Part III - Bring it on

Sharlyn, Sterah

If there’s one thing that these kids are passionate about, it’s sports. Basketball, volleyball, even table tennis, if it's happening they'll live and breathe it. Which brings me to the last part of the ‘Busiest week of the year thus far’: Sport’s Day! Now, this day was crazy. We had three to four things going on at once – ranging from basketball to flour-blowing, from eating contests to chess.

All the students were divided into four different groups: red, yellow, green, and blue. The older grades did more of the major games like volleyball and basketball, and the younger grades had the minor games covered. One of the minor games was a paper blowing game; now at first this didn’t sound too complicated to me, but blowing a flower along a rough string is harder when your mouth is filled with chocolate wafer crumbs… it was hilarious watching the little kids stuff their faces and then try to blow, little crumbs were flying all over!

I feel like I just said this, but the great morning weather didn’t last long, and soon it was raining. The field they were playing volleyball in was soaked, but of course that didn’t stop the games. Janet played the part of the DJ while Jules stood on the ladder in the rain, blowing the whistle and calling points. The field was quickly muddy and the students were slipping and sliding like crazy all over. Praise ran went up for a spike, slipped, and landed in a puddle. Motoky almost did the splits. There was so much laughter and screaming.

Another of the minor games was a ‘Eat what you get’ game, in which 10 kids from each of the teams lined up and picked something out of a bag and had to eat it – we had everything from Chuukese snack bags to dehydrated blueberries. I really wanted to put in a thing of garlic, but that would have been too cruel… and so the worse thing for these kids to eat was the healthy stuff. You should have seen the kid’s faces when they got the carrots. Because of the rain I had to have the game in the 2^nd grade classroom, and that was an unfortunate change of events. They got in there and the noise volume was equivalent to a plane taking off. Kiana took a textbook and slammed it against a desk, and that finally got everybody quiet – for ten seconds, and then they were screaming again. When I finally gave the instructions, made sure there were ten kids in each row and yelled “GO!” the noise was even more incredible. And so were the manners (which is to be expected for an eating contest, anything else would be pathetic). Popcorn flew through the air, pieces of ripped paper were everywhere, and blueberries fell and left streaks of purple on the tile floor. When one of the teams finished, I couldn’t have heard myself yell even if I had the desire to. I walked out of that room with my ears ringing. Another game was the flour blowing, and I wasn’t in the room for that one, but all the kids came out with very white faces at the end of it, so it must have been entertaining.

We had a few track and field events, and the locals gathered around to watch the kids as they sprinted barefoot down the road. But the best part by far was when we got everybody together to play tug-of-war. That was chaos! It was a struggle to get the red marker in the middle of the field, and then when one team won the kids kept slipping all over, and pushing each other and kicking water up. But even through all the craziness it will remain oddly as one of my fondest memories. I guess I like mud.

But anyways, that was kind of what my last few days have been like. I’d love to say I've been able to relax for an extended period of time, but who am I kidding?

I’m a teacher.

Part II - So you think you can science?

litmus paper

Egg Drop!

The 7th graders made
straw bridges

Our Math/Science Fair was the second part of the ‘Busiest week of the year thus far.’

We definitely over-planned activities, but that was quite all right. The day started off with me giving a rousing morning worship talk – and by talk I mean yell. I know how Mr. O felt when he was trying to talk over all us kids at TCJA from kindergarten to tenth grade during assembly, it’s so annoying when the kids aren't listening to you at all and they’re all talking in Chuukese. Oh, wait a minute, that sounds like a few of the classes I teach.

Watching a play by the 6th grade

Madison and Defitson
working on their Rube
Goldberg project

Some seniors and their project

As island life would have it, after the kids did a math game that Alfred had made it began to rain… good thing we’re all used to it! We then had all the groups go around to eight different stations, and I was in charge of two presentations. So I spent that hour running back and forth between those two classrooms making sure that they were both running smoothly. Thank goodness for solid students who keep things going! For the biology presentation the 10^th grade girls told the rest of the students a few things about different endangered animals, and they fixed up the microscope with a couple slides – “Anybody want to see blood?!” I have a few hand-held microscopes that are great at looking at shirts, flowers, and bugs with, and so the kids enjoyed looking through those. Ants are pretty cool, as I know my brother would agree! For the other presentation I had the 9^th and 11^th graders join together, and we showed off models of atoms out of paper mache, and then we talked a bit about pH and how to use litmus paper to figure out if a substance was acidic or basic. And the kids were super excited to stick those tiny pieces of paper in the vinegar, soap, and lemon juice and be able to tell me what the pH was. I love how excited these kids can get! Some of the other stations were a homemade ice-cream station, a design-an-animal station, and an ecosystem station.

