nice little living room with some couches, a workspace with a desk, the bathroom, and areas they describe as the “changing room” and “cleaning room”. When you climb the stairs, you find the tiny little bedroom they share, with two beds draped under mosquito netting. It’s pretty close quarters, but they seem to be getting along just fine. Outside the bedroom, there is a balcony where they’ve hung a parachute-style hammock which I can attest is extremely comfortable.

**(This is the point at which I would have the little video I shot of the house, except that the stupid COM internet keeps breaking the connection while I’m uploading it. Check back here later, and I might get it to work.)

After we chatted for a while (mostly about my encounter with the Jesuits), Nick headed off to church, while Beth decided to skip it since she wasn’t feeling well. I stayed home with her, and we visited some more. While we were eating cookies and talking about Obama’s chances in the general election, the hymns from next door began to float over to us, and we could hear the sermon through some sort of loudspeaker or megaphone.

At some point, Beth told me she needed to wash clothes, so we headed to the “cleaning room”. As soon as we walked in, I immediately noticed that there was no washing machine. The floor is basically just an empty concrete slab with a hole in the wall that drains to the outside, next to a faucet. In the corners, a few large spiders sit in their webs awaiting their next unlucky mosquitoes.

They take bucket showers in this room, behind a set of sheets they’ve hung up to separate it from the dressing room for privacy. They also use the same faucet, and for all I know the same buckets, to wash their clothes by hand. I’d never actually seen anyone do this. I’ve gotten used to not having a cell phone, or cable TV, or a microwave… but this one threw me for quite a loop. Nobody ever taught Beth how to do it either – she just kept squeezing the clothes in the wash water, but I suggested she might need some kind of washboard, something to scrub them up against. Eventually, she tried using an ice cube tray, despite it being a little dirty and not quite the right size.

After I had been there a couple hours, church was over and the truck pulled up to take me home. This time, I kept the camera on for most of the trip, and despite getting some twenty minutes of jungle drive-by footage, I still managed to miss most of the good shots. Oh well, at this rate I should have enough driving video for a halfway decent montage by the end of the year. When we passed my apartment, they stopped and let me out. I felt a bit bad for using the family as my own free taxi service, but I’ll find a way to make it up to them.

On Rahnkaulop (Saturday), there had been a poster attached to our door with Pooh stickers, obviously made by some of the neighborhood kids, advertising a “Talent Show Tomorrow 2:30-3:00” – there was one on every door in the building, along with the stairway and some random walls just in case. When I returned from Kitti, these signs had all been taken down and replaced with similar ones announcing “Talent Show Today 2:30-3:00”. The one on our door had also been addressed – it named the kids it was “from” and added “to: Americans” :)

At this point, I was pretty excited about this little show, so I stepped inside to take a nap before it began. Sadly, when I walked out of the apartment a few minutes before 2:30, all of the signs had mysteriously disappeared and there were only a couple of kids in the courtyard – obviously, the “Talent Show” had been cancelled. Maybe Tanja and I will try to help them do a real one – kids often make plans that are a little over their heads, but maybe with a little grown-up help…

On Niehd (Monday), I decided it was time to try something a little different with my last group of kids. We have started discussing equations and solutions, and once again I’ve noticed that they feel reasonably confident doing the arithmetic, but have no real understanding of the concept. I made a bunch of cards, half of them with equations and the other half with corresponding solutions. The task was for each “equation person” to find their “solution person”.

I made the equations too difficult to actually solve, so that they only way they could do it was by going from person to person, checking each number to see if it worked or not. The idea was that they would work in ever-changing pairs, so that if one of them understood the task better they could explain it to the other. It seems to have gone over well – I shook things up a bit, and it will be a good example to refer back to whenever we review the concept. I graded the exercise by starting them all at five points and taking one point off for every time they brought an incorrect pair up to me to check, and all but a handful got the full five points.

I also collected my first homework assignment from all my classes on Niehd, and was pleased to see that most of them seem to have done it. I’ve already graded one of the classes, and I can tell some of them are definitely putting in the time like I wanted them to. The good thing about the homework is that it has brought a couple of them into my office hours finally. As frustrating as I find them in a class, they’re a lot of fun one-on-one… many “a-ha” moments, which are like crack to a teacher.

The other good thing about Niehd was that we all got paid – I get $300 on the first of every month. Tanja and I each bought $50 worth of CashPower, which should hopefully last us about three weeks. I also spent about $40 on groceries, mostly on lunch foods and cheap dinners that should last a while. Money is tight, but at least it’s coming in again. Now if only I could afford a new pair of headphones…

On Niare (Tuesday), I brought in a big box of chik-o-stick candies, in hopes of getting my kids to speak up a little in class. The results were mixed – they did venture a few more explanations, but every time I gave out a treat the class would erupt in disruptive laughter. I’ll try it a few more times, hoping the novelty will wear off, but this wasn't exactly the sort of energy I was looking for. The reason they don't want to talk is because no one wants to stand out from the crowd or be seen as a suck-up, and giving them treats when they do talk only seems to exacerbate this embarrassment.

