Education Ministry Panel Discussion and Cultural Dinner

Time and a slow internet connection makes comprehensive descriptions of all that we have done and learned challenging currently.  In the interest efficiency, enjoy the videos without my narration just now.

Meeting with Indonesian administrators and Directors 
from the Ministry of Education



Student from Bali performs 
a Balinese dance

Heather represented the
American IREX TGC cohort
with a word of appreciation.

MAN 4 School Performance

Student performance from SMPN 49 School

SMPN 49 School, Ministry of Education, and American TGC.



Jakarta Sends Me Off in Style

The whirlwind of today has left me breathless.  Lack of sleep may also have something to do with it.  It's Saturday here.  I still can't sleep through the night and find I'm up around 3:00 a.m., so I catch up on emails, Facebook friends, and blog posts at that time of day.  After a brief breakfast, which included a new-to-me item called dragon fruit, we boarded our bus and headed off to an amusement park of sorts.  Taman Mini Indonesia Indah was built as a way to increase national pride in 1975.  It includes replicas of typical houses, temples, churches, and mosques from different provinces and islands.  This is a place with the essence of a Disney theme park, but it was eerily empty today, as it is Ramadan and most people are home fasting.  With no clue about what to expect, it really worked well to just let this experience unfold. 

The beauty of the park made for some colorful photographs. 

 Getting into the pit with a komodo dragon may be the craziest thing I've ever done.  To put your mind at ease, the handler was just off to the right. 

 

After a brief break, TGC participants attended a cultural dinner.  Students and teachers from local school performed for us.  While the telling of that event is important to me, I'm exhausted and need to pack for my trip to Surabaya and then on to Mojokerto tomorrow.  Bear with me.  The tale will unfold.



School Visit - SMPN 49

Day two in Jakarta was full.  We visited a local public school.  This is the school at which our Indonesian facilitator, Lilia, teaches.  It was quite an honor that staff and students came to school to meet with us.  It wasn't a regularly scheduled school day.  Ramadan is beginning and many Muslims are beginning their fasting.  More about Ramadan later. 

American and Indonesian Teachers' Group Photo

Public School SMPN 49

These middle school students warmed up to the group of four American social science teachers with a bit of prodding.  They were very kind, and would find that they have a great deal in common with some American middle school students.  They like music (One Direction), basketball, soccer, volleyball, spending time with friends, believe they have too much homework, and care about pleasing their parents.  :)  What's that you say?  Of course American students like to please their parents.

This student reads results from a brainstorming session.  The task:  "Write down everything you already know about the United States in three minutes."  A future blog post will deal with the results.  This is part of my focus while here.

Converse for both boys and girls are part of the required uniform here.

West With the Night

Beryl Markham's West With the Night is one of my favorite books.  It's been years since I read it, though, and I hadn't thought of it until yesterday.  I think it was yesterday.  When you cross both the equator and the International Date Line, yesterday gets complicated.  With the sun long gone before my flight from L.A. began, we were chasing it around the globe at well over 500 miles per hour.

Flying primarily in the dark for hours, dawn came slowly.  The surreal feeling of perpetual night turned my thoughts back to Markham's book.  We were headed west with the night, too.  I'll have to read her book again to see if the title is a metaphor.  We checked into the hotel last evening after negotiating the airport Customs line and traffic through this megatropolis.  Yes, Rusty.  It's crowded!  Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, has an estimated population of 9.7 million.  It seemed to sprawl on for miles as we made our way through the city to our hotel.  I look forward to today, our first day of meetings and workshops. 

The view of Jakarta from my hotel room

Could Be Over the Rainbow

Finally!  It's my turn.  During the course of the spring and summer, I've followed the journeys of my colleagues in IREXs TGC 2012 program.  Cohorts of ten or eleven teachers each traveled in turn to Ghana, Morocco, Ukraine, Brazil, and India.  The final 2012 trip begins today. Fellow teachers from California, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Utah gather in Los Angeles by this evening to launch our 20 something hour flight over the Pacific Ocean.  It feels like stepping off a cliff and hoping I'll end up somewhere over the rainbow.  

Good-bye TJMS. 

