After 6 months

I’ve passed the 6^th month mark of my time spent in Chuuk, so I thought I would share some thoughts on my teaching job at St. Cecilia.

St. Cecilia exists in a time of great transition. Last quarter the board of the school announced that Mariano, the principal of 11 years, would be leaving at the end of the semester. To the general public, Mariano resigned, but from speaking with administration I know that Mariano was asked to leave after money from the school’s fundraising efforts went missing. This loss of funds has plagued the school for many, many years resulting in the school’s $30,000 of debt. With this change, the school is slowly crawling out of debt. Eventually the faculty hopes that their meager salaries will rise. In previous years teachers went months without being paid at all. This year, everyone gets paid, but in dramatically small amounts. If the school can continue moving toward financial health, faculty salary is next on the agenda.

Now that Mariano is gone, Kaspar, the Vice Principal works as acting principal while the school searches for a new principal. Finding a qualified school administrator is not an easy task on a small island that does not offer higher education beyond an associate’s degree. We are hoping that the new principal will be in place next year. For now, the school remains in a state of semi-organized chaos. Here are some examples:

Keys. The office of the school does not control or hold keys to any of the classrooms. Each teacher is responsible for holding the key to his or her own classroom. I keep the key to the library. This proves problematic in a school with serious faculty attendance issues. On any given day, you can expect at least one faculty member to be absent. Sometimes teachers don’t show up for weeks at a time. This leaves the students of that teacher locked out of the classroom, playing outside unsupervised for the entire day. There is no organized teacher substitution, so when a teacher is absent, kids have nothing to do but run around and climb the walls of the school...literally. I have on more that one occasion witnessed teachers manually breaking in to classrooms of teachers who are often late or absent. They just break the chain off the door with a hammer.

Curriculum. There is none! No teachers are given guidelines for what they should be teaching. The administration does not evaluate teachers’ lesson plans. As a brand new teacher I was never informed of the level where the students were, never told anything other than “reading and language arts” as to what was expected of me to teach. I could be teaching nothing but yoga to these kids and no one would know. This is hard on the teachers, yes, but worse for the students. Due to the lacking expectations in reading and writing in both Chuukese and English, some students pass through grade after grade without ever acquiring faculty of either language. No one knows the grade level at which students should be reading by. I have students who are illiterate in two languages.

Teaching at St. Cecilia is probably the craziest thing I have ever taken on. Most days I go home from work questioning whether or not I should be here. Whether or not it makes a difference and whether or not Chuukese people actually want American teachers in the school systems. Watching days pass as students are locked out of classrooms or sent outside for 3 consecutive periods of unsupervised PE (ie-volleyball or basketball) frustrates me beyond words.

However, beyond the chaos, there are small glimpses of relationships I am forming with students that I am hoping will make this all seem meaningful in the end. Today during 8^th period Monsa came to visit me in the library as I was grading. Monsa is a 7^th grader who transferred to St. Cecilia this year and is failing my class miserably. She can’t read, but no one ever noticed this because they admitted her into the school without taking the entrance exam. They placed her in the 7^th grade based on her age, when she should be in 5^th. While Monsa can’t read, she can speak small bits of English, this is true for many of my students and helps them get through grade to grade. She comes to visit carrying a cd player and headphones. I ask her, “What do you have?” She responds, “…(she is translating in her head)…music!” she says with a smile. So she sits next to me and we listen to the Chuukese keyboard music in her cd player.

My 8^th graders have discovered that I am slowly learning Chuukese. This proves to be incredibly amusing to them. Students constantly yell Chuukese phrases at me, now expecting to respond. I tell them, in the classroom, we speak English, but outside the classroom, Chuukese it is. Aita, a female 8^th grader, has made herself my Chuukese tutor. She and other students visit and frequently laugh at me as I stumble through vocabulary. I am an awful language student, but my lessons allow me to laugh with my students, and if nothing else, that makes it worth it.

Peace,

Caitlin