My first period class should have 20 students. Today, I have three. I teach at a school that is a combination of the city school (Sidney Huntington School) and a boarding school (Galena Interior Learning Academy, or GILA). SHS is a k-12 school serving the students of Galena (a town of less than 500 people). GILA is a 9-12 boarding school for student from all over the state of Alaska. We hold classes on two campuses: the SHS campus (where the k-8 classes are also held) and the GILA campus which is a former Air Force Base. The two campuses are about 3 miles apart with SHS often being called the city school because, among other things, it is located inside the town of Galena while the Air Force Base is (sort of) outside the town (officially it's in, but it definitely feels out).
In the evenings and on the weekends the dorm staff takes care of the GILA students, but during the school day they are in classes that are mixed together with the SHS students. This means that we can't cancel school because during the scheduled school day the dorm staff are sleeping. However, sometimes situations arise that require flexibility. For example last fall we had no water at the SHS building. The elementary classes were canceled, but the high school still had classes. All of the SHS teachers had to travel to the GILA campus and find locations to work. I and two other teachers were working in the dining hall. Obviously, it's not the best situation, but we make it work. It has happened this year, but sometimes the roads are too icy to transport the students. In these cases the teachers travel to GILA (if they can't make it the school provides transportation) and classes are held wherever we can find space like the day we were out of water.
Most of the time, weather that would cause other places to cancel we consider normal. We don't blink at -20 and -30 degree (Fahrenheit) temperatures. When it starts getting to -45 or so transportation is provided for teachers whose vehicles won't start. At -50 the local kids aren't required to go to school, but most do.
Today, however falls into the category of unusual. I woke up this morning to the sound of snow hitting the windows and the wind howling. I could feel the house shaking (granted our buildings shake a lot more because everything except the Air Force base, which is protected by dikes, is on stilts because of flooding). I wondered if this would affect school. It did. Shortly after arriving at school I heard the rumor that one of the buses had gotten caught in a snow drift. Meanwhile stories start coming in on cars being blown across the road. Most of the trouble was between the former air force base nd town because this is a wide open area (and also the location of the airport). The first bus that should have dropped off local kids ay 7:45 am arrived about 8:10 which was the same time the first bus of GILA kids arrived. The drivers said it wasn't safe to drive the route with kids, especially for the new bus (we have two buses one is new this year) and that driver was hanging around school. Meanwhile, we have an issue. It's not safe to run the buses, but we have kids on both sides who should be on the other (city kids who need to go to GILA, GILA kids who came over for swimming or other things and then GILA kids who need to go to SHS). It was announced that students would go to classes if they were on the correct side and that students on the wrong campus would find a teacher's room to go work in. Seeing as we have about 30 city kids and 230 boarding students, I know the other campus must be pretty crazy today. Life on this side is pretty easy. Most classes are averaging 3-4 students. One of the lunch ladies came into my first period class for lunch count. She told me, "It's pizza day and we have enough pizza for the whole high school and most of them aren't here." They make the pizza from scratch and its pretty good. I'm guessing there will be a lot of leftovers.
We're waiting to see if/when the weather improves and just playing the day by ear.
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 12, 2019
Friday, January 11, 2019
Life at 50 below
First, let me start that saying, yes the temperature can get to -50 degrees Fahrenheit (-45.6 C). The coldest temperature I have ever personally experienced was -65 (or so because most thermometers stop working at these temperatures).I didn't realize how shocking this was to people until I talked to my mother today. Matter of fact, I didn't realize our temperature was quite so low. My parents were apparently out shopping today and my dad kept showing people how cold it was in Galena on his weather app. Seeing as how my parents live in North Carolina this sparked a lot of interest even from people who just overheard what he was saying. My mom texted me in the middle of class saying, "-51 brrrrrrrrr." Last time I had looked it was only -47.
At these temperatures there are a number of challenges. First, the boiling point of propane is -43.6 F (-42C). This means that at these temperatures propane is no longer a gas, but rather a liquid. Matter of fact propane pretty much stops flowing at -40 (by the way -40 F = -40C). Many of the stoves here in Galena are propane (including our school ovens) so you have to have a back-up plan. For example, school lunch was baked in the former home ec classroom ovens (we don't have home ec classes, but call the room the community kitchen and use it for a variety of purposes) which are electric.
Another issue at these temperatures is many vehicles won't start. We have engine block heaters, battery heaters, and oil pan heaters (one time in the summer I heard a couple of tourists say, "wow, so many of the cars in Alaska are electric" while pointing at the car I was traveling in. I replied, "that's not an electric car." "Why does it have a plug then?" I explained that the plug was for the engine clock heater. Here in Galena, because it gets so cold the school has plugs so that people can plug in while they're at work so that their cars will start after work. Nonetheless, at 50 below or so some cars simply won't start. Yesterday, I got a text from one of my bosses which read, "-47 but we will run a van for teacher pickup for those who need it. Otherwise school as usual. Please text if you need a ride." I didn't go to work yesterday because I was sick, but I rode the school bus to school today.
Besides propane being a liquid and vehicles not starting we have a few other interesting challenges at these temperatures. As a fly-in only community we are reliant on planes for everything. Of course these planes are affected by the usual weather conditions like visibility and winds, but they are affected by the cold. We have three types of planes that fly into Galena: Navajos, Caravans and 1900s. All three are prop planes, but they have different temperature tolerances. Navajos can only fly to -40, while Caravans and 1900s can only go to -50 (Navajos and Caravans are a lot "leakier" than 1900s so you definitely want your cold weather gear on those flights).
In Galena we also have a lot of houses (including one I'm moving into soon) that are not on piped water and sewer. The water is delivered and the sewer is a holding tank that the city will pump out. The city (we're classified as a first-class-city although with a population under 500 we think of ourselves as a village) this week posted reminders that the don't deliver water or do sewer pick-ups at temperatures lower than -40. It's supposed to be warmer tomorrow (-30 or so) and they've announced that if it in fact is warmer they will run tomorrow (Saturday) which is not a usual day for delivery without a $100 weekend surcharge.
Finally, its also too cold for garbage pickup. Here in Galena we have dumpsters around town and everyone puts their garbage in these. The city empties the dumpsters and takes the refuse to the dump, but alas it is also too cold for this equipment. Therefore, they have sent a message asking people to please hold onto their refuse until it warms up and they can empty the dumpsters. Right now the birds and animals are picking open the garbage and making a big mess of it (the dumpsters close, but as they get too full people usually stack the garbage next to the dumpsters).
Tuesday, October 2, 2018
Sometimes you just have to be flexible
This morning I went into work and was expecting it to be business as usual. I had my mind on what we were going to do in my chemistry class, but when I walked into my classroom I saw a couple of test papers sitting on my desk. The tests were for a World Geography class and one of my academic support students had taken them yesterday. I decided I should immediately get them into the interdepartmental mail (World Geography is taught on our other campus) and so I went to the office to do that. I'd never sent anything via interdepartmental mail before so I asked the principal how to do so. He was speaking with the assistant principal, but that isn't an unusual thing so I didn't think anything of it. He told me the drop box was in the district office so after I filled out the envelope (I did know how to do that it was more that I didn't know where the envelopes or the drop box were), I headed to the district office. I asked the ladies there where the box was a popped it into the bin. Then my day began to change.
One of the ladies, C, told me that we had no water and wouldn't for at least six hours. I replied that I'd been at the doctor's office one time when they lost water and had to shut down. Surely, as a school we couldn't, by law, have school without water. I, then told me that in the past when we were notified in advance school was canceled. C and I told me that they would still have to work, but they thought school would probably be canceled. I went back to my classroom to work because no matter what happened, I had plenty of work to do.
As I was working I got an alert of my watch. It was through my app for the local radio station and it said, "No school at SHS in Galena today due to water issues." At first this excited me because I could really use an extra day off. Then I went to talk to my coworker, K. We hadn't heard anything official yet, but she suspected we would have to go over to the other campus and hold classes there. That didn't seem possible to me, but I started think we might still have to do something on the other side (that's how the campuses are always referred to as this side and the other side, depending on where you are when you say it).
I went back to my classroom to continue working and then a few minutes later the principal came in to officially tell me the plan. We would go over to the other campus and basically babysit the kids when they didn't have classes for the other side. He asked me if I had any educational movies that would still hold the students' interest and I said I had The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. So I was going to head over there soon and pick up the movie on the way (I actually live in an apartment on "that" side).
Now you might be wondering, "didn't she post about a message saying school was canceled?" Well, I did, but it isn't that simple. The elementary school (prek-8)was canceled. The high school is actually two schools run sort of like they are two schools, but at the same time run like they are one school. Officially in Galena we have two schools (the Galena City School District also runs a boarding school and some of those kids live in Galena as well): Sidney Huntington School (the aforementioned SHS) and Galena Interior Learning Academy, better known as GILA. SHS is a prek-12 school for kids who live in Galena. GILA is a public boarding high school for students from anywhere in the state of Alaska. While the campus in town gets called SHS and the campus that was made from an old Air Force base gets called GILA the reality is the high school students enrolled in SHS and the high school students enrolled in GILA attend classes together and on both campuses. Thus, there are two issues with canceling the high school classes: 1) Only part of their classes are without water and 2) 230 of our 265 students live in a dorm. When they are not in class they have resident advisors and dorm aides who look after them. However, since this was a scheduled school day they are almost all off duty (there's one who runs the wellness room for sick kids and someone who runs the front desk, but otherwise it's an empty building during the school day). There's nowhere we can send them "home" to if we cancel school.
Thus, I took my papers and my computer to the other campus. I had just arrived and was about to head to my apartment to get my DVD when my principal stopped me. Change in plan. He'd had students asking about where I was because they wanted to ask questions on how to do academic things. He decided he was going to set me up in the dining hall and have me help students during the periods that they had me. Unfortunately, I had brought no books nor whiteboards (I have individual whiteboards that I use a lot during academic support since in academic support I am helping individual kids with whatever they need help on, mostly math). The dining hall director had a big easel pad of paper (because the GILA side is an old Air Force base the buildings are all separate buildings so the dining hall isn't next to any classrooms) and the art teacher was going to be working in the dining hall as well having the kids were on some art projects. She had some markers.
As the day progressed it eventually morphed into the kids attending their regularly scheduled classes in a variety of different locations. For the classes we made due with what we had available (Which was sometimes difficult because often the kids don't carry books around. For example the have a copy of their math textbook in their dorm room and then use another copy in class. I have additional copies in my classroom that they use when they come to academic support). Sometimes we had to get creative. For example, I had a student who needed to work on Algebra II. He didn't have a book, but one student had a book. So he used his phone and took pictures of the problems that he needed so he could work (actually several students did this). In another case a student needed to study for a trigonometry quiz (I was helping her). We started with practicing the problems on a worksheet she had previously done, but had with her and then I googled worksheets on the material she was studying and we used those problems to help her study.
Lunch was a bit challenging. Normally only about half of the students eat lunch on each side. Today all the students and staff ate lunch in the GILA dining hall. We started lunch ten minutes early serving the kids who were already in the dining hall first. Then the kids were dismissed to lunch by building to stagger their arrival in the dining hall. The food was a wider variety of items because more people had to be fed then were planned on. The dining hall manager kept encouraging people to leave the dining hall as soon as they finished eating. Before long we ran out of trays and people had to just balance their food in their hands (they were served in disposable serving dishes, but the individual items had to be balanced). Then, we ran out of seats and people were told to take plastic cutlery and eat outside in the grass (thankfully it was a sunny warm day, although warm is relative. The high today was about 55 F which for Alaska in October is quite warm). After a while she was kicking everyone out because they had to get the tables cleaned off to turn the dining hall back into classrooms (there were three classes, including mine, using the dining hall as their classrooms).
By the end of the day I had filled pages and pages (front and back) of the easel pad with lots of math and a decent amount of chemistry. Sometimes I had two or more students working simultaneously on different parts of the page (and on different subjects), but overall it worked.
After school was over I had a student asking me if first period academic support would be in the dining hall tomorrow morning. I told him the water was supposed to be back on by 2 pm (school ends at 3:55) so hopefully everything would be back to normal tomorrow. When I went to the SHS campus at 4:30, there it was still without water. I do hope everything will be back to normal tomorrow, but if not, I now know what I need to make the day more successful. I think everyone has learned enough that tomorrow will be an educational day even if we still have no water.
One of the ladies, C, told me that we had no water and wouldn't for at least six hours. I replied that I'd been at the doctor's office one time when they lost water and had to shut down. Surely, as a school we couldn't, by law, have school without water. I, then told me that in the past when we were notified in advance school was canceled. C and I told me that they would still have to work, but they thought school would probably be canceled. I went back to my classroom to work because no matter what happened, I had plenty of work to do.
As I was working I got an alert of my watch. It was through my app for the local radio station and it said, "No school at SHS in Galena today due to water issues." At first this excited me because I could really use an extra day off. Then I went to talk to my coworker, K. We hadn't heard anything official yet, but she suspected we would have to go over to the other campus and hold classes there. That didn't seem possible to me, but I started think we might still have to do something on the other side (that's how the campuses are always referred to as this side and the other side, depending on where you are when you say it).
I went back to my classroom to continue working and then a few minutes later the principal came in to officially tell me the plan. We would go over to the other campus and basically babysit the kids when they didn't have classes for the other side. He asked me if I had any educational movies that would still hold the students' interest and I said I had The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. So I was going to head over there soon and pick up the movie on the way (I actually live in an apartment on "that" side).
