May 19, 2009

Less than a week to go and my year of teaching in the RMI will come to a close. It seems like just yesterday I was getting ready to come out here and sending you all e-mail’s telling you about my blog. Sorry it hasn’t been the most constant of reading sources…but it gets done eventually.

School ended yesterday and we started our clean up today. Finals went from Thursday until today and of course Tari was in Majuro, drunk, for all of them. For some reason Movie allowed him to “quickly go to Majuro” but that quick trip turned into the trip with no return, so his kids didn’t get to really finish out the year. I could have told you there was no more chance of him coming back before school ended than there was of a monkey typing a coherent sentence on a typewriter…but so be the reality. My kids, however, all had a great few days of assessments and parties and it was an ending that much embodied the entire year I felt. The older kids had a bit more of a test, but the younger ones just filled out simple assessments – more for next years volunteer – and then did arts and crafts, played games and ate donuts. The test and assessments were extremely representative of the progress made by various individuals and the lack there of in others; and I found a great deal of satisfaction in looking over the tests. It’s a strange thing measuring the success of these students, mostly due to the fact because everyone is so drastically different in their levels of knowledge. That was one of the hardest things to get used to in teaching this year. Lots of times I would look at where I was going with the curriculum and where I was and it would never make sense. But then, I would look back at where we had been and patterns seemed to emerge. Then, projecting forward from the patterns, I felt I was more able to come up with things that proved useful in tackling the predicament of clustered classrooms filled diverse levels. It wasn’t always easy, but a lot of things ended up working and it was gratifying to see the results of our work at the end of the year. Teaching is very much a delayed gratification profession in my opinion and it is often easy to see the frustrations before everything else. But then, you get the one student who stays after to ask questions, or the shy student who raises his or her hand and give you a brilliant answer from left field, or the little note from the boy who wins a spelling bee thanking you, and even if you have a mountainous pile of frustrations from the day, they all seem to melt away instantaneously.

For as much as I complained about teaching at times this year, I don’t regret this year for a second and I will miss all of my kids and our fun classes together every single day. We had a lot of fun and learned a lot together and from one another this year, and I will never look back on it with anything but a smile.