First Week of School!

February 8, 2013

The first week of school went well! In the traditional Tongan fashion we really didn’t start with classes this week, it was more just cleaning the school and cutting the grass. I was trying to figure what I was supposed to do and when I was supposed to teach so I talked to my principal, who a few months ago said I would be teaching 3 hours a day classes 3- 6, after I talked to her the first day she told me I should probably only do some group work with class 5 for about 20 minutes when the teacher needs me to… After our talk she told me to go home and rest, I got really frustrated and went to my house but then decided to just go and talk to the teachers I would actually be working with (the class ¾ teacher and class 5/6 teacher), they told me I can teach the whole time and they will help me translate when needed- crisis averted.

Friday was absolutely absurd. I guess the kids are supposed to have religious instruction and listen to some radio broadcast so I we don’t really teach on Fridays. Their religious instruction took all but half an hour and while the teachers were listening to the teacher’s radio broadcast the PTA chair was with the kids. She actually had them get in a line and march around the school to kill time- this was after trying to organize them by class and size… Since I couldn’t really teach and I don’t understand the radio broadcast, I joined the kids just playing around and started making them give me piggy back rides (it’s called fafa here). They loved it, each took turns and some buckle under my weight, which made me way more happy then when a few of the kids (okay maybe 5) could actually carry me…

Even thought we spent most of the week pushing the lawn mower over the acre or two of grass field in front of my school, I did get a chance to do some benchmark testing with the 42 kids I will be teaching and it was quite eye opening. Some kids have trouble with letter recognition and few know any phonics and even fewer know any site words past the pre-primer level. I thought this was going to be hard but I don’t think I was prepared for teaching kids letters… I will need way more than an hour of English class a day to help these kids and I will definitely need to get better at Tongan, that’s for sure. I guess I really wont know much until next week when I start actually teaching but things are definitely getting more real now.