This morning I went for a walk around the pool area a bit just to move after breakfast. It was here I realized I picked the wrong place to life guard in high school. Check out this lifeguard in a yellow shirt. Yeah, he's skimming leafs out of the pool, just like I had to do, but those surroundings are FABULOUS.
After breakfast, we went to visit Jambalaya University, which is a private Catholic university in Jakarta. There we met with about 30 English teachers from the Jakarta region.
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| There was a group photo taken. This is a picture of me being yelled at to get into the group photo. I hope to replace this with the group photo soon, but right now, this is the best I've got! |
Nicki, from our group was chosen to speak to the group on the educational system in the US. She did a great job given the variety of school environments there are in the US. We also heard from two teachers from Indonesia and then spoke in small groups to share about our contexts. It was loud. Imagine 50 teacher-voices in one room. LOUD.
What struck me was there were a lot of similar pain points and passion points in the room. From both sides, teachers were frustrated with the requirements from the "higher-ups" that interfered with the job of teaching. We all felt like teaching was hard but very rewarding. We had a common language, but that language didn't mean the same thing - what it meant to "lesson plan" looked different in different groups and what it meant to have "student centered instruction" looked different too.
It is important to note though that how these definitions varied was not just between Indonesians and Americans, but between Americans too. In some ways it seems almost premature to talk about these things without fully understanding the context of the American teachers around me. One American teacher talked about how she has a 2 hour break every day and class sizes no larger than 25... AHEM... that is NOT what my reality looks like in my classroom. The phrase of the day was "varies by location". Everything, varies by location in the US. In some ways, the most valuable part of being in Indonesia is being able to talk to other teachers in the US. It seems crazy to me that we needed to fly 31 hours to do that, but it shows how few opportunities there are for teachers to collaborate in the US locally or nationally.
I often got frustrated in my school when the district would insist that we needed to have identical exams between the two high schools. When you look between districts, we don't have identical exams, or even content. When you zoom out to the nation level, the differences are even more severe in the US.
When talking to the Indonesian teachers, they talked a lot about character development and how that was reflected in student grades. I am excited to look at that more too. A friend of mine in this same program went to India where they had a "happiness" curriculum to combat the stress students faced. It is hard to tell if these "socio-emotional skills" are something that we in the US are overlooking or if they are something we have overcome. At this point, I would argue for "overlooking". I do recognize that what "good behavior" looks like in the US is very tied to culture and when we reward behaviors, we are perpetuating a system that is mostly based in white-privilege. But even that is something we could dive into more as teachers (and as a society) in the US.
Also in the univeristy I talked to the woman who seemed to be in charge of the program. She mentioned that Indonesian teachers think US teachers are like what they see in the movies. She said that she tries to say that really US teachers are more complex than anything in Hollywood. Again, I feel like this is an issue we see in the US too. To many people, in the US even, every teacher is either that dude from AP Bio or the woman from Freedom Writers. I am thankful of the work Knowles is doing to change that narrative around the work teachers do. And it is a good reminder I need to write an article for them soon! (Adding that to my to do list for when I get back...)
After the exchange we took a tour of the school where we stumbled upon a performance in the commons. I suppose that is another similarity between Indonesia and the US - college campuses always have something going on.
#IndonesiaUSA70th experience in Atmajaya University - after sharing stories we stumbled upon this dance group. @FulbrightTeach @usembassyjkt pic.twitter.com/QHMsnP7VUQ— Kaitie O'Bryan (@Kaitie_Obryan) July 24, 2019
Apparently this was a dance from the Ache part of Indonesia which is a more conservative Muslim area of the country. I think the name of the dance was Saman, but I am not certain about that.
From there, we headed to the US embassy. I had never been inside a US embassy before. But as you can imagine, it was pretty secure. No phones inside were allowed. They had an "American Corner" which was an area open to the public (as long as they arranged a time 24 hours in advance) with a 3D printer, some maker materials, some American games (my favorite was a Democrats vs Republicans Stratego game), and some US books/magazines. We stayed in this area for a series of presentations from security and medical folks and other people associated with various programs.
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| No cameras allowed inside the embassy, but here's a picture from outside. |
One thing I found interesting was that most of the US positions move every 2-3 years so they really rely on the local staff to carry on the institutional knowledge of the place. I asked them how new administrations affect the day-to-day work and they said much of the actual work is the same, but
- If you get thrown into a jail in Indonesia someone will come and visit you every 3 months to make sure you are OK.
- There are only 4 languages that the state department takes more than a year to learn... Chinese, Korean, Arabic, and.. cannot remember the last one.
- Everything else takes less than a year - but still 5 hours of class time each day (immersive) and homework
- One of the officials was previously in Kyrgystan. He talked about how in Kyrgystan he did more adoptions than in Indonesia which I thought was interesting. Most of his work here is for visas.
After that we headed back to the hotel where I am currently writing this blog post. I am about to go out to the pool and do a bit of reading to relax/re-center. I have been waking up at 4:45 AM most days here which seems to correspond to the morning prayer (perhaps this is not coincidental). But I kinda love it. It gives me a chance to go to the gym before breakfast. BTW... breakfast here is amazing. I will take a picture of my plate tomorrow, but let's just say I am usually super psyched about made-to-order omelettes (which this place has), but that's not the best part of this breakfast. This place has breakfast sushi!!!
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| Breakfast sushi. |
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