My Amazing Mom

When I look at my life right now all I can do is think how amazing it has been. I don't say it enough but right now seems like a great time to thank my mom for making all this happen for me. My mom was the one who diligently forced me to do my school work, made me try new things, and instilled my love for learning and science. Everything good about me is thanks to her, and for that and many other reasons I love her so much.

Thanks mom for always being there for me and Ricky!

 
Here's a song that puts some of my feelings perfectly into words.

Happy Mother's Day!

Ick.

On the walk to catch the bus we found a momento mori:

Storage Closet = Death Trap

I feel the need to share my storage closet with the world. Let me make it clear that this is the condition in which I found it. That being said, let us begin the tour.

Portal to hell.

Yep. This is real.

Who wants to look in this microscope?

So cozy.

Eddie and Sophia, my skeletal friends.

Rats eat EVERYTHING.

Lead Nitrate that is older than me.

The only reason I ever enter this closet is because it has A/C. I'm not going to lie, I may have even eaten lunch in here on the hottest days. So far I haven't been poisoned.

Standard Based Assessment - Samoan Style

Thank God we are giving these tests at the end of the year, because if they were in the beginning I might have had a stroke from sheer ridiculousness. The SBAs are the tests developed by the Office of Curriculum and Assessment in the DOE to test that the students are meeting the standards that the DOE implemented as the foundation of the curriculum.

Here at Leone the sophomores are being tested Monday through Thursday, and the juniors on Friday. I am a proctor for a group of students with two other teachers here at my school. In just the first two days look what we ran into:

Math Section:

#18 has no answer listed for option D, it’s just blank.
Another question in the test book has a check mark printed next to the correct answer.

The students could use calculators, but the teachers didn’t know that so no one told the students to bring calculators.

Reading:

One problem asks students about the meaning of the underlined word – but there is no underlined word…

The student’s answer sheets are numbered 23, 24, 24, 25, 26, 28

General:

There is no actual time set, they can just take as much time as they need.

The teachers can answer questions during the test.

They get the whole test book for the week and just keep turning it in so in theory they could totally cheat.

Thanh caught kids cheating and the other proctor told her not to report it because it would lower the scores and the teachers would look bad (she did anyways).

The best:

I was talking to another teacher from a small elementary school and his administration ORDERED him to give the students the answers if they didn’t know. Yes, you read that right – he was ordered to cheat.

And this is only day two…

DOE Appreciation Dinner

This week in American Samoa it’s Teacher Appreciation Week! It’s also SBA testing, so I don’t really have to teach which makes me appreciate testing. Yesterday the DOE held a dinner as part of the week’s festivities to celebrate teachers who had reached 20, 25, 30, 35 or 40 years of service in the DOE. They also invited us WorldTeachers to thank us for giving a year of our time to teach here.

The dinner was at Hong Kong House, one of the many Chinese places and it was absolutely packed with teachers, administrators and us. I realized this would probably be the last Samoan formal function that I would attend, and I really realized how much I was going to miss all the unique elements of Samoan events. There was a band blasting a mix of Samoan and eclectic states songs, teachers being honored getting up and dancing having dollars thrown at them, gifts of tuna, and a bunch of us getting up and doing the electric slide in front of the main table. And I can’t leave out the MC’s comment after our dancing, “For those of you who didn’t come up and dance, we hope you will get electrocuted!” Teacher events in the states just aren’t like this.

Yes! Appreciation Tuna!

Max can eat this week!

Flaunting those fancy certs.

In Samoa this is a single serving size.

KC and her friend Sky came back this weekend and are hear for the week so KC wrestled with the DOE so that Sky could also come to the dinner, especially since it was Sky’s birthday. Sky had the opportunity to have a very unique birthday dinner, and we all had a pretty good time. Afterward all our treachery responsibility was thrown out the window and almost all of us headed to Rubble’s for some drinks and a chance to catch up. This was the biggest gathering of WTs that I had been at since our mid-service evaluation in January so it was a pleasant Monday night.