For the week before the fair the seniors had been working on constructing some Rube Goldberg machines, which they showed off in front of the rest of the school. The machine was supposed to pop a balloon, and two of the three machines were successful under pressure. The last thing that we did that day was an egg drop. We divided them all back up into the groups, gave them a bagful of random things and told them to have at it. We must have a school full of potential engineers, because I think only one of the contraptions didn't work…It was a crazy day, but successful. 

Part I - Always in my heart

My cool roommates

This is the first installment of what I’d like to call the ‘Busiest week of the year thus far.’ It so happened that we all had the brilliant idea to have all the programs in February… we have the High School Valentine’s Banquet last Saturday night, Math/Science Fair on Thursday, and then Sport’s Day on Friday. BUT! On the plus side, it’s all over now, so I can finally think about Graduation plans again. Anyways, here’s Part 1: Our Valentine’s Day Banquet.

Some of the lovely high schoolers

The banquet was on Valentine’s Day - aww, so sweet. The theme was “Always in my heart” and there were love songs in the air and hearts and balloons hanging from the ceiling at the restaurant we held the banquet at. In the typical island fashion, when I said it was supposed to start at 6:00, that means ‘start getting ready to leave at 6:00’, so we didn't make it there until 7:30 or so. Thankfully, the rest of the students also run on island time,  and there were only a few students that beat us there. The evening went well, and I was constantly running around trying to make sure this were going smoothly and that everybody had food. We brought cupcakes and toppings, (Jerom tried to walk away with the whole tube of chocolate frosting twice), and we made a photo booth with various props that was a huge hit. After eating we managed to wrangle up the kids together for some games. It can take a while to get these kids excited about something other than taking selfies and just chilling with their tunes, but when they’re finally into it, there is no calming them down – even if it is just a Valentine’s Day version of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey…

Minako

The first game we played was something called Shoe Story, which is when one partner goes out into the hall and the other partner puts one shoe in the middle of the room. When I yell “Go!” the partners in the hall had to rush back into the room, find their partner’s shoe, and put it on them. The last pair finished would have to do a quick dance just for funsies. Before the game started, one of the sophomores, Josh, asked me if any of the games would be embarrassing, and I told him that I doubted it, and the he would be fine. Unfortunately he and Minako where the last pair finished, and the rest of the students started whooping and hollering for them to go dance… and he was out the door and halfway down the stairs when I caught up to him. But since it wouldn’t be good for him to not show up to school on Monday, we quickly found a replacement – Felipe, our newest teacher who had just arrived the day before. He took Minako for a quick spin around the room, and our shy student was saved. The evening ended off with us announcing all the various titles and such that the students had won, and there were way more than I imagined there being. We had the typical King and Queen, and then a bunch more, like Face of the Night, Prince, Princess, Best in Gown, and a few others.

Defitson

Class of 2015!

On a different subject, I've found that I don't really enjoy working in groups sometimes, especially if I have to be the leader. The whole delegating tasks to people is something that I need to work on. I get caught up in everything that needs to be done and get so stressed that I forget that I can ask people to help me, and I can forget to inform people about what is going on. When things need to happen there is a big part of me that wants to do everything myself, because I’m scared that it won’t get done otherwise or that I personally won’t like how it was done (which is silly); and then there is the part of me that just wants to be the group member who just glues the information on the poster and then pays for the celebratory ice-cream. But I’m learning to be a little more trusting and am practicing the art of accepting it when things aren’t done my way. Life can be difficult in Chuuk, and teaching with so few materials is rough, but I know that being in Chuuk is equipping me for the rest of my life, and that’s worth any difficulty.