Parent Teacher Conferences

For those of you who are in the field of education you have probably experienced some encounters with parents or have even had to spend a night talking to parents about how "GREAT" their son or daughters are in school.  I had the opportunity to experience parent teacher conferences once before when I was doing my student teaching experience, so I really felt like I knew what to expect when it came to these types of situations.

Let me tell you a parent teacher conference in Saipan is a little different than one in NW Iowa or any where else really in the states.  I never really thought about the language barrier that I would face when it came to talking to the parents because all of their kids are required to speak english at the school at all times.  Therefore, I figured that all the parents would speak SOME english as well.  Boy was I wrong, I encountered many different types of conversations.  Conversations between me and the parent, between me, a translator and the parent, and some between me, the child, and the parent. ( and of course if I was in this situation as a kid I would probably translate something way different to my parents than what the teacher was saying.  But, who really knows what the child was saying to the parents and what the parents were saying to the child.)

I had one parent who spoke very little english who tried telling me a story/was asking me about a situation their child had in my class and she couldn't process the thoughts out in english.  She sat by my table for about 10 minutes trying to get her thought out but she could only say a couple words in english so I never did figure out what she was trying to get across to me.  ( I just thought it was crazy to see how hard it was to communicate between two different languages.  I can only imagine in the Bible how crazy people were going at the Tower of Babel when the Lord had everyone speaking in different tongues, I was frustrated between two languages.)

It was a good learning experience and was very exciting to meet most of the parents.  It is always encouraging to see how each parent supports their child and how they each parent pushes their child differently in school.  Even though it was a little hard to understand some of the parents it was still a great learning experience to see how different cultures put a different emphasis on their child's education.  I am really looking forward to getting to know the parents and the students more as the year progresses.

Street market

This is the local street market that we tend to go to on thursday nights,  As you can see there are many people that fill the streets entering small little shops with many homemade items for people to buy.

Most of the meat at the market is served on a stick.  You can have your choice of pork, chicken, beef, and octopus on a stick.  Octopus is small and they just barbeque it the way it is and let the tentacles just hang right off the stick.  Very unique in flavor and taste.  It was hard to get me to try it the first time but has a chewy taste that many people think and consider to be a great delicacy. 

These are some of the signs that you have at the market and I just found them to be funny to see how they are presented. As you can see each item is usually 1.00 to get some type of food item.  

I really liked this sign!  Each person for only $5 dollars a person can get 6 choose.  In the culture that we live in most people who learned english find shortened or different ways to get ideas across to one another.   It is sad to say but I will talk like this sometimes because most of my students will talk like this because their english isn't fully polished yet.


The Street market is a very enjoyable place to go if you want to view different ethnic displays of food and culture.  Each week their are different cultural dances and presentations of singing that you can view while sitting at the market.  It is very interesting to see the different foods that these cultures enjoy and delight in.