Now you might be wondering, "didn't she post about a message saying school was canceled?" Well, I did, but it isn't that simple. The elementary school (prek-8)was canceled. The high school is actually two schools run sort of like they are two schools, but at the same time run like they are one school. Officially in Galena we have two schools (the Galena City School District also runs a boarding school and some of those kids live in Galena as well): Sidney Huntington School (the aforementioned SHS) and Galena Interior Learning Academy, better known as GILA. SHS is a prek-12 school for kids who live in Galena. GILA is a public boarding high school for students from anywhere in the state of Alaska. While the campus in town gets called SHS and the campus that was made from an old Air Force base gets called GILA the reality is the high school students enrolled in SHS and the high school students enrolled in GILA attend classes together and on both campuses. Thus, there are two issues with canceling the high school classes: 1) Only part of their classes are without water and 2) 230 of our 265 students live in a dorm. When they are not in class they have resident advisors and dorm aides who look after them. However, since this was a scheduled school day they are almost all off duty (there's one who runs the wellness room for sick kids and someone who runs the front desk, but otherwise it's an empty building during the school day). There's nowhere we can send them "home" to if we cancel school.
Thus, I took my papers and my computer to the other campus. I had just arrived and was about to head to my apartment to get my DVD when my principal stopped me. Change in plan. He'd had students asking about where I was because they wanted to ask questions on how to do academic things. He decided he was going to set me up in the dining hall and have me help students during the periods that they had me. Unfortunately, I had brought no books nor whiteboards (I have individual whiteboards that I use a lot during academic support since in academic support I am helping individual kids with whatever they need help on, mostly math). The dining hall director had a big easel pad of paper (because the GILA side is an old Air Force base the buildings are all separate buildings so the dining hall isn't next to any classrooms) and the art teacher was going to be working in the dining hall as well having the kids were on some art projects. She had some markers.
As the day progressed it eventually morphed into the kids attending their regularly scheduled classes in a variety of different locations. For the classes we made due with what we had available (Which was sometimes difficult because often the kids don't carry books around. For example the have a copy of their math textbook in their dorm room and then use another copy in class. I have additional copies in my classroom that they use when they come to academic support). Sometimes we had to get creative. For example, I had a student who needed to work on Algebra II. He didn't have a book, but one student had a book. So he used his phone and took pictures of the problems that he needed so he could work (actually several students did this). In another case a student needed to study for a trigonometry quiz (I was helping her). We started with practicing the problems on a worksheet she had previously done, but had with her and then I googled worksheets on the material she was studying and we used those problems to help her study.
Lunch was a bit challenging. Normally only about half of the students eat lunch on each side. Today all the students and staff ate lunch in the GILA dining hall. We started lunch ten minutes early serving the kids who were already in the dining hall first. Then the kids were dismissed to lunch by building to stagger their arrival in the dining hall. The food was a wider variety of items because more people had to be fed then were planned on. The dining hall manager kept encouraging people to leave the dining hall as soon as they finished eating. Before long we ran out of trays and people had to just balance their food in their hands (they were served in disposable serving dishes, but the individual items had to be balanced). Then, we ran out of seats and people were told to take plastic cutlery and eat outside in the grass (thankfully it was a sunny warm day, although warm is relative. The high today was about 55 F which for Alaska in October is quite warm). After a while she was kicking everyone out because they had to get the tables cleaned off to turn the dining hall back into classrooms (there were three classes, including mine, using the dining hall as their classrooms).
By the end of the day I had filled pages and pages (front and back) of the easel pad with lots of math and a decent amount of chemistry. Sometimes I had two or more students working simultaneously on different parts of the page (and on different subjects), but overall it worked.
After school was over I had a student asking me if first period academic support would be in the dining hall tomorrow morning. I told him the water was supposed to be back on by 2 pm (school ends at 3:55) so hopefully everything would be back to normal tomorrow. When I went to the SHS campus at 4:30, there it was still without water. I do hope everything will be back to normal tomorrow, but if not, I now know what I need to make the day more successful. I think everyone has learned enough that tomorrow will be an educational day even if we still have no water.
Friday, August 10, 2018
A hilarious series of errors
So if you read my last post you probably realize that by now I have arrived in Galena. I haven't made any posts on Galena itself and I will later, but I want to share a hilarious series of events that had me in stitches today.
On Wednesday we started new teacher in-service and this afternoon while I was in the meetings one of the administrators came and told me that the business office didn't have my direct deposit information which is super important because we get our first paycheck (plus our signing bonuses on the 15th). It's also super important because Galena doesn't have any banks (although remote deposit on my phone does make that a lot better than when I lived in a village prior to remote deposit and mobile banking apps). We called the business office and it was discovered that they did have my direct deposit form, but I had made a mistake on my health insurance form and needed to fix that. One of my colleagues was in fact missing her direct deposit form and so our supervisor wanted us to go to the business office to correct these issues right away. The only problem was that our school is on two campuses that are about three miles apart (for a town of less than 500 people Galena is incredibly spread out) and the business office was of course located on the opposite campus from where our training was being held. Neither my colleague nor I have had our vehicles arrive and so since we didn't have our own transportation our supervisor pointed out the window and said, "see that Toyota? Why don't you two take that and go together. The keys are in the car." Our supervisor went back into the training, we picked up some things from our seats and then headed out to the car. When we got out there we realized there were two Toyotas side by side and we each thought he had been pointing to a different car. I said, "well, he said the keys were in the car..." and proceeded to look for keys hanging from the ignition. The left car had keys in the ignition and the right one didn't. So we got into the left car. My co-worker just didn't feel it looked right and we were a bit afraid we were going to take off in the wrong car so we looked around and I found a piece of mail laying face down on the console. I picked it up, turned it over and discovered it was addressed to another district employee (at least it was one we knew). We laughed and climbed out of the car. At this point my coworker wanted me to drive (originally she had wanted to drive) and I replied, "no way, I'm not driving now." We went back to the car on the right and I discovered there was a set of keys in the cupholder. We started toward the new part of town where the other school is located, but I still felt a bit nervous. I looked through the glove compartment and breathed a sigh of relief when I discovered the insurance car which said that the car was insured by the Galena City School District.
We got to the new part of town and discovered another problem. Neither of us had done any driving and we didn't actually know how to get to the school. I thought we should turn right on the road that went past one of the local stores that I recognized, but after we turned I thought we were wrong so we went back the other way. After a while we're both going, "I've never seen this before" and decide we've gone the wrong way. We go back to the original road and in fact find the school.
