totally unrelated picture, but i thieved it off of another's blog (thanks regina)

brian, nick, beth, lucas, dani, regina, scott, kate at Rusty Anchor

Empty Promises

I feel like my blog is sort of a little baby compared to other volunteers. I got some good pictures but don't have the time to upload right now. I'll make a vague promise to get more up this weekend.

There was a big catholic women's party this weekend where we live. More to come on that. It was a weekend of drinking sakau though. It seems that that's becoming a common thing for me around here.



Staff Meeting

We had a staff meeting today, it was during lunch and we just went ahead and kept meeting through our fifth period. Half the time was a big discussion of when to have the staff welcome party which was highly amusing. Seemed like serious business, i just laugh... Maybe half English half Pohnpeian this meeting was. I can sort of understand what people are talking about (sort of), but mostly by context, tone, etc, not knowledge of what they literally say. It's frustrating at times, OK a lot of the time, not speaking the local language, especially since my students like to take advantage of the fact.

case in point
In Pohnpeian, during class the other day "let's both guess and see who gets the most right"...In English "teacher, they're talking about guessing"...

The other half of the meeting was a fairly intense discussion about 20 students who were suspended (for the whole year!, yikes) after the Welcome Party we had last Friday. These students (10 of whom are my juniors) were caught drinking or were drunk at the party. Stupid mistake on their part for sure, probably not the best discipline policy in my opinion though.
Some teachers want to let them back in, most want to be firm in the school's policy. I agree with both, the punishment is too harsh in my opinion, but also the school shouldn't back off something it's already chosen to do, especially if it's a policy. What to do? As an outsider and a guest, I think it's best to just see how it unfolds, of course, I do have an opinion, but in a culture where confrontation and going around/above authority figures is kind of a no-no, where I'm a guest and an outsider, I think it best to just sit and watch, for today.