Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Hotter than the Sun

I never thought I would find a place that was too hot for me but, oh my gosh, is it uncomfortable here. It's been in the mid- to upper-90s for a couple weeks. With the humidity, the heat index feels around 110. It's not so bad if I'm sitting down under a fan. It's also not so bad in the mornings and evenings. But between the hours of eleven and six, I regularly feel like I might pass out.

I realize that I'll get no sympathy from those of you who still have to endure snowy winters. I'd still take this over that. But I'll be glad when the end of June rolls around. Supposedly, May and June are the hot months and the rest of the year is bearable. Of course, during the typhoon season, I'll just be wet all the time and everything in my house will have mold or mildew. But these are minor complaints compared to the joy I feel every day just going to work.

My job here, basically, is to help teachers plan and carry out more student-centered lessons. I wasn't sure what I was getting myself into. Imagine yourself a veteran teacher. Then, imagine some foreigner comes to your school and into your class and starts telling you everything that you need to change about your teaching. I was a little bit scared of meeting strong resistance. But the teachers are truly dedicated to their jobs and they want to try new things all in an effort to get their students to enjoy learning. Today in a class, I saw a teacher try an activity that she made up herself. She quickly presented new vocabulary and then cut up a bunch of letters and had teams race to spell words when she held up the pictures. The students loved it and the teacher couldn't stop smiling while she was watching them. It was a beautifully simple way to reinforce spelling without the mind-numbing drilling that is so common in classrooms here. And that's my job: to change teachers' thinking about what a classroom should be, to help them help students discover new information rather than to feed it to them.

The weeks are passing quickly and every weekday goes by in a bit of a blur. The weekends seem long, because I'm mostly alone with my thoughts--no TV and not much to do within reasonable driving distance. But I'm getting used to the quiet and starting to explore more. In two and a half weeks, I have a two-week holiday for the term break. I'll be spending a couple days on yet another tropical island with gorgeous coral reefs and a couple days in Kuala Lumpur. After that, I'll be playing it by ear, but hoping to explore some parts of the country that are a bit further away.