We take care of our business and head back to the car. I don't know what was going through our minds, but I suspect it was my fault. In the district office we had picked up a medium sized flat rate box (not a very big box if you're not familiar with U.S. priority mail boxes) that I had shipped. The box weighs a very surprising 47 pounds 6.2 ounces and is not easy to carry. I think because I was struggling with the box I walked to the first car, put the box in the back seat and climbed in the passenger seat. My coworker followed (if this isn't how it actually transpired, I'll still accept the responsibility). We started driving back to the GILA campus and my coworker is like, "is this the right car?" Then the seat belt alarms started chiming (no one in Galena wears a seat belt) and my coworker said, "It didn't do this on the way." I look in the glove compartment and don't see the insurance card where I left it. Finally I found it, but it was buried under other documents. I was starting to worry we were in the wrong car, but after finding an insurance card registered again to the Galena City School District I reassured myself. Right after I finished reassuring myself, my coworker tells me she had to move the seat when she got in. At that point, I exclaim, "We are in the wrong car!" I remembered that we got into a car parked near the stairs leading into the school, but when we had arrived two other employees and been parked over there in a truck and I had watched them get out. The view was wrong to have been parked anywhere near where we grabbed this car from. My coworker also pointed out that the keychain was bit different. We drive back to school and I'm dying from laughter and embarrassment, park the car where we found it and walk over to the correct car. As we approach I notice the window is rolled down and remember I that I had left the window rolled down. My coworker found jacket on the seat. Laughing all the way we drove the correct car back to campus stopping at my apartment to drop off the really heavy box. We got back just after the training session wrapped up for the day.
On Wednesday we started new teacher in-service and this afternoon while I was in the meetings one of the administrators came and told me that the business office didn't have my direct deposit information which is super important because we get our first paycheck (plus our signing bonuses on the 15th). It's also super important because Galena doesn't have any banks (although remote deposit on my phone does make that a lot better than when I lived in a village prior to remote deposit and mobile banking apps). We called the business office and it was discovered that they did have my direct deposit form, but I had made a mistake on my health insurance form and needed to fix that. One of my colleagues was in fact missing her direct deposit form and so our supervisor wanted us to go to the business office to correct these issues right away. The only problem was that our school is on two campuses that are about three miles apart (for a town of less than 500 people Galena is incredibly spread out) and the business office was of course located on the opposite campus from where our training was being held. Neither my colleague nor I have had our vehicles arrive and so since we didn't have our own transportation our supervisor pointed out the window and said, "see that Toyota? Why don't you two take that and go together. The keys are in the car." Our supervisor went back into the training, we picked up some things from our seats and then headed out to the car. When we got out there we realized there were two Toyotas side by side and we each thought he had been pointing to a different car. I said, "well, he said the keys were in the car..." and proceeded to look for keys hanging from the ignition. The left car had keys in the ignition and the right one didn't. So we got into the left car. My co-worker just didn't feel it looked right and we were a bit afraid we were going to take off in the wrong car so we looked around and I found a piece of mail laying face down on the console. I picked it up, turned it over and discovered it was addressed to another district employee (at least it was one we knew). We laughed and climbed out of the car. At this point my coworker wanted me to drive (originally she had wanted to drive) and I replied, "no way, I'm not driving now." We went back to the car on the right and I discovered there was a set of keys in the cupholder. We started toward the new part of town where the other school is located, but I still felt a bit nervous. I looked through the glove compartment and breathed a sigh of relief when I discovered the insurance car which said that the car was insured by the Galena City School District.
We got to the new part of town and discovered another problem. Neither of us had done any driving and we didn't actually know how to get to the school. I thought we should turn right on the road that went past one of the local stores that I recognized, but after we turned I thought we were wrong so we went back the other way. After a while we're both going, "I've never seen this before" and decide we've gone the wrong way. We go back to the original road and in fact find the school.
We take care of our business and head back to the car. I don't know what was going through our minds, but I suspect it was my fault. In the district office we had picked up a medium sized flat rate box (not a very big box if you're not familiar with U.S. priority mail boxes) that I had shipped. The box weighs a very surprising 47 pounds 6.2 ounces and is not easy to carry. I think because I was struggling with the box I walked to the first car, put the box in the back seat and climbed in the passenger seat. My coworker followed (if this isn't how it actually transpired, I'll still accept the responsibility). We started driving back to the GILA campus and my coworker is like, "is this the right car?" Then the seat belt alarms started chiming (no one in Galena wears a seat belt) and my coworker said, "It didn't do this on the way." I look in the glove compartment and don't see the insurance card where I left it. Finally I found it, but it was buried under other documents. I was starting to worry we were in the wrong car, but after finding an insurance card registered again to the Galena City School District I reassured myself. Right after I finished reassuring myself, my coworker tells me she had to move the seat when she got in. At that point, I exclaim, "We are in the wrong car!" I remembered that we got into a car parked near the stairs leading into the school, but when we had arrived two other employees and been parked over there in a truck and I had watched them get out. The view was wrong to have been parked anywhere near where we grabbed this car from. My coworker also pointed out that the keychain was bit different. We drive back to school and I'm dying from laughter and embarrassment, park the car where we found it and walk over to the correct car. As we approach I notice the window is rolled down and remember I that I had left the window rolled down. My coworker found jacket on the seat. Laughing all the way we drove the correct car back to campus stopping at my apartment to drop off the really heavy box. We got back just after the training session wrapped up for the day.
Thursday, August 2, 2018
Final countdown
Tonight at dinner my aunt asked me if I was packed [for Galena]. I just looked at her. She then said, "What am I talking about you still have..." "3 days I replied." She counted them out and determined I had three more days and four more nights before I depart. My flight is on Monday at 6:00 am.
I have actually achieved quite a lot, but it feels like a never-ending list. I have had a physical, filled out a million new-hire documents, ordered transcripts, and requested a new copy of my teacher certification (I have to give the district an original copy and my previous district kept my original district copy of my certification). Last Saturday I shipped nine Rubbermaid Roughneck totes and this week on bought a Yamaha Kodiak 450. I pretty excited about the machine. I arranged shipping through the Yamaha dealer. They have a contract with Everets Air Cargo which supposedly gives me a better rate and they will deliver the four-wheeler to Everets, fill out the Hazmat form as well as the waybill. I was pleased with the shipping rate. The total to ship (by air) was $766.79. I was figuring it would be somewhere well over a $1000 so this was a nice surprise (The total to ship my totes was about $285; a decent price in my opinion as well). I still have a number of things to do, including, but not limited to: shopping for groceries, packing said groceries and changing my cell phone provider. When I lived in the bush before (if you go to my earliest blog posts they are about living in the village of Kobuk in the Northwest Arctic Borough) I had GCI as my cell phone provider. GCI is by far the best provider for Bush Alaska (matter of fact in many villages it is the only provider), but it's an Alaskan cell phone (and cable and Internet) provider and so when I was living in Los Angeles I switched to AT&T. From what I've been told AT&T has voice service in Galena, but not data. GCI has 3G.