As usual, I devoted at least a half hour of class time on Niare to letting/making them start working on the assignment, with me there to answer questions. The theory is that doing the homework is like cleaning your room – the hardest part is beginning, and after that it goes on its own momentum. It sounded like a good idea, but I’ve already started to regret this, since it quickly becomes a classroom discipline nightmare. Half of them don’t bring their books (so that they huddle together to ostensibly copy problems but more likely copy answers), and they’d rather spend the time chatting with their friends or trying to sneak out when I’m not looking, but some of them really do buckle down and get started.

During my lunch, I walked over to Telecom to pay the installation fee for our new phone. It was only $24, split two ways, and the monthly is supposed to be $8 – not bad. The number (if you’re calling from the states) is 011-691-320-7940. If you feel like dropping us a line, the best way to do it is get some kind of international calling card. Oh, and don’t forget about the time difference – I leave for work around 7:30 AM, which is 4:30 PM the previous day in Florida, and I don’t usually get back until 4:00 PM (1:00 AM) on MWF and 6:00 PM (3:00 AM) on TTh. The best time to call is probably early morning your time.

Also, I’m going to try and start using my COM e-mail more: bboucher@comfsm.fm. The server is here on the island, and I can access it a lot more quickly than the g-mail web server. The only thing is that I can’t accept or send out attachments bigger than 2 MB – not that I’d want to, since even a file that small would take at least a minute to transfer.

Of course, don’t let all this “fancy new technology” dissuade you from sending postcards - we still have a lot of wall to fill up. My two (one of which I brought with me) are quickly becoming swamped by various photos of Ljubljana from Tanja’s parents. “Stand up for America! Be American!” as the F-150s I am so glad to be missing would say. My address, once again, is:
Brian Boucher, c/o WorldTeach
P.O. Box 2378
Kolonia, Pohnpei
Federated States of Micronesia
96941

Today (Niesil) has been somewhat hectic, but there was one good pick-me-up. Belinda and one of the other MS 95 students came to my office hours today after a particularly difficult daily problem, which I must confess I wrote in a slightly sadistic mood. We spent a half hour or so going over the problem in detail, and I kept reassuring them that I was more interested in their thought process and planning than the actual answer, and that I would grade them very gently.

At the end, Belinda made a comment about how she used to hate math in high school (which she graduated from about a decade ago) but that now she’s trying to start liking it. I can tell that she takes the course very seriously, devoting time to making her homework neat, listening intently during my lectures, and always explaining her work fully. It’s students like these that can make a whole class seem more worthwhile, although I have to work hard to get the others to follow her example. At least I know one person I can have an impact on here.

I'm a Daddy (Well, Not Really)

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: seripwelel = “newborn baby”

I am officially not sick anymore – hurrah! Apparently all of this sunshine is agreeing with me. It’s been a busy week, as it appears all of my weeks are going to be from now on. I thought it would be a good idea to give all of my three classes the same basic syllabus, so that I won’t get lost switching between them, but I am now realizing this means I will routinely have to grade about a hundred exams all at once every weekend. I am slowly diminishing the pile of grading I built up while I was under the weather, but not quite as fast as I am having to add things to it.

I am definitely starting to feel like I am boring my students, but I’m not sure what to do about it. I have a lot of material to get through in the next fifteen weeks or so, and I can’t afford to do many “fun days”. I also feel like the only way I can speed up is by giving them the sort of math education they’ve already had – that is, telling them how to do things without the why. Then again, its very hard to teach them anything abstract when the only questions they will answer are of the “what’s six times nine?” variety, and even then at most half of them will speak up. The learning process continues for both of us.

To get a little variety and a different perspective in my life, I have started auditing the Basic Japanese class at COM which meets twice a week. The scene is pretty interesting – our teacher is an excitable, wafer-thin Japanese woman who addresses a classroom full of dark-skinned Micronesians (with the women in flowery skirts and bearing quarters stuck in their earlobes – no clue why – and the men, sporting the all-pervasive rat-tail, decked out in their version of hip-hop regalia) and, finally, me. In addition to my desire to learn the language, I also wanted to see how another teacher manages her classroom, and what it feels like to be amongst the students.

The first class I went to was on Niare (Tuesday). I felt a bit out of place because I missed the first three meetings, during which time they had apparently learned all of those useful little phrases like “good evening” and “thank you very much”. I didn’t help that I had to grade papers during class, and when it came time to work with a partner I was placed with an obviously disinterested girl with the thickest upper-lip hair I have ever seen on a woman, who spent most of the time we were supposed to be conversing lazily flipping through her notebook.

That day, we learned how to count to ten and how to ask questions like “How many people are there?”. We also learned a Japanese version of “ten little indians”:

    hitori, futari, sannin imasu
    yonnin, gonin, rokunin imasu
    shichinin, hachinin, kyunin imasu
    juunin no-indian boys

I was startled when the other students managed to sing this little ditty in near-perfect harmony. Micronesians love to sing, and their highly musical church services can often be heard for several blocks around.