Hellooo - airplane seat.  We're going to be spending a lot of time together, so let's get things straight, right from the start.  1)  I like the aisle seats.  2)  Need sleep.  3)  Need sleep.

Below is an overview of my route. 

A close up of arrival at Jakarta and then the hop to Mojokerto where my host school is.

The Small Beaded Bag and My Jolly Green Giant

"'When you say you've got the Cloak, and clothes...' said Harry, frowning at Hermione, who was carrying nothing except her small beaded handbag, in which she was now rummaging. 'Yes, they're here,' said Hermione, and to Harry and Ron's utter astonishment, she pulled out a pair of jeans, a sweatshirt, some maroon socks, and finally the silvery Invisibility Cloak... She gave the fragile-looking bag a little shake and it echoed like a cargo hold as a number of heavy objects rolled around inside it."

—Description^[src]

The relevance of the need for a small beaded bag like Hermione's is finally clear.  Ah, that there could be such a magic bag in the muggle world!  For weeks my family has put up with scads of papers covering our kitchen table, mountains of indescribable objects with ambiguous and just-in-case purposes littering the floors of rooms in my house, and the back of my head as I work on my computer.  My daughter has even taken it upon herself to tell me when it's time to call it a day and head to bed.  Once my face appears in the bathroom mirror, and I begin to wash away the grime of the day, I could swear I see a faint bluish-green glow emanating from my skin (too much screen time). 

 

 

In my defense, reading the blog posts of my TGC colleagues who have and are currently traveling and teaching in their respective countries takes quite awhile.  It's IMPORTANT!  Call it research.  Moreover, working on my cultural presentations on California and its educational systems takes TIME. 

 

 

Preparing materials without knowing exactly how many students, educators, and hosts I will meet, what resources will be available, AND with the goal of keeping my suitcase within the airline's weight guidelines, is, I'm discovering, a matter of prayer, hours of strategic planning, and diligent list-making.  The first practice packing today revealed that, if I fit all the souvenirs and gifts into my jolly green giant of a suitcase, then I don't have any room for clothes.  Hmmm.  Everything back out.  Tomorrow I'll try packing clothes first.

There are but three and a half days before I catch the first leg of my flight.  GULP.  Must.  Be.  Ready.  Will.  Be.  Ready. 

All of this...

...has got to fit in here.  Sigh.

Jolly Green Giant

I sure could use that small beaded magic bag.

Mistaking Indonesia

In the spirit of Curtis Keim's Mistaking Africa:  Curiosities and Inventions of the American Mind, a book I read before my trip to Senegal in 2010, I am determined to approach my trip to Indonesia by dropping any preconceived notions about its people and culture.  That's difficult to do.  For one thing, I am consuming reading material and have watched multiple videos in an effort to be prepared and to demonstrate my heartfelt interest in learning about the country.  If I heed my own classroom admonitions to my students, I'll remember that sources are written with a degree of bias; some greater than others.  For example, I love the PBS Globe Trekker series.  Its videos about Indonesia are very interesting and informative, but remembering that the show's producers likely edit out the mundane and opt for clips of its people and places that seem the most surprising and different to its (GT) audience, I've got to assume that there are more similarities between the U.S. and Indonesia than depicted in the videos.  Keim suggests that "Americans learn to understand Africans as they present themselves in all their diversity -- as "others" who are in fact not so different." (Gerhardt, March/April 2000)  I hope to learn to understand Indonesians as they present themselves, and discover the stories that are not, in fact, so different than mine.

A visual example of different perceptions, and sometimes misconceptions, can be seen by using Wordle.  Wordle is a cool e-tool that uses words or phrases submitted to configure a word cloud.  The words that appear larger were submitted many times.  Words that are smaller were suggested fewer times.  Amy, an English teacher from Massachusetts who traveled with me to Senegal, had her American students brainstorm words they thought of when they thought of Africa.  She then interviewed African teenagers and had them do the same.  After using those words to create word clouds, the students could see some similarities and differences in perspective.  I wanted to see what would happen when I posed the same task at my school.  See what you notice.

Amy's American students' brainstorm

African students' brainstorm

My middle school students' brainstorm

Besides Americans misconceptions about Indonesia, I wonder what myths I'll be able to bust that Indonesians believe about Americans.