For those of you who are accustomed to always having 4G or LTE this probably doesn't sound good, but it makes me quite happy. When I lived in Kobuk the service was only GPRS. I would click on a page and then go brush my teeth or do other chores before coming back to check and see if the page had loaded. Internet service in Kobuk was also really slow (and rather expensive) so I didn't bother to get Internet (I just used the school's Internet - the school was about 40 yards from my house) and my GPRS connection. When I moved to Nome the wireless and Internet service both improved, but neither was what you would consider good. When I arrived in Nome GCI wireless has Edge service. I also paid $70 a month for 1 Mbps Internet with a data cap of 10 GB per month. While I was in Nome the Internet improved. I still paid $70/month, but my speed increased to 3 Mbps. My data connection also improved. Nome upgraded to 3G (at the time AT&T still only had Edge so it was nice to be able to access the Internet better than my friends on AT&T). I'll have to see what I can get for Internet, but it seems that the possibilities are better in Galena today then they were in Nome a few years ago. Data is without a doubt better (and cheaper) so I'm not worried about that. Also, I should be able to port my number since it was originally a GCI number, if I can't things will be tough because my phone number is on so many things...
The other big thing I need to do is go grocery shopping. One of the things everyone who lives in the Bush does when they come into town is go grocery shopping (matter of fact it isn't unusual for high school students coming for sports and other reasons to shop for their families). I will stock up on meat, veggies and other perishable items which will undoubtedly be really expensive. Here is a link to my blog on prices in Kotzebue (back in 2011). I will pack the items into Rubbermaid totes because among other things they weigh only three pounds, much less than a suitcase. They are also easier to handle and tend to fit better on bush planes as well. I meant to take a picture of my totes as we took them to the airport last Saturday, but I forgot. Nonetheless, you can read about (and see pictures) of when I shipped to Kobuk. Looking back on my shipping to Kobuk post I see that 1) I packed things other than totes 2) it was raining when we went to the airport and 3) there were lots of people. I must say this year I shipped only totes (I've learned they are much, much better) and the day I shipped my totes this year was a sunny day. Also, I guess since it was still July at the time the post office wasn't crowded at all. Anchorage requires you to take shipments of boxes greater than two to the airport post office. The airport post office has a hand truck customers can use, but it can also get really busy. We went shortly after the post office opened and there was no one there. It was easy and quick to ship everything.
I'll get to Galena on Monday and start settling in. Hopefully, by the end of next week, I will be more settled and can start focusing on the start of the school year.
Here are a few other pictures from this summer...
I have actually achieved quite a lot, but it feels like a never-ending list. I have had a physical, filled out a million new-hire documents, ordered transcripts, and requested a new copy of my teacher certification (I have to give the district an original copy and my previous district kept my original district copy of my certification). Last Saturday I shipped nine Rubbermaid Roughneck totes and this week on bought a Yamaha Kodiak 450. I pretty excited about the machine. I arranged shipping through the Yamaha dealer. They have a contract with Everets Air Cargo which supposedly gives me a better rate and they will deliver the four-wheeler to Everets, fill out the Hazmat form as well as the waybill. I was pleased with the shipping rate. The total to ship (by air) was $766.79. I was figuring it would be somewhere well over a $1000 so this was a nice surprise (The total to ship my totes was about $285; a decent price in my opinion as well). I still have a number of things to do, including, but not limited to: shopping for groceries, packing said groceries and changing my cell phone provider. When I lived in the bush before (if you go to my earliest blog posts they are about living in the village of Kobuk in the Northwest Arctic Borough) I had GCI as my cell phone provider. GCI is by far the best provider for Bush Alaska (matter of fact in many villages it is the only provider), but it's an Alaskan cell phone (and cable and Internet) provider and so when I was living in Los Angeles I switched to AT&T. From what I've been told AT&T has voice service in Galena, but not data. GCI has 3G.
For those of you who are accustomed to always having 4G or LTE this probably doesn't sound good, but it makes me quite happy. When I lived in Kobuk the service was only GPRS. I would click on a page and then go brush my teeth or do other chores before coming back to check and see if the page had loaded. Internet service in Kobuk was also really slow (and rather expensive) so I didn't bother to get Internet (I just used the school's Internet - the school was about 40 yards from my house) and my GPRS connection. When I moved to Nome the wireless and Internet service both improved, but neither was what you would consider good. When I arrived in Nome GCI wireless has Edge service. I also paid $70 a month for 1 Mbps Internet with a data cap of 10 GB per month. While I was in Nome the Internet improved. I still paid $70/month, but my speed increased to 3 Mbps. My data connection also improved. Nome upgraded to 3G (at the time AT&T still only had Edge so it was nice to be able to access the Internet better than my friends on AT&T). I'll have to see what I can get for Internet, but it seems that the possibilities are better in Galena today then they were in Nome a few years ago. Data is without a doubt better (and cheaper) so I'm not worried about that. Also, I should be able to port my number since it was originally a GCI number, if I can't things will be tough because my phone number is on so many things...
The other big thing I need to do is go grocery shopping. One of the things everyone who lives in the Bush does when they come into town is go grocery shopping (matter of fact it isn't unusual for high school students coming for sports and other reasons to shop for their families). I will stock up on meat, veggies and other perishable items which will undoubtedly be really expensive. Here is a link to my blog on prices in Kotzebue (back in 2011). I will pack the items into Rubbermaid totes because among other things they weigh only three pounds, much less than a suitcase. They are also easier to handle and tend to fit better on bush planes as well. I meant to take a picture of my totes as we took them to the airport last Saturday, but I forgot. Nonetheless, you can read about (and see pictures) of when I shipped to Kobuk. Looking back on my shipping to Kobuk post I see that 1) I packed things other than totes 2) it was raining when we went to the airport and 3) there were lots of people. I must say this year I shipped only totes (I've learned they are much, much better) and the day I shipped my totes this year was a sunny day. Also, I guess since it was still July at the time the post office wasn't crowded at all. Anchorage requires you to take shipments of boxes greater than two to the airport post office. The airport post office has a hand truck customers can use, but it can also get really busy. We went shortly after the post office opened and there was no one there. It was easy and quick to ship everything.
I'll get to Galena on Monday and start settling in. Hopefully, by the end of next week, I will be more settled and can start focusing on the start of the school year.
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| Isn't she beautiful? |
Here are a few other pictures from this summer...
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| Anchorage is home to Lake Hood the world's largest seaplane base. |
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| This picture was taken at 11:17 pm. |
Monday, November 13, 2017
I'll admit it, I make mistakes.
We all make mistakes, this is a surprise to no one. We all make language mistakes. Again, this shouldn't be a surprise. One of my tenth graders has created a joke out of my asking Siri. I didn't realize at first just how often I ask Siri to spell a word. Now, anytime I wonder about the spelling of a word one of my students goes, "Hey Siri, how do you spell..."
When I was an exchange student in Germany (and thus learning German) I thought the word for tired (mĆ¼de) was pronounced just like the word for brother (brĆ¼der). As you can probably guess from looking at these words, that simply isn't true. The thing is when you learn a foreign language, especially when you learn it from immersion rather than a classroom setting, you often don't hear the words/sounds quite right.
