Super Teacher

All right, in movies you see these phenomenal teachers who love every one of their kids – even the ones who you just know will be spitting in your burger five years down the road. These super-teachers get their students to care about great literature and classical music. They teach them the value of hard work and high moral character. These teachers mold young minds into scholars in the sole pursuit of making the world a better place.

I’m not one of these teachers.

Don’t get me wrong; I try dang hard to be this kind of teacher. I try with all of my might to be patient when a kid is smacking gum in my face and then pretends that he doesn’t even know what gum is when you ask him to spit it out. But man, it’s tough to not snap in that situation.

So here’s the thing; some kids are easier to teach than others. Some kids want to be there, and others don’t. There are kids who will burry their nose in a book and get to work the minute I even think about giving instruction.

There are also kids who, even as 14-year-olds, need someone to hold their hand through even the simplest of stuff like sharpening their pencil.
I’ll say, “hey, Randy, why exactly are you chasing Jear around the room?”
“Nothing, teacher,” he’ll say, “I was just sharpening my pencil.”
Those kinds of kids are frustrating and getting to them is probably the mark of if you are a good teacher or just someone who puts on the collared shirt every morning.

Now there are some days when I am this funny, cool teacher who makes even Randy laugh and bend over his book with the business end of his pencil to get some stuff done. If I could be this guy every single day then I would never have a problem again in my life. I’d win the Teacher of the Universe award like every other week.

Sadly this cannot happen.

Number one, the guy it takes to get to some of these students needs to change it up every single day. One day the funny jokes might get Randy to work, another day it might be stern looks and consequences and still another day it could simply be a pat on the shoulder and a, “hey, I’m glad you made it to class today.” Some days I just don’t know what road to take. Not to mention, it gets really confusing if Randy needs one sort of teacher and Jear needs another.

Number two being a super-teacher is exhausting. There are days when I am tired – enough said.

Sometimes these tough-case kids will figure out ways to get out of my class. “Mr. Tim, I think I have pink-eye,” or “Mr. Tim, my mother told me to go home to clean,” or “Mr. Tim, I think I left my pencil in the other class.”
And sometimes, Lord help me, I just let them go even though their eyes are clear, their mother had no way of telling them to come home and their pencil is clearly behind their ear.

Then, when they leave the class, both of us think we got the better end of the deal.
I know, I know, it’s the wrong way to look at things. And maybe there is a future version of me who will be getting kids to write to their local senator about the environment instead of drawing phallic symbols on their neighbor’s notebooks. Right now though, super-teacher or not, there are just some days that Randy and me need a break from each other.

Hollywood, if you want to make a movie about my teaching, you might have to wait a couple years.

M&M's

"In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, M&M's."
"Mr. Tim, what did you say?"
"I said, 'in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.'"
"You didn't say 'Amen.'"
"Yes I did."
"You said 'M&M's.'"
"No I didn't."
"Yes you did, and Jesus heard you."
"He did?"
"Yes, and Jesus hate you now."
"Jesus hates M&M's?"
"No, he hates you because you said 'M&M's'"
"I said 'Amen'"
"No you didn't."
"Monica, go sit down."

Ruckus

We’re studying the Titanic in class and I was trying to give the students some idea of how excited the world was to see this ship take off. I decided to do a little role-playing. I divided the kids into two groups, kids who pretended to be on the giant ship and kids who were supposed to be saying goodbye to the ship. Edlynn was the newspaper reporter taking photos, Bella was the mayor christening the ship and Mikaa and Winton were two famous actors eager to be among the first to ride on this fabulous new ship.

“OK, you’ve got to be waving your hats, you’ve got to be blowing kisses, you’ve got to be so excited that this thing is about to sail,” I said.

From the back of the class, Sallyanne raised her hand.

“Oh, you want to be something? Well, OK, I guess that you can be married to Nathan over there on the ship and you’re saying goodbye to him.”

The class exploded. I’m not kidding; the class went crazy. Some kids were covering their mouths and saying “ohhh,” some were on top of desks snapping their fingers and some were laughing so hard that they were on the floor.
It was like Kurt Cobain came back from the dead and soloed for a Nirvana reunion tour. It was like the Marshall Islands just scored a goal in the World Cup final. It was like every kid in the class was just told that later that day Akon was going to play a surprise concert in the lawn.

I’ve never seen anything blow up that big.

Nathan ran from the classroom… I’ve no idea where he is now. Maybe he’s taking refuge with the CIA under the pseudonym “Smith.” Meanwhile, Sallyanne just sank her head into her desk and started balling.

The whole thing was ridiculous.

My stomach twisted. One crying girl, one running boy and the rest of the class threatening to jubilantly riot; it was Wednesday and suddenly the weekend seemed years away.

After a good five minutes I quelled the rebellion and let them out to lunch.

“If you happen to see Nathan,” I called after them, “tell him that I can offer him safety and amnesty.”

Now I was stuck with a pre-teen girl balling in the middle of an empty classroom. I had no idea what to do. Should I try and hug her? Should I sing to her like in the musicals they all love? What if I just gave her a dollar?

“Are you OK?” I asked. “I am sorry.”

She had her head down on her desk and I lowered down until I was eye-level with her.

“You want some candy?” I asked. She sniffed and nodded yes. I gave her some gum and she left rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. I walked home to lunch alone.

Then when I got back to class Sallyanne popped out of nowhere with a big smile on her face.

“Hi, Mr. Tim,” she said.

“Hey,” I said.

Kids are so weird.

Nose to the Grind Stone

It took my fellow teacher Dan Caccavano seven hours to upload a video to You Tube this weekend. He started after dinner in the Marshall Island High School office and around 2 am he decided that it would be a good idea to just leave it overnight.
Such is the life on a coral atoll.

