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.