Other times you fall into the trap of false cognates. In German the word information is Information (although note, it is pronounced a little bit differently). Computer is Computer, and meter is meter (although German nouns do have gender and I realize I'm leaving that part out - on purpose). Additionally, you have words that are very similar like mother in German is Mutter and book is Buch. But then there are the false cognates - words that look similar or even sound similar, but have rather different meanings. One of my favorite of these is the verb putzen. It sounds a lot like put, but the meaning isn't the least bit similar. One of my fellow exchange students, Laura, told us a story about her misuse of the word putzen. Because she thought it meant put she used it all the time. She would tell her host family she was going to putzen the letter in the mailbox. Now this story gets really funny when I tell you that putzen actually means to clean! After getting over her embarrassment, Laura was able to laugh at this and even shared the story with myself and some of her other foreign exchange student friends (by the way, I don't usually use real names, but I haven't seen Laura in over 20 years and if by some chance you're reading this and your that Laura, please contact me).
Like Laura, I have been forced to accept that fact that no matter how hard I try I will always make mistakes. Sometimes they are grammar mistakes (I make those in English too), sometimes they are mistakes in word choices (now that I think about it, I sometimes make those in English too) and sometimes they're mistakes in writing (I mean spelling, but since I'm about the speak about Chinese which doesn't have an alphabet I chose the word writing).
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| Here's a screen shot of me typing a Chinese character here within this blog. If you click on the little drop down menu on the right, more choices will appear. When you click anywhere on a new row the numbers will be assigned to the characters in that row. You select a character by hitting the number associated with that character. There are different ways to have the characters sort, but I usually leave mine sorted by frequency. |
The other day, my mistake was a little funnier. We were reviewing the English names of the organs and I was giving the students the Chinese name and having them
say the English name. Unfortunately instead of saying heart (åæxin - first tone), I accidentally said sex ( ę§ xing - fourth tone). Now in reality the word for sex, as in how the students took it is ę§ē± (xing ai), what I said more like gender, but these are 7th grade boys. They laughed uproariously and that day I didn't have a TA in the room to help me (actually I often don't). Thankfully one of the kids said enough for me to figure out what I might have said. After class, I asked one of my Chinese coworkers some questions in relation to what I might have accidentally said and he turned all red, but didn't answer. Thankfully, my dictionary doesn't get nervous about telling me what words mean.
When I first started teaching this class I felt like it was the bane of my existence. After all, it's not only middle school (not my favorite grade to teach), but it's also life science (my least favorite science) and the kids don't really speak English. Nonetheless, the class has really grown on me. They are still middle schoolers, but they really get into the videos I show them and they bring a unique energy that is actually a lot of fun. Then there are the decidedly middle school actions. For example I introduced the concept of the larynx in class today and wrote the Chinese word on the board. The first character in the Chinese word for larynx ( pronounced yan) sounds the same as to smoke. One of the students got up and jokingly said I had the wrong character and changed it to the character to smoke - I guessed that was the character he wrote because I could recognize the part of the character that means fire (and then the TA confirmed it). A couple of times in class I have introduced the word esophagus (é£ē®” -shi guan) which is pronounced almost the same as the second and third characters in embassy (大ä½æé¦ -da shi guan). The shi in esophagus is second tone while in embassy it's third tone (if you don't know anything about Chinese tones second tone is a rising tone and third tone is a falling then rising tone). When that one came up there was no TA in the room, so I was pretty happy that I recognized what the kid was conveying.
While, I do make a lot of mistakes I think it is good. You learn more from your mistakes than you do when you get things wrong. Thus, I'm learning a lot of Chinese (of course not only from my mistakes, but also from preparing for class). I'm also modeling for the students. I need these students to be willing to make mistakes, especially in their language learning. If they aren't willing to try they won't improve. Thus, since I keep making mistakes I keep modeling the fact that its okay to make mistakes and that you need to just keep on trying. And isn't that a lesson that extends well beyond language learning?
Friday, November 3, 2017
He laughed so hard his belly ached.
My school is set-up very much in a Chinese style. Even though we more or less follow an American curriculum, the students attend all of their classes together as a class, much like it is in an American elementary school, except that the different subjects are taught by different teachers. Also, the students stay in one classroom and the teachers come in to teach the students. Because our school is very small (less than 50 students spread out over grades 7-11 - no 12th grade because the students all of to our sister school in Virginia for 12th grade) there is only one class per grade and those grades can be as small as 4 students (8th grade). The largest grade is 10th grade (the start of high school in China). Our 10th grade class has 15 students which is our maximum for any grade.
I teach 10th grade chemistry and calculus I (we call it calculus I because its really the AP curriculum taught over 2 years) and also 7th grade life science.
One of the questions people commonly ask me is, "do you teach in English or in Chinese." Usually, the answer is in English. My 10th graders can more or less handle the English (that's not to say it isn't really difficult nor that I don't spend a lot of time helping them understand what things mean), but my 7th graders are an entirely different story! We started the school year with four 7th graders. Of these four one spoke pretty good English, one spoke decent English and two spoke no English. We then moved a student down from 8th grade because his English was sufficient to handle to 8th grade and we added a 6th grader who wants to attend our school, but joined a year early (we start at grade 7) to learn English before he needs the year to count (in other words he has been planning to repeat the 7th grade next year from the time he began). This makes trying to teach a 7th grade American curriculum very challenging. Most of the material we are learning is new for the students (meaning they've never learned it in Chinese either) and all but one of them really cannot learn the material from English. I have two assistants who take turns attending the class, but they tend to not know the science words in English (and often not in Chinese either) and so this makes life very interesting.
As a result, I end up teaching my 7th grade class bilingually (or at least to the best of my ability). I prepare vocabulary charts in which I give them the English word and the Chinese word (I check with a coworker to make sure I got the right word from the dictionary. He often has to do a Baidu search to confirm the word because it has been a long time since he's taken Biology). Sometimes I included the pronunciation of the Chinese word. This is for me because during class I have to use the Chinese words repeatedly and sometimes in the beginning I cannot remember the pronunciation. We then go through the material using videos, powerpoint, models and other visual aids. I often ask my questions in English and then repeat them in Chinese. If there is an important point that I cannot say in Chinese, I ask the TA to translate. One of the TAs will usually do so (she also gives me individual words if I need them), the other usually will not (I don't think he can). Some of the students will try to ask their questions in English. Some of them really don't have the ability to ask the question in English. The other day, I had a student who had a long question. He spoke on and on and on in Chinese for about two minutes before I stopped him. I said, "I can't follow all of that." He looked at the TA and replied, "but she can translate." I told him, "yes, but she can't remember so much to translate all of that. Start at the beginning and go slowly." He started at the beginning and I could understand the first sentence completely. Then he kept going and the TA started having trouble translating, but between the two of us I got the main idea. As we progress through a topic the students learn more and more of the English words and the class moves from almost entirely in Chinese to maybe 60-70% in English. Unfortunately, I don't think it ever gets beyond 70% English. This has resulted in my Chinese definitely improving, and sometimes with some of the strangest words (my Chinese vocabulary now includes the names of most organs in the body, cells, blood, mitosis, meiosis, the stages of those processes and even odd words like dialysis. Unfortunately, while I can describe the entire process of cell division in Chinese, I cannot tell you I'm sad or frustrated). One day recently, one of my students said (in English), "Miss Cannon your Chinese has upgraded."