A word on the format of this class – the Basic Japanese course at COM Pohnpei campus is part of the HTM program, or Hospitality and Tourism Management. Although the national campus in Palikir offers Associate’s degrees, our campus only offers certificate programs in various trades like accounting, cabinet making, air conditioning repair, and of course tourism – we pass the students seeking an AS, AA or AAS on to Palikir.

Because the Japanese course is run under the auspices of HTM, it is geared towards students with interests in the service industry who may encounter Japanese-speaking tourists. Accordingly, much of the speech we are learning is highly formalized and respectful – Japanese has many distinctions between honorific and non-honorific vocabulary, a legacy of Japan’s long-enduring class structure. For example, we learned to ask someone’s name with the lengthy phrase “Osore iri masu ga, o-namae o o’negai shimasu?” which translates roughly as “I’m afraid to do so, but may I humbly ask for your most honored name?” Of course, in a less formal setting, the phrase “O-namae nan desu ka?” is perfectly acceptable.

The second day, Niepeng (Thursday – do I have to keep translating those?), was a little more fun. We spent most of the time working on demonstratives (“this”, “that” and so on) – like Pohnpeian, Japanese distinguishes between locations near the listener (so-) and locations far from both speaker and listener (a-), while English uses the single word “that” for both. This time, I was paired with an energetic man who was an absolute delight as a partner. When we were given cards for word substitution exercises (“Where is the ____?” with the blank filled in by the words on the cards) we would always blow through our entire stack in no time and be forced to recycle the cards.

I am also studying Japanese from some books I ordered on Amazon (which only took a week to get here) – one is on basic Japanese grammar, while the other two cover hiragana and katakana respectively. The language has a fairly simple, though not always intuitive, structure – it is far closer to Pohnpeian than English is. The hardest part for me is that the verb always comes at the end, so that a simple sentence like “Denwa wa kore desu.” translates word-for-word as “telephone (topic marker) here is” and means “The telephone is here.”

There has been another really exciting development this week – I would have talked about it first, but then you never would have read through that linguistic polemic. On Niepeng, Meghan came in to tell me that she had called our host family, and our sister Tanya had given birth. She wasn’t supposed to be due until September 11th, so this was a little unexpected and we were both really excited to see the baby, so Meghan and I decided to meet up at the Spanish wall that night and head over to the old house in Ohmine.

I am pleased to announce that Leonard Brian Doses entered the world on August 26th at around nine in the morning, weighing seven pounds and three ounces. That middle name is not a coincidence – I had joked with Tanya before that she should name the baby after me if it was a boy, and I guess she decided it was a good idea at least for a middle name. I’m going to call him “Li’l B” since that was the nickname my old friend Ben gave me, and it matches his initials :)

Poor Tanya, who is only sixteen, had to undergo twenty-four hours of labor, and she is still not walking straight, but after watching this video I think you will definitely agree it was worth it. By the way, peren means happy.

After visiting with little Leonard for a while, we all stayed for a bit and colored with the kids before heading home. Before we left, Floid made me promise to come visit him the next day and help with some math homework. I was beaming from ear to ear all the way back – I’ve never been a namesake before, and I kept thinking about how this means I will, at least symbolically, be staying on Pohnpei much longer after my year is up.

The next day, I kept my promise to Floid and went back to Ohmine. As I said last time, I’ve been meaning to spend more time there anyway. When I came down the street, Floid spotted me and shouted in excitement, at which point all the other kids (who were playing in the yard after school) came tearing around the corner to say hi. It was a heart-warming sight, and a little hilarious since two of the boys were as usual naked. Floid and I reviewed a math test he had done poorly on, and I was happy with the half-hour or so of good focus I got out of him considering we were in a highly-distracting environment. In the end, Kathy handed me a little Tupperware container of yams (which taste like buttery mashed potatoes). It was a very fun evening.

Today is Rahnkaulop, and I am sitting in my office typing this after a boring and unproductive day, spent making Japanese flash cards and listening to books on tape. Old habits die hard. To break up the monotony, I am going down to Kitti with the family tomorrow – they’re going to church, and I’m going to visit Beth and Nick. I haven’t seen their place since it was made ready for them to move in – the last time I saw it, it was mostly spider webs. Look for the pictures.

I am also starting to plan for a trip to the Phillipines for Christmas – Evelyn invited me to stay with her family at an apartment in Manila or their house in one of the outer provinces. I am really excited about the idea of staying in a city with 14 million people after living in a country with a hundredth as many. They also have a mall, the Mall of Asia, which is the fifth largest in the world. Apparently, Phillipinos love to shop and they have a massive number of cheap Chinese imports flooding the market.

To help pay for the plane ticket or any expenses I’ll have there, I’m going to start tutoring at night for the Talent Search Program here at COM. They pay something like $10 an hour, and it could be as many as two hours every weeknight – best case scenario, that could double my income, and even if not it will still help out a lot. Wish me luck!