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.  

Cultured as a teacher

This school year is flying by. We have completed 7 weeks of school and they have been great. I have learned many new things as a teacher, what works, what doesn't work, what kids can handle at what age levels. It has been very eye opening so far. But, the thing that I have learned the most is that there is so much that is going on outside the classroom and it is a teachers duty to make that relationship with the student as strong as you can in an eight hour day.

I have found that in different cultures and different places in the world people might not be growing up in christian homes or even a household with parents that live with them. It has been very intriguing to me to hear about the different places and different cultures that these students come from. I have learned that some students come hear strictly to learn english and it has very hard to understand this concept. Some students come to Saipan while their parents are still back in Korea, China, Japan, ext...... just to learn english. So I have found it hard to grasp how a student can find support outside the classroom.

I am looking forward to getting to know the different cultures and learning about the students and developing the different relationships that I may face in the coming year.  

School

So I know I have been very bad at writing in my blog and keeping those of you actually reading this updated on the things going on in my life.  For those of you who know me fairly well I like to be as busy as possible so I don't have to sit by myself in my apt.

School has been going great!!!!  We have completed 4 weeks of school already and the time is flying by!!! I really don't know if that is a good thing or not but i have really enjoyed learning about the different cultures and different teaching styles toward students of different races and ethnicities.  The biggest difficulty that I tend to face is the kindergarten and 1st grades because some of the students don't speak english all to well yet.  So I find myself using more cues and hand motions to get the students attention and to help them understand the task that they may be trying to accomplish for the day.

I really do enjoy the younger grades very much so and it is so interesting to see how they react to me as a teacher.  Some of the students are so amused with my hairy arms and legs(they call this my white FUR!  I have kids come up to me in class and just start rubbing my arms or trying to touch my legs if I am standing there, they really haven't seen it before in the culture that they are from so they are so amazed that I can have so much hair on my arm.  They also are very intrigued by my blue eyes.  I had a student ask me the other day how my eyes got this way!  They thought that everyone had dark eyes and that it was very interesting that a person could have bright blue eyes.  It has been very interesting to see the tendencies and the curiosity of the younger students when they are experiencing something new.  I find myself learning more and more about there cultures everyday understanding where they come from, things they stand for and the different backgrounds that these students are being brought up in.  Looking back to one of my education classes I compare this experience to a melting pot of students and teachers working together to form a unified bond between education and our service to the Lord.

I have been coaching the coed volleyball team for my school and let me tell you it has been interesting!  Coming from watching my sister playing volleyball I really thought that volleyball couldn't be that tough but let me tell you it's tougher than it looks....... Right now we are focusing on getting some serves over the net(this has taught me some patience, because I am told that I am a little competitive sometimes or so I am told )!!!!  This is a little different volleyball in NW Iowa where they start playing in 4th or 5th grade.  For some of the kids this is the first time they have picked up a volleyball and have learned how to bump it over or even return a serve.  So we have started with the basics and we hope to gradually get better and learn each and every day.

I will hope to update soon about more of my experiences in Saipan.  My challenge to you today is to meet someone new.  Someone of a different ethnicity or different culture.  You will realize that you will probably have more in common with that person than what you think......

Spear fishing

This past weekend a friend of mine on the Island took a couple of us new teachers spear fishing.  This was quite the adventure.  We drove up to the northern part of the island and when we reached the beach we walked along the bank for about a quarter of a mile.  We had to do this in order to get past the coral so we got in and let the current just pull us out into the ocean a little ways.  This was quite crazy for me because within a matter of 2 minutes of swimming we could see the bottom of the ocean and we were swimming in about 40 feet of water.  It was amazing that you can see down that far and the water is so clear here.  So I started off with a hand spear this spear has a rubber cord on the end of it that you pull up near the top of the spear, you sneak up to about 6 feet from a fish and release the spear and hang on to the cord.  This was a challenge for myself.  It is a lot harder to spear fish than I thought.  You have to be really good at diving and holding your breath in order to get near a fish and I could not do that as good as I would have liked to. For those of you who know me well I am really competitive and wanted to catch a fish however I was unsuccessful at doing so.  I also was able to try to spear fishing guns one shot about 12 feet and one shot about 20 feet.  It was hard getting use to shooting and predicting where the fish was going to be along with playing the current as well.  I had a good shot on a fish and barely missed the fish because after I shot at the fish the guy told me it was a  poisonous fish and we wouldn't have been able to eat it anyway.

This was a really fun trip I was able to swim and see a lot of different things in the water ranging from small little colorful fish, eels, and even a sea turtle.  Sea turtles are kind of hard to find around here since they are endangered animals and people from the island hunt them illegally and eat them because they taste good they say.  I told someone about seeing a turtle the next day and he said to just shoot it because they were so good.  So the mindset of the people on the Island sometimes is if you can get away with it then it is ok to do it.  This is hard for me to grasp because it is so different then what I grew up around.  I would really like to go spear fishing again and learn more about the area fish and water life.

Teaching

I made it through the first week of school and it was very challenging/eye opening for me as a teacher.  Wow I never have been laughed at by so many students for pronouncing so many names wrong.  I tell you what I have seen so many different names that I have no clue how to say or pronounce so it is very hard for me to remember 230 students because I can't even say them muchless remember them.  Some students have both a Korean or Chinese name along with an American name so this makes it easier if they have this and easier for me to remember since it is so familier to hear. On another note the students are very structured and disciplined so it is easier to conduct and easier to get to know the students.  Students at this school are very smart and are very good at memorizing things that are put in front of them.  So my goals in health is to get students to think outside the normal written memory and factual knowledge.  If you ask the students a question from the book they will know it right away however, if you ask them why a person ought to do something  like why is it Christian to do that or why we should eat healthily students have trouble understanding what I am asking.  I feel that this will be my biggest challenge here is to get students to think past the basic concepts and factual knowledge and really putting them into use outside of the classroom.  I would like to get the students to really understand the importance of health and physical fitness because they seem to really focus on subject areas and really excel at learning in the math and science areas because they don't have to think outside the box they just know the right and wrong of numbers and other things put in front of them.  I think that this will help me as a teacher though because I will understand how to deal and teach students that learn differently and can only understand some of the things. All in all it was a good week for me and am looking forward to learning the differences in students and  the backgrounds where each student comes from.

Food

Here in Saipan I have encountered many different types of food.  Vietnamese, Chinese, Tawain have been some of the foods that I have tried in the past couple of weeks here.  I ate at my first Vietnamese restaurant last week and I have never really used chopsticks before so it was very interesting for my first time.  I find myself wanting to eat so fast so I just lift up the plate and scrape the food in my mouth rather than taking little bits of rice that my chopsticks pick up.  For a while I was just taking the end of my chopstick and sticking it right through the meat or other delicacies that were difficult to pick up, however, I was informed that it was rude or a form of insult to the food so I stopped doing that.  Even though the food looks a lot different than american food I still do my best to try at least one bite so I know whether or not I would like it or not.  I have found that I really enjoy the vietnamese and other ethnic foods here.  Even though it does not include as much meat as a normal american bacon cheeseburger or a great big steak I have learned to really like the wide variety of vegetables that are included in these foods.  (I still do treat myself to a burger and fries here though every now and then.  I would like to learn to cook some of these foods and bring them back to the states for others to realize you don't need so much meat in a meal in order to have a good meal.  My challenge this week is to try a different ethnic food that you have not before and form a respect for other cultures and what they may offer!!!