One of the funniest moments occurred yesterday. The day before yesterday I had given the students a new vocabulary sheet. This one was on major organs in the body. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to include the stomach. Therefore, I wrote the word stomach (in English) on the board and told the students to add the word stomach in both English and Chinese to their sheet (I told them this in Chinese). One of my students then asked me, (in Chinese) "How do you write stomach?" I replied (in Chinese), "the English or Chinese word?" "The Chinese word." I just looked at him. Another student explained to him how to write the word. A third student then asked me, (in Chinese) "teacher, how do you write stomach in Chinese?" I looked at him (all of the students are male) and said, "You're asking me how to write stomach in Chinese? Me? I'm an American. You think I know how to write it?" (all of this was also said in Chinese). I then proceed to look up the character in my dictionary and showed it to him before I wrote the Chinese word for stomach on the board. A fourth student was laughing and laughing and laughing. Next thing I know he tells me (also in Chinese), "Ms. Cannon I laughed so hard my belly aches. The Chinese student needed the foreigner to tell him how to write a Chinese word!"
As a result, I end up teaching my 7th grade class bilingually (or at least to the best of my ability). I prepare vocabulary charts in which I give them the English word and the Chinese word (I check with a coworker to make sure I got the right word from the dictionary. He often has to do a Baidu search to confirm the word because it has been a long time since he's taken Biology). Sometimes I included the pronunciation of the Chinese word. This is for me because during class I have to use the Chinese words repeatedly and sometimes in the beginning I cannot remember the pronunciation. We then go through the material using videos, powerpoint, models and other visual aids. I often ask my questions in English and then repeat them in Chinese. If there is an important point that I cannot say in Chinese, I ask the TA to translate. One of the TAs will usually do so (she also gives me individual words if I need them), the other usually will not (I don't think he can). Some of the students will try to ask their questions in English. Some of them really don't have the ability to ask the question in English. The other day, I had a student who had a long question. He spoke on and on and on in Chinese for about two minutes before I stopped him. I said, "I can't follow all of that." He looked at the TA and replied, "but she can translate." I told him, "yes, but she can't remember so much to translate all of that. Start at the beginning and go slowly." He started at the beginning and I could understand the first sentence completely. Then he kept going and the TA started having trouble translating, but between the two of us I got the main idea. As we progress through a topic the students learn more and more of the English words and the class moves from almost entirely in Chinese to maybe 60-70% in English. Unfortunately, I don't think it ever gets beyond 70% English. This has resulted in my Chinese definitely improving, and sometimes with some of the strangest words (my Chinese vocabulary now includes the names of most organs in the body, cells, blood, mitosis, meiosis, the stages of those processes and even odd words like dialysis. Unfortunately, while I can describe the entire process of cell division in Chinese, I cannot tell you I'm sad or frustrated). One day recently, one of my students said (in English), "Miss Cannon your Chinese has upgraded."
One of the funniest moments occurred yesterday. The day before yesterday I had given the students a new vocabulary sheet. This one was on major organs in the body. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to include the stomach. Therefore, I wrote the word stomach (in English) on the board and told the students to add the word stomach in both English and Chinese to their sheet (I told them this in Chinese). One of my students then asked me, (in Chinese) "How do you write stomach?" I replied (in Chinese), "the English or Chinese word?" "The Chinese word." I just looked at him. Another student explained to him how to write the word. A third student then asked me, (in Chinese) "teacher, how do you write stomach in Chinese?" I looked at him (all of the students are male) and said, "You're asking me how to write stomach in Chinese? Me? I'm an American. You think I know how to write it?" (all of this was also said in Chinese). I then proceed to look up the character in my dictionary and showed it to him before I wrote the Chinese word for stomach on the board. A fourth student was laughing and laughing and laughing. Next thing I know he tells me (also in Chinese), "Ms. Cannon I laughed so hard my belly aches. The Chinese student needed the foreigner to tell him how to write a Chinese word!"
Thursday, November 2, 2017
Halloween Chinese style
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| A few of our students trick-or-treating. Some of them really dressed up, but I didn't think to take pictures. |
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| The entrance to the school. Notice that the pumpkins are quite large, are the traditional jack-o-lantern shape and are orange (or at least mostly). None of these are common things in China. |
I'm sure it surprises no one to hear that Halloween is not a traditional Chinese holiday. Back when I lived in Inner Mongolia (2002-2005) basically no one in China had ever heard of Halloween. My first year in Baotou (the city I lived in in Inner Mongolia) I taught a really cool class that included afternoon culture activities. That year we had a big Halloween party where we not only carved jack-o-lanterns, but made our own piƱata (I didn't have anywhere to hang it from though so I stood on a chair and held it while my blindfolded students swung at it with a plastic bat). One funny thing I remember is I instructed my students to all bring in a pumpkin, preferably orange (traditionally most pumpkins here are green) to carve jack-o-lanterns. That student came to class laughing because when he was shopping for pumpkins he was looking for the biggest one he could find (they are traditionally quite small) and the seller told him, "but the smaller pumpkins taste better." He told us he replied, "but I'm not going to eat the pumpkin, I'm going to play with it!"
Fast forward to 2017 and its an entirely different story. Two weeks ago I was shopping |
| Some of us dressed up more than others. |
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| I don't know who procured the Scream masks, but there were several of them. This is me with one of my 7th grade students. |
Wednesday, October 18, 2017
I'm still shaking...
I teach at the Beijing campus of a US school (the US campuses are K-12, my school only has grades 7-11). All of our students are Chinese and they will complete their schooling at one of our US campuses before going to university somewhere in the west, most likely in the States. These parents are not only spending a lot of money, but they are also taking quite a risk. Let me explain.
Chinese education is all about tests. Students take a high school entrance exam to determine which high school they can go to. They are further arranged in classes according to their test scores (the students take all their classes together as a class). Every so often they take exams, the results of which are used to rearrange the classes once again putting those with the best results together and so forth. This grading of both schools and classes is important because the best schools are allotted the most resources and the best classes are given the best teachers. It's also really important because university admissions are based solely on the students' results on the college entrance examination. These exams require students to memorize massive amounts of knowledge (However, the Chinese education system is entirely focused on memorization and includes almost no higher order thinking skills). By choosing to attend an international school like mine, the students are not learning (memorizing) the information on the college entrance exam and are therefore precluding themselves from attending most Chinese universities. While the 7th, 8th and 9th graders could still leave our school and attend a Chinese high school, the situation is further confused by a system called the Hukou. Hukou is a family registration system which determines a number of things, including where you can go to school. If your Hukou is not in Beijing then you cannot attend a Beijing public school. Also, not only are the college entrance exams different in different provinces but if your hukou is in a province other than Beijing you are required to get a higher score to qualify for a Beijing university. Many of our students are from Beijing (i.e. their Hukao is in Beijing), but some of them have lived in Beijing for most of their lives, but because their Hukao is not in Beijing they either have to attend a private school or go back to the province of their Hukao (they also have to return to the city of their Hukao to renew their national ID cards, get a passport and my other things). A few of our students are even from entirely different provinces and only get to go home during breaks. Thus, these parents, and of course their children, are taking a great risk. If they do not do well they will have trouble getting into a good university (and in China, it's all about the ranking). Even if they get into a good university they need to be well prepared enough for the university and to be able to complete their education in English.
