"Everything in this Country is Sticky"

In case anyone pays attention to the titles, that is a direct quote from Brenden Cutter, one of the guys from the trip. A bunch of us went to see Despicable Me last night, and Brenden bought sour patch kids, who's sour crystal coating, after about ten seconds, soggified and stuck together. He was quite depressed. Speaking of the movie by the way, I highly recommend it.

Anyway.
The last couple of days have been intense. Tuesday we all went to PICED, the Pacific Islands Center for Educational Development. We had already been told that they are going to be one of the best resources for us here on island, both with tangible stuff like copying and access to printers and educational resources, but as a support team as well. One of their employees this year is actually a WorldTeach volunteer from last year, so she is fully aware of all the challenges we face. Still we spent about 6 hours there getting info pumped into us. All of us pretty much ate dinner and crashed.

Yesterday we had a fun random day. Out of nowhere, the AmSam DOE requested that all of us WorldTeachers attend a conference which NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) was hosting in a local high school. Now, since we are all in the employ of the DOE, when they "request" we show up, and in our new WorldTeach lavalavas and white shirt. This last bit turned out to be an issue- there was serious swapping and trying on the night before so that everyone found a white shirt which was appropriate to wear. One of the wonderful guys here, Mark, rescued me- I ended up wearing his GAP white polo from the ninth grade...Thanks Mark (he demanded a blog shout out as a return for the shirt) ! It turned out to be wonderful surprise- the conference was geared towards teaching teachers hows to teach (sorry about all the teach-es) marine and atmospheric science to all age levels. Many of us spent the day making marine themed art projects and learning about the classification of fish, sea turtles and more. The day ended with the local dance troupe giving a performance at the closing ceremony. When we went back to home base, we had a raffle of all the stuff last years volunteers left behind... I ended up with tennis rackets, external speakers for my computer, a rolling duffel bag and some space bags.

Today we all had our first teaching experience in a "real" Samoan classroom. At one o'clock, all of us trudged over to the PICED building where each of us taught a ten minute sample lesson to a group of recruited Samoan high school students. From what I could tell, most of us did pretty well. It was definitely different teaching them as opposed to the other volunteers- they are a talkative people, and at the same time, creativity has not been encourage by their previous education. They are good at regurgitating information, but their critical thinking skills and understanding of the "why" behind things is lacking. They definitely have storytelling inside them- I think it is just that in the past, it has been squashed by teachers who only wanted to teach by the book, checking off curriculum markers so that they could receive pay stubs and put as little effort into their jobs as possible.
But I digress. My lesson worked out well, once I gave some encouraging words to the students; I was teaching the sequence of decision-> action -> consequence as both a tool for analyzing real life actions, as a tool for providing structure in creative writing, and as a tool to analyze novels and break them down into understandable portions. First I introduced myself and set my only two rules- 1. Respect. 2. No talking when I talk. Then I had them all make nametags so that I could address them personally and make a connection while talking. Then I diagrammed the sequence on the board, went over its application, and introduced the activity. My activity was thus: I divided the class of 15 into two groups and made each group form a circle, and elected a starter in each one (I chose the quietest student). I gave that student a prompt with a choice in it and had them decide which action they would take. Then each student went around and added a sentence of the story, based on the sentence ahead of it. When they were done with my prompt, I had another student make up his own daily action and the cycle went again- some of the stories they started to come up with were preeeetty hilarious. My favorite though, ended with, "and after I died and went to heaven, I came back down to haunt EVERYONE!" Once they groups had completed two or three stories, I brought them out of the groups, reviewed the concepts, and DONE. I felt pretty good about it. One of the students came up to me afterwards and said he liked my lesson, so that was nice.

Tomorrow is more classes, and then some party PICED is throwing.
Saturday we move to our houses- I am super excited to nest. I am sick of living out of a suitcase and sleeping next to 8 other girls. Just living with 21 other people is exhausting.
One of my roommates and I are also debating buying a cheap car for the year and selling it back at the end... you can get a decent one for 4 or 5 thousand and it might be worth it, since public transportation stops by 5 45 everyday, runs sporadically on Saturdays, and doesn't run at all on Sundays (excluding taxis, but those would get expensive). We shall see.

Later gators! Miss you all, and I hope you are enjoying the blog... there will be more funny stories when school starts I am sure!

Mwah,
Rosa