I'm tardy to write about this experience but I figure it's still important to document/an interesting story...
Last week I was scheduled to teach English to first graders from Monday to Friday. The Sunday before, I returned from a trip to an Islamic boarding school in Indramayu. Unfortunately, I came back with more than just gifted souvenirs--I was very sick from what we think was food poisoning (I ate almost exclusively raw vegetables & I think that there may have been many pesticides...that happens because people do not understand the dangers of harsh pesticides). Anyways, I ended up starting my teaching stint on Tuesday, with just one class in the morning as I was frankly still quite ill. The elementary school at which I taught was very close to my house, so I can save gas and walk there and back. It is not a very large school, space wise, so there is a rotation system every day that allows for two sets of classes to use one classroom. There are a total of six classes in the first grade. Classes A, C, and E have the first session from 7:00 to 9:00. Then classes B, D, and F have the second session from 9:00 am to 11:00 am.
I ended up teaching more than the first graders because there were so many requests. To try and be fair, I taught each class in the first grade one time for 30 minutes. I had a lesson plan that had extra activities to go over 30 minutes, but the children had just finished a week of testing and said they were tired after 30 minutes of learning. My teaching style must have worn them out, too because we sang songs and played games to learn the parts of the body in English. They loved singing "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes" but none of my classes could grasp how to play Simon Says. The whole "be honest & sit down if you're wrong" concept was difficult for them to understand. They got really into singing the song though! It was cute.
It was an interesting experience but I'm not meant to be an elementary school teacher in Indonesia. It was chaos! Insufficient facilities, and not enough teachers or materials--that's what extreme corruption has done to the education system in Indonesia. It makes me frustrated, honestly angry, when I think about the education system in Indonesia. Private schools in Jakarta are touted as meeting international standards, but public schools in regular places are...less than satisfactory in my experience. They're certainly not free or secular like one would expect from a public school. The teachers at schools outside of Jakarta rarely come to class; when they do come to class they do not have an interactive lesson plan--mostly the students are lectured or are assigned homework or projects to do on their own. This frustrates me because the students always show up and they generally do their work. Hopefully all the exchange students have just had bad luck and we're seeing the worst of the school systems. It would be terrible if all the schools all over Indonesia were just as lacking in secularism and governmental support. Anyways, I enjoyed volunteering as an English teacher at the elementary school. The children could have been calmer, but I understand that they were hysterically stoked to have a bule teacher :) Hehehe
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