Site visit

Last week, our field director, Anna Zelinsky, came to do her site visit. She was unable to do one during first semester because our runway was out of commission, so she tried to do the spring visit fairly early in the semester. She arrived Tuesday morning and split her time between observing my classes and observing Morgan’s, trying to hit every class at least once. In addition to these informal observations, she did one “formal” observation of our choosing. In this class, she would keep detailed notes of what the students and I are doing during every minute of the class. My formal observation was of a class where students were studying chemical reactions. I gave them iodine dissolved in water as well as some cooked rice to see that those two create a bright blue color when mixed together. “Color change” is one of the 5 signs of a chemical reaction I had told them about the day before. The class went fairly well, and afterwards, Anna and I talked for about an hour about that class and my other classes in general. In the couple days she observed, she was able to get a good idea of what my classes were like, and she gave me suggestions on ways to improve as well as pointing out things that I was already doing well. It was nice to have someone there who has experience teaching in the RMI and who knows the culture well to give me some reasonable yet attainable goals for the rest of the semester. The biggest goal I have is to start introducing them to the scientific method. Next week I’m planning to start talking about what a hypothesis is and why it’s important. (And having them make hypotheses themselves, of course.)

Anna planned to leave on Friday’s plane, but that flight was canceled because Air Marshall Island said she was the only passenger booked on it. It turns out, that wasn’t true, but AMI is not the most reputable airline in the world. Instead, she stayed an extra day and took a boat on Saturday, which, to our surprise, went off without a hitch. And it was nice to have Anna around for the extra day.

The rest of my weekend was great. I had time to do my lesson planning, get some good rest, finish Dune, and recuperate from a week of visitors. (The weekend before that, we had hosted a couple of the nearby WorldTeach volunteers, so it had been a busy 8 days.)

On another, unrelated topic, I realized this weekend that no one makes “plans” here. You would never ask someone if they have plans for the weekend as you leave work on a Friday. This is because all travel arrangements are made only shortly before they happen, so any weekend sojourns are decided within hours of their departure. And if you’re not leaving town, then your “exciting” events of the weekend include walking around, maybe getting a haircut, going to church, and attending the occasional party (to which there are never any invitations or announcements, you just sort of hear about it by word of mouth). And none of those things are really planned for. What this means is that the next definite thing I’m doing is returning to Majuro and then the States in June. That means I have *no plans* whatsoever for the next 3 and a half months. I don’t think that will ever happen again in my life.

Please note however, that when I say there are no “plans,” I do not include Morgan and my food plans, which *are* made and held to. This Tuesday, we decided to replace the usual mac ‘n’ cheese ‘n’ spam with our famous chocolate chip pancakes, which usually we only have on Saturday mornings. We figured we’d honor the tradition of Fat Tuesday as best we could. (PS: Mom, is pancakes on Fat Tuesday a tradition that actually has a basis in something, or did we just sort of make that up?)