One of the things that I've discovered during my time of teaching is that students sometimes tend to skip class a lot. Some of the times, they hope that you won't notice that they are missing/you didn't see them that morning or they think you won't try to find them if they do skip class. There's no sort of 'Hall Monitor' to wrangle kids in so if the teachers don't hunt them down, then they might get away with skipping class. Last year, I tolerated this behavior – this year, no. So one of my students was missing from my class to help design some t-shirts for the Sports Day (on Thursday) but she didn't tell me she was going to miss class and I knew she was at school because I saw her earlier that morning. Now when it came time for this student (her name is Fuatai) to show up and class and she didn't, I went around to the regular spots she should/could have been at but did not find her. I didn't want to spend to much time chasing after her because I still had a class to teach. But the nail in the coffin for me hunting her down was when I found out that she had the notebook of another student – so not only was she missing from class, another student was unable to write down their notes because she wasn't in class. So I definitely had to find her at that point. So I went to the teacher she was helping and asked where Fuatai was – the teacher had sent her on an errand somewhere and after Fuatai was done with the errand she was suppose to come back to class – she didn't. So we sent a student to go get her and I thought that she would promptly show up to class….I was wrong. The next time I saw her, she was walking around outside the window of my class, in no big hurry to get to class. At this point I was a bit upset – so I went and caught up with her and told her to get into class (she had to go back to her classroom because she didn't have her bookbag with her). So sometimes you have to go that extra mile as a teacher just to get the students to care about their education – and yes, I know it was a bit extreme to go hunting her down but she was affecting more then just herself and I had to let her know it was totally unacceptable to skip my class without a note.
Now after that bit of drama, the rest of the day went relatively smoothly. I went to do my tutoring session over at Paul/Viv's house and around 4pm I had to go to the Peace Corps office to get ready for the Guy/Girl gender talk. Now, for those of you who have been reading since last year you'll remember that I had this same type of talk at my place around this time last year. So once again the event was coming to my humble abode and I was pretty excited. Helping with the session this year was Aaron (Group 77), Eric (Group 76) and Ray (Group 76). Together we were a pretty good representation of what Group 78s Peace Corps experience could look like. This time we decided to get pizza instead of Chinese food because it's just easier to order pizza for a large number of people. We had about 8 guys from Group 78 so it was a pretty packed living room. We talked about a wide variety of stuff – mainly focusing on what they will probably encounter on their first visit to their training village (their training village is called Manunu and they will be leaving for it on Saturday). The strangest part of the whole experience (at least for me) was the fact that I was now the "oldest" volunteer in the group! I've been her for about 19 months now, while the trainees have been here for a week, Aaron has been a volunteer for 6 months and Eric/Ray have been volunteers for about a year now – I'm now the old, wise volunteer…how crazy is that! Overall, I thought that we covered a lot of topics that were relevant to what these new guys will encounter during their 2.5 months of training – hopefully they all make it through. Now the "worst" part of this week of Peace Corps functions is the fact that I am now completely overloaded with food (and for a person who doesn't cook regularly, that's usually a positive). Before the fiafia (when I didn't know I was having it) I went shopping for food, so not only do I have the food I bought, I have the food left over from the fiafia and the pizza from last night – just pure overload!
So that's the end of crazy event #1….crazy event #2 comes to you tomorrow…l8r!
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