The movie is a little over six minutes long. I am no expert on computers, and I have no knowledge of kilobytes, megabytes or snakebites for that matter, but it seems to me that seven hours for a little over six minutes seems ridiculous. That is an hour to upload a minute. I guess more that a minute if you are trying to be exact, and as this is journalism, I suppose I should try. Let’s see, if the movie was six minutes and 20-some seconds then that is about 1.12 hours for every minute of movie uploaded. I don’t know if that is right, but what, you come to me for mathematical precision?

Cut me some slack already.

So that movie is part one of a five-part student-generated documentary series on a Shakespeare play being put on here by the high school. It is done every year and is organized by a volunteer group out of Dartmouth.

Dan is in charge of teaching kids how to edit movies, and make the documentary alongside the play.

I don’t see Dan too much anymore. He spends most days after school hunched over his computer screen, toying with clips and sound bytes, or instructing students who have never even held a camera how to counteract over-exposed frames.

This year’s play is “A Comedy of Errors,” so Dan falling asleep and drooling over his keyboard until 2 am while the screen cheerfully tells him that it will only be a few more minutes seems fitting. However, if you let me get philosophical for a moment, and if you made it this far into the column I doubt you have much choice but to just read on, maybe the seven hours is only appropriate.

In this country nothing is easy. It is the curse of a third-world country desperately trying to pull itself into modern contention in a few short years. Cell phones regularly drop calls, noting ever comes on time, and the internet moves like a snail on a frozen sidewalk. So Dan and his students making this movie was not easy either. There was a lot to learn. A lot of mistakes to take into account. I mean, when you are capturing and importing video for the first time there are bound to be mess-ups. Multiply this by about 20 high school students who have had very limited access to computers their whole life and you can see that there were bumps in the road.

They learned though, they got through it and now part one of their video is on You Tube for the rest of the world to see. Knowing your way around a computer is a vital skill in the developed world, and now these kids who worked will be able to show something online to anyone they want. They can say, “look, I did that.” Plus if people only could put up stuff they had to wait seven hours to upload, then maybe there’d be a lot less crap on the net.

And maybe if you added up all of the hours they put into it then seven hours uploading doesn’t seem so bad.

Dan is exhausted though, I think I’ll buy him a cup of coffee, oh and here is the link to the movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akHfCEu_iDg.

Wow

OK, so it is already March 10... Almost exactly three months until I am home... Time is speeding up and on some levels I look forward to going home and on some levels it is scaring me how fast living happens.

Nuclear Victims Walk

Any given day is just a series of moments strung together...
Suddenly everyone started walking. There was no call over a speaker or countdown; everyone just got tired of sitting in the rain so we walked – hundreds of us.

It was still too early in the morning for the sun so we walked by the thin halos of naked light bulbs dangling here and there from houses. People spoke in low, feeling voices that took the place of eyes.

“Mr. Tim, Mr. Tim?” Anahko asked me.

“Yes?”

“Nothing.”

Last Friday was Nuclear Victims Day here in the Marshall Islands. School was cancelled and on Saturday morning, at 5 am mind you, there was a walk from the end of the atoll to the urban center of Majuro.

As I walked my students came and went, talking to me for a few moments before running off. Above us all the stars came in and out of sight as the clouds washed and swirled around. Sometimes rain came.

Every now and then I looked down at my tee-shirt (I was wearing two of them) to try and figure out in this dim light just exactly what its color was.

The reason I was on this walk was that every one of my kids said they would be doing it. So, despite the ungodly hour I was walking. Besides, there was a free tee-shirt for the first 100 walkers.

Long before there was a walk, in February of 1946, Commodore Ben H. Wyatt the military Governor of the Marshall Islands, asked the people of Bikini Atoll for permission to do nuclear testing on their tiny speck of land. He said it was “for the good of mankind and to end all world wars.”

The testing eventually led to this walk.

During the walk dogs barked at the mass of people coursing up the road and I gripped my dog stick tight. My kids laughed at me — they think it’s funny that I’m afraid of dogs. I’d show them the scar from the dog bite I got when I first arrived to demonstrate how unfunny it is to me, but I think that its placement would not have the desired effect. I was bitten on the bum.

Just as the sun was getting around to telling me that my free tee-shirt was maroon in color we reached the end of the walk. Hundreds of people converged on a field from the both directions of the island, people milled around and waited for organizers to hand out the breakfasts of oranges, hard-boiled eggs and doughnuts.
Stuff like this rarely strikes a chord with me. We have a big, dark history as a human race and doing something like a walk very early in the morning, just doesn’t seem to do the actual tragedy justice. My walk was just a bunch of nice little moments capped off with a free tee-shirt. It seemed sort of silly.

Then again, claiming to end all world wars by bombing someone’s homeland into oblivion seems sort of silly too. The Bikinians, as I hope we all would, chose to abandon their home for a greater good. To them it wasn’t silly, they left behind a home that due to radiation of the food supply, they still haven’t returned to. Now, 62 years later, the Bikinians hold “local” Government meetings hundreds of miles from the atoll of the governed. Some spend their days trying to convince the US Government that their injuries due to the nuclear fallout warrant compensation.

Just a bunch of little moments added up...

And so last Friday we just suddenly started walking. It seemed like a good idea, it had started to rain, and maybe everyone on the walk wasn’t doing it for any great and noble reason of remembrance, and maybe it doesn’t add up to the real and terrible tragedy, but maybe you just got to try to piece together little things like waking up early, walking with like-minded people and thinking about it all just a little bit and hope that it adds up to something more.

Let Down

Man, I was planning to go to Arno to go surfing but then some mean sickness came a knocking....