An Intrepid Sojourn: Samoan Day

Over the past month if you had visited our LHS campus you would have frequently seen that all the students were out of class. Why is that? Samoan Day!

The original date of Samoan day was set to be Feb 11^th so beginning in mid-January we were having 50 minute long practices each day to prepare. For Samoan Day each grade was to perform a series of dances and a song that would be watched by the other classes, parents, teachers and anyone else who came to Samoan Day. The day is meant to celebrate the Samoan culture and help keep the kids close to their roots and to remember the traditional dances and songs.

The practices were fun to watch (we couldn't really help with the Samoan dancing…) and they only shortened each class by about 5 minutes so it didn't have too bad of an affect on the learning. Well, at first. As we got closer to the long anticipated day the practices kept getting longer and longer. I don't mean that they would be scheduled for longer time slots; they just would let the run longer on random days meaning you would never know if you actually were going to see the class period that was scheduled for after the practice. That last week we didn't see those class period see once. One day the last week they just canceled the afternoon periods all together - right before they were supposed to start so that we could practice more!

Regardless of the frustration we felt as teachers, we were really excited for Samoan Day since out students were pumped and had some amazing dances worked out. However the day before Samoan Day was to happen we heard word that Cyclone Rene was on the way. Since it was predicted that school was going to be canceled the next day the we had an emergency assembly (as we have no PA system) to tell the students that Samoan Day was going to be moved to next Thursday. This was pretty awesome because it meant that we were going to have Friday off, and as we already had Monday off for president's day we ended up with basically a three day week.

As it turned out it was good in terms of no real school, because we spent almost all of Tuesday and Wednesday practicing. At this point Thanh and I were banging our heads against the wall because we hadn't been able to teach in a structured setting for what felt like eternity. Finally, Samoan Day rolled around and it was worth it! The kids were so excited and they did an amazing job! Here are some of the pictures from the day, and for more check out the web album. I am going to do my best to put up some videos that I took, but that is always tedious with our internet.