HOME AND WORK

Hello family and friends. First of all, happy 4th of July! Although it's the 5th here, I know it's still the 4th back home, so that counts right? We were given a few hearty handshakes at school, with wishes for a Happy Independence Day! And last evening, some of the principals took the North American teachers out to eat at Chili's to celebrate. All but two were there I believe, bringing the total to 14 Americans and 2 Canadians, because, you know, we couldn't exclude them.  Their independence day was on Sunday (or so they tell me.)

Anyway… I have so much blogging to do, so much to write about! And so very little time. Actually having a job keeps me busy most the day, and we have also been working on Saturdays, and still busy with other things on Sundays. Very little time to sit down and write. But, I’ll need to make a habit of it if I’m going to get anything written at all. Once the new semester starts, I’ll be even busier.

I will attempt bring you up to date on my accommodations, the new-teacher-induction, and what consists of my daily life in the two + weeks I’ve been here. I’m not writing about everything in a strictly chronological order. I think this blog will end up with a topical focus instead of a chronological one, although I will still try to post once a week or twice a month at the least.

Where to start… How about with where I live? I live in a big, towering apartment. It’s part of a complex with several buildings: Mediterranean 1, Mediterranean 2, and Royal Mediterranean, which is the newest, and is where I live. Specifically, in Tower Lavender, which stands opposite Tower Marigold, across the pool.  As I wrote in my previous blog entry, when we first arrived we didn’t have anything except the teacups and saucers with the Formula One racing logo. Some school people soon brought over some things for us, including two pots and a pan, two glasses, two teacups, two saucers, two plates, two bowls, silverware, a cutting board, two ladles, a broom, a mop, and some other things. They also gave us a rice cooker. A single burner stove unit was already installed. I think it’s good that we only have two of everything, because we have to wash our dishes right away, and we don’t need any more than that. Most importantly, we have a water dispenser, which is essential as you never drink tap water here. (Although I have been using the tap water to rinse my toothbrush and I’ve been fine.) We’ve made many trips to Carrefour (only takes about 5 minutes to get there – if that) to get various essentials and other apartment stuff. Of course, my most vital purchase so far would have to be the mini French press I bought, which I use to make my morning cup of Java java. I guess if I’m going to be grammatically correct, it would be Javanese java. But for once in my life I’m truly drinking local coffee, because I live on the island of Java. Perfect for a coffee lover such as myself!

We live in small bubble of upscale commercialism. The Lavender tower lobby has escalator that leads directly to a tunnel walkway to the mega-mall next door, called Central Park. There is another huge mall next to that one which we sometimes walk to because it has a good grocery store, a department store with good prices, and some other clothing stores with larger sizes, because all the sizes are scaled way down and usually aren’t meant for people taller than, say, 5’6” or so. (At least three of the new North American guys are over six feet tall and find it difficult to find anything that fits.) Outside of the shopping malls and apartments, the streets immediately dissolve into residential areas with houses and shops of varying niceness and cleanliness, and the streets are always busy.  Unlike the States, there is no neat grid-like pattern to the streets, or uniform look to the buildings. They are all unique and seem to organically meld into one another. There are little to no middle-class boutiques, no mid-size businesses. There are just mega-malls and street-side vendors, or at least that’s the impression you get looking around. Also, I can’t quite seem to find the center of Jakarta, and I’m starting to think there might not be one. The closest you get would be the national monument (Monas,) which I glimpsed just briefly, but which is rumored to be at the city-center. There are clusters of skyscrapers here and there, but no one definite cosmopolitan nexus so far as I can see. But what do I know? I’ve been here just over two weeks.

