Merry Christmas!

Well, Happy Holidays to all. I'm on my Christmas vacation right now, hanging out in Chiang Mai, Thailand, with my friend Mer (Grinnellian working for an NGO outside the city here). We're going to spend the holiday at the spa, getting massages and stuff, and also eating a LOT of food. There are a lot of tourists here, but otherwise Christmas isn't a big holiday here.

In Manado, however, Christmas is a very big deal, and I'm sure that it would be exciting to be there (I'm glad to have the exciting vacation, though). Manadonese people get a lot of their traditions from the Dutch, so Santa came on December 6th, not the 25th. In Dutch tradition, Santa (or Sinterklaas) lives in Spain, and travels to the Netherlands every year by boat. He sends Black Pete down the chimney (so he doesn't get dirty himself, I guess), and the good children get presents. The bad children get put in a sack and taken back to Spain, which seems pretty awesome, actually.

Now, Black Pete is black because of the soot from the chimney, but originally the character may have been a slave, or maybe he was just a Moor (from North Africa). I've heard varying reports from Dutch tourists. In any case, Sinterklaas sometimes travels around the streets, and he takes a man in blackface with him.


In Manado, they drive around in the back of a truck, blasting Christmas music. And Santa has four or five men in blackface, and a clown, too, for some reason. This has happened a number of times; you hear really loud Christmas and you start looking around for the traffic slow-up that is Santa and his posse (he's followed by decorated angkots, so traffic is definitely effected).

Anyway, I hope everyone is having a good holiday. It's a little hard to believe that it's Christmas, because it's so warm and unchanging here that time doesn't seem to work the same way. But I'm thinking of everyone back home and wishing you well!

Teaching in an SMA

I'd like to talk a bit about what school is like here. Specifically, my school.

There are about 1,000 students at the school. There are three grades, 10-12. After grade 10, the students are put into a more specialized program, so grades 11 and 12 are split into science, social studies, and language. School starts at 7am and ends at 2:15 (earlier on Friday). There are four periods, 45 minutes each, then 10-10:30 is a break (for lunch), then there are five more periods. Myself, I think 10am is a bit early for lunch, so I usually eat a late lunch when I get home.

Discipline is pretty different than in the States. First of all, the gates are closed at 7am, and any late students can't come in. "If they're late, it's better if they don't come at all," one teacher told me. Or, the late students are brought into the teachers' room and scolded for a while, then switched. As in, hit with a switch. Not a lot, but once or twice to get the point across.

If there's announcements at the beginning of the day, all the students have to gather in front of the school, and afterward the schedule is pushed back and the periods shortened. Some days there have been teacher meetings, during which the students just hung out in their classrooms, I guess. Between classes, a bell is rung, but it's not automatic, so whenever a teacher realizes it's time to switch, they ring the bell. When there's no electricity, which is not uncommon, nothing happens. Not to mention, only some of the rooms have clocks, and these all say wildly different times. So people don't seem to care too much about the schedule. The teachers are often late, or go past their time and teach into lunchtime. It's very different from the States, and it's something that can be annoying at times.

Some teachers don't show up to class at all. I'm supposed to have a teacher with me in the class at all times, but one of the teachers I work with never shows up. Last Friday, a class asked me to stay and talk with them after our class. "Don't you have another class?" I asked. "No, the teacher doesn't come," they told me.

I'm not sure about homework at the school. I believe the students are taking ten different subjects, and homework for all of them would probably be a lot. But, based on how they behave in my class, there's not a lot of accountability when it comes to classwork. Whenever I assign homework, it's just to finish something outside of class, and often some of the students already have finished it. But it's very difficult the next class to get anyone to have their homework.

One of the other trying points is that the students were raised in a very different culture. In our orientation, we learned that Americans and Indonesians are on opposite ends of the individuality spectrum. Americans are very, very individualistic, and for that reason value personal freedom and competition, whereas Indonesians are much more communal, and so hate to separate themselves from the group. The students are afraid to single themselves out in any way, and they try to help each other, so they do things like tell each other the answers.

As for English class, well, mostly the teachers teach in Indonesian. So they're learning about English more than practicing it and getting comfortable with it. That's why we're here, to get them used to speaking English. So I try to make my lessons interesting, and to encourage creativity, and get them all talking in English. It can be very difficult sometimes to get the students to participate, and I think that's the hardest part of the teaching. If the students make an effort, my activities will help them. But there's not a lot I can do for the students that just sit there. In any case, I'll keep trying lots of different things, and I hope that my students are gaining something from my being here.

I've talked a lot about the difficulties of teaching, but there are good things, too. The students can be very excited, especially about playing games, because they can't do that in other classes. My students also LOVE to sing. All Indonesians love to sing, but especially the Manadonese. My first week, I had to sing in every class, and the classes would sing to me, too (usually "I'm Yours" by Jason Mraz). Many of my students are eager to learn, and there are class periods where I just have to stop and laugh because the students are having so much fun with their English. Some of them really like to imitate my inflections (I think English is one of the more tonally expressive languages), so whenever I say something like "OH-k" they all have to repeat it. They also love to say things like "Barack Obama--he is my father."

This past week, I've been teaching them about Thanksgiving, and I made a crossword puzzle out of the vocabulary. But I didn't realize how many words are the same length...

"The first Thanksgiving was celebrated by Native Americans and the ______" "Potatoes"
"People of all ____, young and old, enjoy Thanksgiving." "Eggs"
"Thanksgiving is a time for families to come __________" "Potatoes"