Teaching on Tanna

A typical moment during the lunch hour: students gathered on my little porch, checking each other for lice. Making a nice little pile of lice on Raio's skirt, to be eaten after. Because if you eat the lice, then I guess you can be sure they won't end up back in your hair.

Now I am approaching week 8 of the 2010 school year at Loukatai School. Week 8 already. That’s halfway to the end of term 1. One could say that things have changed from my days of free hours all day every day, days when I could read and run and relax and swim at the beach and play my guitar and sit and “story” the time away from sun-up to sun-down… Those were the days before school started on February 15^th. But oh, those were the days… On February 12^th the headmaster at Loukatai had the good idea to pull the teachers together to assign classes to each one. Good to have 3 days to plan ahead for the coming school year, right? With early literacy being the primary point of work among my group of Peace Corps teacher trainers here, I thought I might ask to teach the reading portion of the day to the youngest classes at the school. But it became apparent that not only were we still waiting on one more teacher (who never did arrive from her island; she was eventually replaced by a different teacher from south Tanna), but there was no one qualified to teach English to the year 7 and 8 students. No one except for me, that is. So I agreed to do it. So much for teaching literacy to the early grades, I thought. But I’m always in for pleasant surprises. And this island and this lifestyle have surprises as a customary part of each and every day it seems. Plus it actually sounded like fun. And besides, I had 3 whole days to plan…

So I started making my lesson plans, my goals, and I started planning ways to build literacy skills across the school, not just in classes 7 and 8. But I knew I had to do some waiting and seeing to really figure out what work lay ahead of me. Wait and see what surprises were in store in the classrooms of Loukatai School. And then the students came. And then, sure enough, there were the surprises. Even with all the stories I had already heard about Vanuatu classrooms, there were still so many surprises. There are still surprises every day. But I guess that is simply one of the wonders of teaching: the unexpected arrival of a special situation inside or outside of the classroom. So is it with teaching anywhere I suppose. Nevertheless, I’d like to share some of my little Loukatai surprises.

I was prepared to deal with low standards, as we had been informed already that the standards, which vary widely from the remote areas to the really remote areas, to the really, really remote areas (since here the question is how remote are you?), are generally not as high as what we as Peace Corps Volunteers from the US have been accustomed to in our home country. I was prepared for that. Isn’t that part of why I came here, after all? So I found that the reading and writing and listening skills in year 7 and 8 needed some work. Not terribly surprising. And I set off to help my students build up these skills. Charlotte’s Web was too challenging a book to listen to and comprehend… But Blueberries for Sal? Stellaluna? The Little Island? Make Way for Duckilings? I found out not only were these books perfect books for my 13 to 17-year-old students to listen to (glad too that I had my own copies of them), but they loved when I read these books aloud to them. Now that was a surprise. I couldn’t imagine reading these picture books to a silently captivated class of teenagers in America…I have many a time read these books to a captivated audience of 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 year olds in the US, but teenagers? Please. And since I had to get these kids reading and reading and reading, as we know volume of pages read does correlate with improved reading, I thought I’d get them reading 30 minutes a day. Sounded simple enough. So one afternoon, we set off to start our daily 30 minutes of reading, using what few books were available at the school. I asked the students what time it was. Blank stares. Even with the clock in the room. Surprise: they couldn’t tell time. But then again, time here revolves around two things: the sun and the bell, if someone decides to go and ring it. So we started learning how to tell time on a clock. And they are getting good, I am proud to say. (Almost to the point they could do the 30 minutes independently. Almost.) I am trying with everything I know to get these kids to care about reading. To help them find that reading is something they can enjoy. To help them see that reading can inform them about the world. The tsunami warning happened because of this earthquake in Chile—we can read about it kids! A novel concept. And no, I tell them, I am not from Chile, and no my family in the US did not feel the earthquake. Chile is in South America, which is different than North America. (By the way, I got an article on the earthquake online, as naturally information on the Chile earthquake was not available locally. And you wonder why so many people didn’t bother running up the hill, why they think these tsunami warnings are nonsense…) My students loved the real newspaper article I showed them on the Haiti earthquake, from a US newspaper. We had to break down the text, but they sure liked looking at the photos and learning about Haiti. I am also teaching them to read silently, instead of out loud, the default way to read here. We are working on building stamina as readers. I am trying to get them to care about even the broken books they have…

(Here are some class 8 boys building their stamina for reading silently)

And on the early literacy side of things, I also had a nice share of surprises. I did an assessment on Class 1 through 4 students, starting with Class 3. These are kids who are 8 to 12 years old. The first part of the phonics assessment: capital and lowercase letter identification. Not one of the 17 Class 3 students could name every one. Not one. There were 6 students, out of 20, in class 4 that could do it. And with this pattern, as you might guess, none of the class 1 or 2 students could name every letter. Actually, the class 1 students couldn’t identify a single one (but some could sing their abc’s!). But not to worry, I am far from discouraged. These are kids I’m talking about. These kids can learn and they WILL learn to read! I’ve got two years to see to that. And I’ve got two years to make something of the Loukatai School Library. Two years to see it filled with beautiful books with pictures and words that these kids won’t be able to get enough of. And I’ve got two years to work with these local teachers, so that they themselves can do things like master the phonetic sounds of the English alphabet (they were nicely surprised to learn that the English “R” isn’t rolled, that the letter Q makes a different sound than the letter K, as do the letters B and P…)

And then one of my favorite surprises yet came just over a week ago. It came in the form of an enormous box waiting for me at the post office, return address from the Bronx, NY. A box sent by one of my sister Emily’s amazing young students at MS 223 in the South Bronx. A box carefully filled and sent to my students by this one NYC student, Michael, and his whole family. 25 new reading books inside. 20 copies of Times for Kids magazines. Several NYC newspapers. Even a newspaper in Spanish! An American flag, a small globe, a US dollar and coins, a Spanish-English dictionary, a photo album filled with photos of his family and postcards of NYC, and TONS of wonderful, new school supplies. I was overwhelmed by the generosity of this most beautiful surprise that came from a place so very different than the place my students live in. From one strong culture to another, bridged by the importance of learning and sharing and compassion. My year 7 students were so excited to open a box of things from Michael and his family. (Although I still have most of it saved to share with more of the students at the school later on.) And what was the most interesting thing to them by far? Hands down to the advertisements in the Sunday issue of the newspaper, as they tried to wrap their minds around a store where you could see or buy any one of the cameras on this page, or any one of the DVDs on that page… And do they really have that giant Spiderman in the US? Then I tell them what a parade is, and what a float is, and what Macy’s is. I live for these spontaneous, organic moments of surprise, both inside and outside the classroom. And how about the time when I went to show a group of class 8 boys, hanging around the classroom after school, the Times article on the Chile earthquake I had just received in the mail that day from my mom, an article with all these incredible photos of the devastation there. Was I surprised to find that these teenage boys were more interested in the swimsuit model ad for Macy’s on the back? No, not terribly surprised by that one.

Teaching at Loukatai is sure an interesting experience, to say the least. And I will continue to enjoy every one of my moments of surprise, and try to make the most of them. So often they turn out to be great teaching moments. And I will continue to enjoy and make the most of this process of getting every one of the students of Loukatai School to be a great reader and writer and independent thinker. And if you haven’t already, please see my Loukatai Library page on facebook, with photos of the school library, and requests for ideas on how to stock this library with books!

The Loukatai School Library, March 2010: