Makes All the Difference...Apparently

This morning, during class discussion in the library, I was leaning against one of these sloping walls, having sat there purposefully because otherwise the boys sit there and slouch into inattention. But I was slouching now, and I was getting frustrated with the students who weren't paying attention. So I sat up.

It was like a miracle. All of a sudden, the postures around the circle improved, and the behavior improved with it. The conversation wasn't perfect from there, but it was a lot better.

I have a new reason to sit up straight.

Warning: Reflection Ahead

I was humming a hymn in the hallway today, when I messed up the words in my head and sang "All things bright and beautiful, all teachers great and small." I laughed at myself, and then I thought about those stories of little kids mixing up the words of songs into something adorable and ridiculous. Like my mother who imagined the infant Jesus surrounded by vegetables when she misheard the line from "Silent Night" as "Sleep in heavenly peas."

Since I'm a little too old for that to be cute anymore, I started thinking about how I want to be a "teacher great," but more often I feel like a "teacher small." Someone asked me recently if I feel like a veteran teacher with a year of experience under my belt. The answer is no. Emphatically. I'm still waiting for the day when lesson planning comes easily, when classroom management is a breeze, and when I feel like I have enough time to teach/grade/prepare/review everything I need to.

In some ways, I'm a better teacher than I was last year. But mostly, I feel like I have a long way to go. In particular, I've realized how little I know about teaching English to non-native speakers. It's a different ballgame, and I'm still learning the rules. Sometimes, I feel sorry for these kids because they're my first batch, my experimentees, and I improvise a lot.

But here's where my reflection ended up: what I love about teaching is that I always have another class, another day, another week, another unit, another chance to do better. If nothing else, this job forces me to accept grace for my failures. And grace spurs me on to make myself a better teacher tomorrow than I was today.

It's been a while since...

...a picture post. So I rooted through some old and new pictures to bring you this. Enjoy.

Here are some photos from when colleague Ami and I went to Ancol, Jakarta's theme park and beach on the north side of the city.


Boats on the beach. I think you can take these boats out to the Thousand Islands north of Jakarta on the Java Sea. Bet you didn't know I was so close to the (not quite) namesake of a favorite salad dressing.

Both times that I've been out with Ami exploring Jakarta, people have asked to take my picture. Actually, it's happened more often than that. Once when I was riding the angkot on my way to the mall, a woman plopped her baby on my lap and snapped a picture with her cell phone. I don't mind that much, but I joke with Ami that I'm going to start charging people for the privilege. I haven't, but the second time it happened at Ancol, I insisted on taking a picture of my own. So here's the photo of the people who took a photo of me.

It's been a while since Ancol, but it was only a couple of weekends ago when Carol and I decided to take an architectural tour of our neighborhood. Here are some of the fun things we found.

Traditional

Modern

Big
Small

Sticks Out

Blends In

Front

Back

And even though it's not in my neighborhood, just because I liked it when Erica and I drove by...

Color!

Indonesian Independence Day

We kind of had today off for Indonesian Independence Day, but we had to go into school for an hour to attend the flag ceremony, which was a bit unpleasant. It involves standing outside in full uniform, and even at 7 in the morning, it's too much like a sauna to be wearing a blazer. Since I still don't really understand the Indonesian, and I don't know the songs, my participation was pretty much limited to counting trickles of sweat.

Actually, the songs always make me smile. The Indonesian national anthem sounds as much like stirring European band music as you could want, but I'm more fond of the Independence Day anthem because it sounds like the kind of song that you might hear at an outdated theme park ride and have stuck in your head for the rest of day (a bit like "It's a Small World").

But even with a slightly painful morning, I'm glad for the rest of the day off, particularly since I had a busy weekend to recover from. Saturday, after talking to the family (including roommate passing through Indianapolis!) on Skype, I helped lead worship for an evening church service. Have I mentioned The Gathering Place? It's a small satellite service of my church that meets on Saturday night in South Jakarta. It takes a while to get down there, but I've met a great circle of friends. So for a while, I've been doing "social church" on Saturday night and "Sunday church" on Sunday morning. One thing I love about TGP is that there are always people going out afterwards, so dinner and ice cream followed the service. Yesterday, I did more church, and then decided to go see Up before meeting Carol and some new friends for supper.

Now I have long been a sneaker of food into movie theaters, but I've moved away from candy bars and towards...fresh fruit? Yes, I snuck organic strawberries into the movie theater, after I washed them in the mall restroom and dried them under the hand dryer. It was totally worth the strange looks. And Up? Delightful.

One More Lesson in Humility

Today's Tally:
One failure
One success
One I-don't-know-yet

Failure:
Just as I was 75% done with putting in a new jug in my water dispenser, congratulating myself on the drip-free installation and composing a blog post to that effect in my head...disaster. More specifically, my worst water jug disaster by far. On the plus side, my floor got an unintentional mopping. On the minus side, one towel doesn't quite cut it on a five gallon puddle (and I'm having flashbacks to helping friends dry out their flooded basement apartment two years ago). Why did I decide to stick my other one in the laundry ten minutes ago?

Here's hoping for better things with the next one.

Success:
I bought airline tickets to Hong Kong for a friend's wedding in September. I'm thrilled to be going because it feels like a make-up for the other weddings, babies, and milestones that I'm missing among my friends and family back at home. I also get to see a new city, and I have a beautiful dress to wear. The next project is Christmas tickets home.

I-don't-know-yet:
This is totally unrelated, but I'm thinking of buying a guitar and learning to play. What do you think?

The Apartment Complex Giveth...And the Apartment Complex Taketh Away

When I moved in here, the apartment complex provided basic linens for me, and my kitchen was supplied with bowls, plates, teacups, silverware, and glasses in multiples of three along with the necessary cooking vessels and utensils. There might have been whispers that my use of these items was temporary, but when I didn't hear anything more from the apartment office about it, I figured I'd have this stuff for as long as I'm here.

UNTIL...Saturday morning when I got a knock on the door from two women who said they were here to take the stuff back. What? And I don't even get a warning call? I told them that it wasn't a good time, but we rescheduled for Monday. When they came back, they packed "my" dishes into "my" pillowcases but were kind enough to leave "my" dishrack and "my" frying pan. They also remembered to take the ash tray that I had nearly forgotten I had.

So until I go out and get some new kitchen stuff, I've been eating out of my tupperware with a cereal box spoon and a fork I got at a funeral (long story). Which makes me laugh enough that I'm not rushing out to buy dishes and silverware.

Another kitchen update: The Hanukkah miracle is finally over. I had to replace the gas cannister a couple of weeks ago. And of course, it petered out just as I was boasting to Carol about how long it had lasted.

An update having nothing to do with my kitchen: I had a really good day of teaching today. :)

Adventures in Volleyball

Some of my students have been pestering me for a couple of months to come play volleyball with them after school. Now my volleyball playing is usually limited to one week a year at family camp (I promise it's not as dorky as it sounds), but I love playing, as long as the competition doesn't get more serious than trying to spike on your dad.

So playing with students sounded like fun, and yesterday I brought clothes to change into and headed down to the volleyball court. It took about ten minutes to realize that this was not the pick-up game I had imagined. The gym teacher was running the show, there were approximately a million kids there, and before I knew it, we were doing drills, balls were flying everywhere, and my old P.E. anxieties started to resurface, coupled with questions like "Can a teacher do this and maintain any dignity?" Worse, when I finally did get to play a game, I was on a team with 11th and 12th grade girls pitted against six middle school boys. I'm not sure that it was meant to be demeaning, but it sure felt that way. I bet it was fun to watch because neither team was acting like one: the little boys just wanted to pelt us with their surprisingly strong serves but got in each other's way when the ball was returned and they actually had to work together, and the girls on my team shied away from the ball and looked at each other accusingly when it hit the ground. They beat us 2 games to one, but at least I personally had relatively little to be ashamed of, which was my highest hope for the afternoon.

In other news, I discovered that I grade papers very efficiently when listening to country music. Thank you, Rascal Flatts.

Taking the Long(?) Way Home

Today, traffic was so bad around the school parking lot that four of us teachers walked home. After sitting in the sweltering school van for fifteen minutes in the stuffy underground parking lot, surrounded by a fleet of unmoving cars who only seemed to be good for raising the carbon monoxide levels and with no hope of budging anytime soon, we abandoned ship. We didn’t save that much time getting home, but it was time infinitely more pleasantly spent. I never thought I’d be relieved to be out in the “fresh air” of Jakarta.

Normality and Grace

This week has not really been that noteworthy. I’ve just been getting back into the swing of things, giving and grading a test, being disappointed by my students’ ability to do homework over the holiday, but very happy to see them back at school. I know I’ve said this, but it’s been fun to see Indonesia anew through the eyes of our new expatriate teachers. I’m reminded how much that used to be strange to me is now normal. Things like:

Food served in palm leaves

Toilets with sprayers attached

4:30 AM prayers projected from the mosque

Riding with 14 other people in a van to the mall

Giving taxi directions in Bahasa Indonesia

Prices in the tens and hundreds of thousands

I did have a new experience of my own this week when I took an “ojek” to school. Ojeks are motorbikes for hire, but they’re not metered, so the drivers are happy to rip you off, especially if your skin is light. I’m sure that I made a lovely spectacle for the people we passed, trying to balance purse and school bag with laptop inside while holding on and riding sidesaddle in my school uniform. I guess that’s the price I pay for missing the shuttle to school.

[Even though I still got to school with plenty of time, I was a little upset with myself, mostly because I had prided myself on always getting to the shuttle on time. But bumping along on the back of the motorbike, I realized that that kind of pride is only for the graceless. And I’m blessed to be one of the grace-full. I love and need James 4:6--“But he gives us more grace.”]

Tonight Carol and I walked to an Indonesian restaurant for dinner and then to the nearby Italian restaurant to get gelato. The gelato was exciting enough (have I mentioned how hard it is to find good ice cream in Indonesias?), but they also packed it with dry ice. One piece went into the water as we were enjoying dessert at the poolside. A second piece is in my freezer awaiting further experiments, and the third is bubble, bubble, toil, and troubling in a Halloween-worthy fashion in a bowl next to me. I know: mild thrills.