This takes us to this afternoon. Today after school we had a parents' meeting. The purpose of meetings like this is to educate the parents on what we do, introduce them to the foreign staff like myself and answer their questions. Because they are taking such a risk with their children's education the attendance rate at these meetings is very high. After a school-wide meeting where the administrators spoke to the parents, we had grade level meetings. There were 1-2 foreign teachers, 1-2 translators, and the class advisor in each grade level meeting (along with the parents of course). I was assigned the 10th grade because while I do teach 7th-grade general science, I mostly teach 10th grade. I teach 10th-grade chemistry and 10th-grade calculus. The other teacher who mostly teaches 10th grade had to be out all this week so I was the only foreign teacher (which also meant we had only 1 translator). The class advisor greeted the students and began to introduce me, but I told him I could introduce myself. I introduced myself in Chinese, as I had planned, and then gave some explanations of the chemistry and calculus courses. I gave the explanations in English, but when we got to chemistry some of the translation was incorrect. So I re-explained, in English. The translation was better, but it was still a little bit off so I explained in Chinese. At this point, you could tell the parents were impressed. When I had given my introduction in Chinese they were impressed, but this of course went well beyond introducing myself. After the introduction of the courses, I opened it up for questions. Some of the questions I understood and some of them I needed a translation. I answered the questions in English initially, but as the time went on I was answering more and more of the questions in Chinese. It sort of felt like an inquisition. I know the parents were curious, and I know they are very concerned with their children's futures, but man oh man some of the questions. I got questions about how do we teach chemistry without a laboratory (this is one of my biggest issues), will we learn the whole textbook, and how does this course compare to the Chinese national curriculum. The last question was challenging because I've never taught in a Chinese public school. It was also a question I had to answer carefully so as to not insult anyone. Remember the Chinese curriculum focuses on memorizing. From talking to my previous students I'm quite sure the Chinese curriculum requires students to memorize a lot of useless information and to doesn't work much on analyzing and other important skills, but I couldn't say that. I had to simply speak about the differences diplomatically and avoid any sort of judgments. Even though I could not address every question and topic without a translator, I'm quite sure the parents were very impressed (matter of fact one of my colleagues, who doesn't speak English by the way, told me they were really impressed). I, on the other hand, was so anxious I didn't even realize until I finished, how much I was shaking!
Chinese education is all about tests. Students take a high school entrance exam to determine which high school they can go to. They are further arranged in classes according to their test scores (the students take all their classes together as a class). Every so often they take exams, the results of which are used to rearrange the classes once again putting those with the best results together and so forth. This grading of both schools and classes is important because the best schools are allotted the most resources and the best classes are given the best teachers. It's also really important because university admissions are based solely on the students' results on the college entrance examination. These exams require students to memorize massive amounts of knowledge (However, the Chinese education system is entirely focused on memorization and includes almost no higher order thinking skills). By choosing to attend an international school like mine, the students are not learning (memorizing) the information on the college entrance exam and are therefore precluding themselves from attending most Chinese universities. While the 7th, 8th and 9th graders could still leave our school and attend a Chinese high school, the situation is further confused by a system called the Hukou. Hukou is a family registration system which determines a number of things, including where you can go to school. If your Hukou is not in Beijing then you cannot attend a Beijing public school. Also, not only are the college entrance exams different in different provinces but if your hukou is in a province other than Beijing you are required to get a higher score to qualify for a Beijing university. Many of our students are from Beijing (i.e. their Hukao is in Beijing), but some of them have lived in Beijing for most of their lives, but because their Hukao is not in Beijing they either have to attend a private school or go back to the province of their Hukao (they also have to return to the city of their Hukao to renew their national ID cards, get a passport and my other things). A few of our students are even from entirely different provinces and only get to go home during breaks. Thus, these parents, and of course their children, are taking a great risk. If they do not do well they will have trouble getting into a good university (and in China, it's all about the ranking). Even if they get into a good university they need to be well prepared enough for the university and to be able to complete their education in English.
This takes us to this afternoon. Today after school we had a parents' meeting. The purpose of meetings like this is to educate the parents on what we do, introduce them to the foreign staff like myself and answer their questions. Because they are taking such a risk with their children's education the attendance rate at these meetings is very high. After a school-wide meeting where the administrators spoke to the parents, we had grade level meetings. There were 1-2 foreign teachers, 1-2 translators, and the class advisor in each grade level meeting (along with the parents of course). I was assigned the 10th grade because while I do teach 7th-grade general science, I mostly teach 10th grade. I teach 10th-grade chemistry and 10th-grade calculus. The other teacher who mostly teaches 10th grade had to be out all this week so I was the only foreign teacher (which also meant we had only 1 translator). The class advisor greeted the students and began to introduce me, but I told him I could introduce myself. I introduced myself in Chinese, as I had planned, and then gave some explanations of the chemistry and calculus courses. I gave the explanations in English, but when we got to chemistry some of the translation was incorrect. So I re-explained, in English. The translation was better, but it was still a little bit off so I explained in Chinese. At this point, you could tell the parents were impressed. When I had given my introduction in Chinese they were impressed, but this of course went well beyond introducing myself. After the introduction of the courses, I opened it up for questions. Some of the questions I understood and some of them I needed a translation. I answered the questions in English initially, but as the time went on I was answering more and more of the questions in Chinese. It sort of felt like an inquisition. I know the parents were curious, and I know they are very concerned with their children's futures, but man oh man some of the questions. I got questions about how do we teach chemistry without a laboratory (this is one of my biggest issues), will we learn the whole textbook, and how does this course compare to the Chinese national curriculum. The last question was challenging because I've never taught in a Chinese public school. It was also a question I had to answer carefully so as to not insult anyone. Remember the Chinese curriculum focuses on memorizing. From talking to my previous students I'm quite sure the Chinese curriculum requires students to memorize a lot of useless information and to doesn't work much on analyzing and other important skills, but I couldn't say that. I had to simply speak about the differences diplomatically and avoid any sort of judgments. Even though I could not address every question and topic without a translator, I'm quite sure the parents were very impressed (matter of fact one of my colleagues, who doesn't speak English by the way, told me they were really impressed). I, on the other hand, was so anxious I didn't even realize until I finished, how much I was shaking!
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