First In-Class Presentation

Our first classroom visit was to one of the ‘international’ classes.  These classes are supposed to be taught in English, and there was a visiting professor from a nearby university who came to lecture.  For the convenience of the lecturer, they lectured in their subject for two block periods for one day.  For example, Monday was dedicated to biology, so students had biology for four hours that morning.  Tuesday was for math (calculus), Wednesday was physics and Thursday was a chemistry lecture.  We were told all math and science classes were taught in English, but the biology lecturer was speaking Bahasa Indonese and only the vocabulary she wrote on the whiteboard was in English.  After about 20 minutes, she walked over to where Jeanne and I sat and talked to us about the difficulties of maintaining students’ attention during such a long block.  She also spoke about students’ misconceptions in distinguishing monocots from dicots.  She said they seemed to think that any slender plant was a monocot, and she told them that the papaya is a very slender plant but nonetheless a dicot.  We discussed how this misconception can best be addressed.  She talked to us for several minutes and I think both she and the students were grateful for the break.  At the end of the period, she took attendance and then left.  It’s the students who remain in the classroom, not the teacher. 

Novi then came and whisked me and Jeanne away to separate classrooms, where we showed our presentation about Oklahoma.  In the classroom where I was, like the first class, it was predominantly female (70%) and Jeanne later said the same thing.  There is no computer in the room because each teacher has his/her own laptop and there’s just a video cable available so the teacher can plug the laptop into the projector.  The teacher who had just been in the class left her laptop and I just plugged in my flash drive.  The students in the class were the ones in charge of technology; they connected the computer, stood on a desk to turn on the projector, and brought a power supply when the laptop gave a low-battery warning.

The students were polite during the presentation, but when I got to the slide about the type of food we eat, they started oohing and aahing and I felt guilty for flashing images of food in front of them while fasting.  Little things that you don’t think of when you’re creating such a presentation!  I had barely finished and asked for questions when Novi returned and escorted me back to the principal’s office.

While there, she had a discussion with us about the impossibility of eating on campus since the cafeteria did not provide any food during Ramadhan.  She asked if it would be all right to go off campus, so we went to a nearby mall.  While we were discussing this, the principal’s phone rang and I was quite startled to hear that her ring tone was ‘Dixie’!  How's THAT for globalization?

Most restaurants in the mall’s food court were open but had temporary curtained barriers up so that people who were eating would not be seen by people who were fasting.  Probably a good idea!  After lunch, we stopped by a Carrefour store (kind of like a super Walmart) and picked up some red cabbage (for my chemistry lesson the next day) and some disposable cups (for Jeanne’s lesson with pennies about logarithmic decay).  After this, we thought we were heading back to school or the hotel but instead we drove almost to the center of Jakarta for a very special event: Hari Anak Nasional Tahun 2012 (the national day of the child).  I’ll write more of this later.