Friends...

After much chatting and joking, and some drinking, I finally headed home splitting a cab with Sky and KC and went to bed at 1:15… Whatever, I only had to proctor a test the next day. Can you tell that we are nearing the end of the year?

It's a Miracle!

For the last few weeks the internet at my house has been extra slow - to the point where some web pages just won't load. It was tedious but not terrible, but after a couple weeks I really needed to use some faster internet to get some work (or blogging?) done. I decided today that I would shell out the $10 for one day of using the hot spot in Laufou and would camp out in Carl's Jr. for hours and just do all I had to do with high speed internet including my increasingly more frantic job searching.

I signed on and paid online and to my amazement was treated to the fastest internet I have ever used on island - by far. I had mooched off people here before and while it was fast for the island, it was never this fast. It was so fast I didn't even have to buffer videos on YouTube! (Shut up that's a big step here...)

As a result I have been here for seven hours downloading two weeks of videos that tie into my lessons, checking plane tickets, sending couch surfing requests and uploading pictures and videos. Also drinking several liters of Diet Coke.

For the first time all year I was able to sit down and upload many of my videos from the year, so with out further ado I present: my year in videos.

By far my favorite, a video of the beautiful view from the top of Mt. Alava. This was the view we had when we camped on Mt. Alava in January. Amazing.



Here's a more sober video I took the day after the tsunami while we were delivering emergency supplies to the villages on the west side that were hardest hit.



One from our trip to Western Samoa of Rosemary and I sliding down Sliding Rock.



Here are a few of the many videos that I took of our school's Samoan Day we had earlier in the year. They really practiced and you can tell!







The first video of my time here in AmSam taken on our first full day on the island back in July. These are the boys in our group preforming a traditional dance they just learned in our morning at the local museum and cultural center.



The crowd at the Flag Day weekend fautasi races. They are cheering for their village's boat.



A boy jumps into the pool below the waterfall in Nu'uuli. We couldn't even climb the rock face!

Sweet Saturdays - and Guts

Yesterday I was lucky in that I managed to get a ride with Taylor so that I could take a huge package of gifts (lucky mom and brother!) to ship home to the post office in Pago Pago. Sadly the reason that Taylor was heading into town is because her aunt was in the hospital because of a serious issue that had come from no where a few days ago. Thankfully she is doing alright now.

So I find myself at the post office at 10 in an extremely long line, but I managed to get my packages shipped and for cheaper than I thought. Afterward I actually ate a bagel (they are redic rare here) and read my book until Rosemary met me at the coffee shop I was at and we decided to go swimming at Sadie's for the third week running. We ran into John there and had a lovely day of swimming.

Later I ran home to shower and get my computer so that we could meet up later and watch the latest episode of Glee that I had downloaded. we were meeting for dinner at Jade and I got there early as i wanted to catch the last bus. In true AmSam fashion the power was out in all of the west side when I got off the bus, but I had no worries as I waited in the lingering A/C in Laufou reading by the security lights.

Luckily the power came back on and we could get dinner, and afterward we decided that we would just walk the 40 minutes to Julia and Rosemary's place. As we neared their house I really, really had to use the bathroom, so when everyone stopped at the store I took Rosemary's key and went ahead.

I was booking about as fast as you can power walk, and this happened to be in an area of the road with no sidewalks. Since I didn't want to get hit by a car I was walking in the longish grass on the side of the road. Suddenly I head a loud, wet, explosions and instinctual do a awkward pirouette as I look down to see the huge toad that my powerful footfall just squashed into a bloody pulp. The toad, of course, was a huge fat one and it was large enough to plaster my sandals and ankle with bloody entrails goo. I swear that until I shook my foot it's liver was wrapped around my ankle.

Still really having to go to the bathroom I hastily wiped off most of the gunk with a breadfruit tree leaf and powered to their house where immediately after using the facilities I jumped sandals and all into their shower.

At least it's a funny story.

The rest of the night was much more fun as we watched two new episodes of Glee and enjoyed the good company.