Friday, part two

After furiously typing for an hour, I discovered when I tried to publish my last entry that I had lost my internet connection and about ¾ of the post was lost.  Sigh.  I’m quite sure I wrote something brilliant and no one can say differently.  ;)

One of the things I was surprised by at SMP 49 was the easy camaraderie between the students and the teachers.  They were laughing, joking and completely at ease, which I thought was wonderful.  I mentioned before that the students remain in one room while the teachers travel.  We did not get a chance to ask the students (away from their teachers) how they felt about that arrangement.  I’m trying to imagine middle school students in the US remaining in the same class all day long.  I’d hate to be the last teacher of the day!

After meeting with the students, we came back to the media center for an impromptu professional development about global education.  The very fact that most of the conversation was in English tells me that Indonesia has been wrestling with global education far longer than we.  As I heard at an education seminar Saturday afternoon, a new addition to the Indonesian curriculum is character education.  This is deemed necessary because of the very effective globalization of American and European cultures and not through the usual routes of movies and television but with new social media that allows students to truly be a part of non-Indonesian lives.  I think exposure to other cultures, beliefs and thoughts challenges our own and this can be of great concern to the older generation.  The minister of education, with whom we met Saturday, said Indonesians were very concerned about the younger generation not knowing or valuing their own culture.  And that this was why character education was now being taught across the curriculum.  Funny how new ideas and technologies excite the young and force the old into conservative action.  As for the outcome of the meeting, I think teachers from both countries agreed that the core tenets of global education (investigate the world, recognize other perspectives, communicate effectively, and take action/solve a problem) make learning more relevant and meaningful to students.  I think the greatest challenge comes from the ‘recognizing perspectives’ and ‘communicating effectively’  strands.

After the meeting with all teachers, we divided into subject area groups again.  The science teachers’ biggest concern was all the material they had to cover.  They kept mentioning they had ‘lots of materials’ and at first I assumed they were talking about supplies for labs (at which thought I was quite envious!) but it turns out they had lots of materials (topics) to cover during the course of the school year.  And that every subject had an end-of-year comprehensive exam, so they were very stressed about doing a good job.  They also had what we would call PLC (professional learning community) meetings and vertical team meetings (subject area only, with district and city-wide groups).  With school starting by 6:30 AM and not ending until 4:00 PM and weekly meetings (which did occur during the school day), their plates seemed very full!  I’m sure the students felt they were overworked, too!

After taking our leave of this welcoming group, we headed over to the Carrefour Mall, where we ate at a little restaurant called Bumbu Desa.  The food (ribs, quail, two types of fish, white rice, red rice, mango and peppers, assorted vegetables and spinach) was all delicious, although I’m taking my colleagues’ words for the meat dishes (they smelled enticing enough for me to consider taking a vegetarian vacation).

Our last stop on Friday was in the heart of Jakarta, which is beautiful, modern and with lots of lush landscaping around buildings.  Our destination was AMINEF (American Indonesian Exchange Foundation).  It’s actually the Fulbright exchange program, but Indonesian law prohibits any exclusively foreign foundation, hence the combined effort of US and Indonesian parties.  Mike McCoy, the director, explained the foundation’s work, they covered the logistics of the Fulbright scholars and helped Indonesian students who wanted to study in the US.  He made the comment that Fulbright scholarships in the STEM areas just went begging, and that if we knew anyone who wanted to apply for a 10 month program they were all but assured of being accepted.  Good to know.  He also told us that the Indonesian government was currently devoting 20% of its budget to education!  That was an eye-opening figure and makes me wonder what we’re dedicating to education.

After our meeting, we were given gifts of hand-made coffee mugs celebrating 60 years of the Fulbright program in Indonesia, which was a very nice gesture.  On our way back to the hotel we encountered something quite startling: a small monkey (perhaps a macaque?) on a leash that had a DOLL face mask on with blond hair pulled up into a pony tail!  The man holding the end of the leash was lounging in the middle of the median and was accepting coins tossed his way.  Traffic was slow but unfortunately sped up just as we caught sight of this monkey so I didn’t have a chance to get photographic evidence (but one of the other teachers had a telephoto lens, so he got a picture that I’ll try to snag).

This entry is really too long, especially without pictures, so I’m going to turn the tap off for now.