I hope you now have an idea of where I live. Let me fill you in a little on what I’ve been doing. In a nutshell: preparing for the new school year. We can’t drive and or take public transportation, but the school basically buses us everywhere we need to go (including church services on Sunday if you sign up.) All new recruits attended seven days of new teacher induction at the PIK Jakarta campus, from June 21^st to the 28^th. A word about the school: Bina Bangsa School (hereafter BBS) has a few different campuses. The one in PIK (which is an abbreviation for a neighborhood in north Jakarta) is both primary and secondary. There is also the Kebon Jeruk campus, which is where I work. The KJ campus, as it’s usually called, is in west Jakarta, and the name translates to “Orange Grove” or “Garden” – it’s another neighborhood. The primary and secondary are in two separate buildings, quite close to each other. Outside of Jakarta, there are campuses in Bandung, in Malang, and in Semarang, all cities in Java. All the new teachers who work at the KJ campus live in the Mediterranean apartments and we travel together and more often than not go out to eat together too.

Here’s something I wrote a while back, but didn’t post as of yet:

“June 21 2012

Today was our first day of new teacher induction. Everyone in the Mediterania apartments got onto one of the school’s mini coach buses and we were whisked away to the PIK campus, also in Jakarta. It was nice to get out of our apartment-mall area, where we have been living exclusively for the past three days. The streets are not very clean and there is quite a bit of rubbish on the ground. The canals in particular are littered and pretty bad looking in places. We went by shops and residential streets and houses with open porches and doors and corrugated steel roofs. But even with all the people and traffic and litter on the ground, I felt invigorated more than intimidated by travelling through the city. I might just be in the “honeymoon” phase of my cultural adaptation, but that’s okay with me for now.”

What can I say about the rest of induction…? There were lots of corny getting-to-know-you and ice breaker games, a plethora of mild-mannered PowerPoints, boxed lunch, usually noodles or rice, two tea breaks per day, more PowerPoints, and meetings with principals and heads-of-department. I think you get the idea. Typical stuff. It’s amazing how you can travel halfway across the world to teach and Kagan Cooperative Learning groups and Bloom’s Taxonomy will still follow you there. By the end of the seven day induction we were all pretty worn out. We have to write three weeks’ worth of lesson plans, although since I teach three subjects, I’m only writing lessons for the first five days of school. I'm sure the lessons will change once I actually meet my students. (Also, we keep getting new information, even in the last few days before school starts! That's kind of frustrating.) During induction, we also had to demonstrate a lesson. I did one about reading an informational report on sloths. Did you know that sloths are extremely lazy and never clean their fur; in fact, green algae grows in their fur. Also, they give birth hanging upside down. C’est fou, ça.

Last Friday we went for a retreat / more PowerPoints in an area called Puncak in the mountains, but that’s its own blog entry. You’ll see why…

At the moment, we have moved from the PIK campus to our regular campus, KJ Primary. All the teachers have their desks in one big room, which is actually kind of nice. You get a sense of community that way and don’t feel isolated. Also, once the school year starts, it’s not going to be full of people all the time. I also saw “my” classroom for the first time. I put “my” in parentheses, because it’s just barely my classroom. More properly, it belongs to the class of P5 Hope (i.e. primary grade 5, class name “Hope” – all the classes have virtue names; we’re a Christian school in case I forgot to mention it.) This is my form, or homeroom, class. I see them a little bit for homeroom time and I am also their English teacher. They stay in their classroom, I move to my other classes, which are P4 English and P4 Science. Although I teach more English than science, I am somehow under the science department, and in fact am level rep. for 4^th grade science, which means that I set all of our unit tests, prepare the practice-test activities, and write the weekly schedules for 4^th grade science. I also teach a class of remedial English for both 4^th and 5^th grade, and will coach an after-school (co-curricular) activity (or CCA,) as of yet to be determined. Every teacher coaches one. I’m hoping for some sort of debate, art, book, or music club. It might seem like a lot of hodge-podge teaching, and it kind of is, but once I get my schedule down, I think it will be manageable.

Right now I’m in the process of preparing my classroom, preparing lessons, requesting materials, and making sure the first day of school will go smoothly. I'm nervous, but excited.

I hope my accounts of home and work weren’t too boring. At least you have a sketch of where I am and what I’m doing. Soon I shall regale you with more amusing stories about toilets and traffic jams.