day 2 of training

Woke up this morning around 5:30, went for a good run with other volunteers around 6:30.  Today we had visits from DOE officials, and missionaries that gave us our first Samoan language lesson.  We learned a bit about the education standards (but much more to come), and the common core requirements that AmSam hopes to begin implementing in 2 years (but their curricula now apparently adheres to 75% of common core already).  One of the many difficult aspects about teaching here (as I assume it is anywhere), is going to be having such high standards while needing to teach to the abilities and levels of the students.  After looking ever so briefly at the biology and marine science standards, it is clear that I won't get through all that material, even without knowing students' abilities.  The bio standards look just like the biology class I just finished in college, not high school. Although I may not remember, because my college and hs bio classes may have been quite similar. 

Samoan is HARD. We leared the 17-letter alphabet, how to pronounce vowels and vowel combinations, glottal stops (like in fa'afetai, which means thank you), vowel enhancers I think they are called, and some sentence structure.  It will take a lot of effort to learn, but I really want to.  We've all still been saying Pago Pago wrong.... we've been saying Pango Pango (after mistakenly saying Pago Pago, the way it looks), but it's really like a throat "ng" without the g.  Kind of like the "ng" in "king".  Basically you don't finish the g and don't close your mouth.  Hard to describe, but will attempt to teach it when I get home!  Equally difficult is when words begin with a glottal stop, like "'oe".  I haven't had any trouble getting around with English, but Samoans get excited when you speak Samoan and it will come in very useful in the classroom.

Attempted to set up a bank account today, but each person takes about 45 mins so we didn't have enough time to do during our break.  Eventually will get to it and get a phone..... island time.  But the 2 hours spent waiting for an unsuccessful bank attempt did allow me to speak with an awesome Samoan woman who had moved to Anchorage, Alaska after she graduated from Leone High School here. She was here visiting and said she couldn't wait to get back to the cooler weather in Alaska; that it was too hot here!! (funny, because I'm not Samoan and right now I think it's even cold here!). She was sooo nice and had such a great laugh and taught us a few things about Samoan culture. I could tell everyone was laughing around us as she tried to teach us Samoan.

Then had some more training on our role as teachers barriers to teaching in AmSam..there are a lot.  It's weird, because I imagine it's not anything like teaching in Africa where there are literally no resources and schools are barely schools; we have some resources here and there are strict standards.  But having the standards almost makes it harder; they definitely want you to teach to the test, and I think I'll end up feeling like I'm failing at teaching a lot if I have trouble managing my classroom or if students aren't understanding material.  Also frustrating will be that there ARE resources here, or there could be, but the politics on island really decide where the resources go. One of the classrooms we are training in has new apple computers, a smartboard, and air conditioning!  I don't expect any of that in Leone (pronounced Le-ohn-eh).

Tomorrow we're meeting with the DOE director, having language class, hopefully getting a bank account or phone (fingers crossed) (takes too long to do both here in one day haha!), and having our fist class on lesson planning.  Alright, meant to keep this short.