Monday, July 25, 2011

Getting Healthy

I am going to try and be more healthy. I am quitting the vice that many of you may know I partake in, which is going to be hard but I am looking forward to the freedom that will come with it. I am also trying to make myself drink more water because you sweat buckets in this place and I need to keep myself hydrated. Also, tonight I am going to a Zoomba class with my friend. I will get back to you on how that goes...it's sure to be interesting...

Friday, July 22, 2011

Racial Harmony Day

Sorry for the less frequent blog posts, but work is busy and also probably not all that interesting to write about all the time so I figure I should limit myself to when I have something relatively interesting to talk about.

This week my school celebrated a National holiday, which is called Racial Harmony Day. Singapore is gearing up for their National Day, which is a seriously big deal here. They have a huge show at Marina Bay and people pay up to $200 for tickets to go. I keep laughing because for Canada Day we all just get some beers and a blanket and watch some fireworks.

Racial Harmony Day is partly because of some racial rioting that happened here a while ago, to try and encourage Singaporeans to embrace each other's cultures. You can imagine that with three very different ethnic groups all living together on such a small island this is an important thing to maintain. Even the Pledge which all Singaporeans take in the morning at school says:

"We the citizens of Singapore pledge ourselves as one united people, regardless of race, language, or religion to build a democratic society based on justice and equality so as to achieve happiness, prosperity and progress for our nation."

It's all a good idea in theory, and I truly to appreciate the sentiment behind it. All things told, Singapore is a much more integrated multicultural society to what we are trying to achieve in Canada. As I work with the youth here I can tell you that lots of kids have friends of different ethnic groups and there is less of a racial divide than you can see in Canada sometimes. Students take the time to learn words of each other's language and when Muslims go to Mosque, or are fasting, everyone knows what's going on and nothing is made into a big deal. The school canteen has Halal food, Chinese and Western and there isn't really the groupings that we have in Canada. Sure, there's Little India or Chinatown but even in those areas you might still find a Mosque, or a Hindu Temple in Chinatown, or a Chinese restaurant in Little India.

That being said, there are certainly still some problems. A teacher I work with who is from Mauritius was called the N word by a student and I had a student use it in my classroom too. Kids here don't really understand the term, but it's still pretty shocking to hear it.

Ads for apartment rentals still contain "No Indians" or "No Malays" because landlords have preconceived notions of people of those groups.

It's going to take more than dressing up in the clothes of another ethnic group for people to really get an understanding of each other, but you do have to hand it to Singapore for trying.

It felt weird and awkward to be consciously dressing up as someone from another culture, in Canada I would have felt like a huge idiot, but here people complemented me on the clothes I bought in Little India.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

First off I'd like to give a big shout out to my awesome Mumma, whose birthday is this week! Happy Birthday!!

It's been a hectic week and I haven't had time to come on here and update all of you on how things are going on this here island nation, so I thought it being Saturday night and me not being out with my friends I ought to update you all.

These past two weeks I have been working with the Drama Club again on a competition that was held today, the National Literature Festival's book trailer competition. It was the first year that the drama club was able to send two teams and I'm proud to say that our teams got second runner up for My Sister's Keeper and Gold for Emily of Emerald Hill. I recorded them on my iPhone and have posted the videos of their performances on youtube, I will put the links at the bottom of this post.

Work has been hectic and with everything being thrown at my it's been sink or swim. I would characterise my current state as treading water in the storm. There is lots of marking, what with me having 160 secondary two literature students alone and you can imagine how many pages of essays that makes whenever I assign anything.

This week we had Catherine Lim, a noted Singaporean author come to the school and discuss her work. Our lesson study group, which is a group of teachers who take on a research project each year to examine different teaching strategies or other pedagogical methodologies in a group, has been working on ways of teaching students Irony and Catherine Lim uses a lot of irony in her work. I really suggest some of her short stories to teachers interested in teaching irony.

It was great to have her at the school and many students were enthusiastically inspired by her and her experience as a writer. She also gave me some awesome tips that I've been putting into use with my students that when phrasing HOW irony works it is helpful to use "yet" or "the very." This works like a charm teachers! My hint of the day.

On the social side of things I am making more friends and spending more time with the ones I have, when I have it which isn't often. I am going tomorrow night with a group of ex pat teachers to see Harry Potter which I am excited for. Also I am planning a trip possibly to Hong Kong for the break in September with my friend Iain who taught there for 15 years as well as a possible trip to the UK over the Christmas holiday to see my Grandmother and visit London.

So in short, things are good, I am feeling much more secure in my place in the world now that I'm teaching and my students make me laugh every day so it's a joy to go in to work, even when they are naughty. Enjoy these videos of my drama kids, I'm so proud of them!!

Emily of Emerald Hill (a Singaporean play that I am currently teaching to my sec 2 students, this performance won the gold. I sadly missed the first couple of seconds when recording, but you can still see the great work they put in)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8YlJ0GMxFU


My Sister's Keeper (this is a book you probably have heard of, or the movie. About a girl whose family wants her to donate her kidney to her sister. This performance won second runner up)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nMkDa7iFZc

Monday, July 4, 2011

Ben's Visit (Better Late Than Never)

I finally have a bit of time on my hands as today is yet another of Singapore's long weekend Mondays, so I thought I should take the opportunity to finally post about Ben's visit.

He arrived on a Friday night into Changi Airport and I took the MRT to the airport to meet him. For some reason I was super nervous and for the first few minutes when we were finally together it seemed strange. I think you spend such a long time thinking about someone and when they are there in person your mind has to adjust to what they are really like.

We came to my flat here in Tampines and got some McDonald's Delivery, which became a nightly ritual. It was really fun showing him around and bringing him to all the places I tell him about on the phone, like the hawker centre where I get my dinner every night and the waffle place I get my Kaya waffles. Ben loved them and now understands why I rave about how tasty kaya is. He even brought some home with him.

For a big chunk of his visit we stayed at my friend's flat while he was in Borneo so that we could stay out of the way of my roomates and their elderly father who is staying with us now.

Aside from enjoying our time together, it was really cool to see Ben be able to use his Chinese. I remember one day when we went to a hakwer centre and he ordered in Mandarin from the hawker uncle and the entire place went quiet as people turned to look at the ang moh who had just used such perfect Chinese. People loved talking to him about China and how he learned Chinese (he taught himself) and it was great to see him so in his element. People are still telling me how perfect his dialect is and how impressed they are.

It turns out that the girl who does my nails and doesn't speak English is from Putian, the same place Ben lived while he was there and they spent the whole time I was getting my nails done chatting.

In terms of the fun touristy things we did, we spent a few nights at Marina Bay looking at the skyline and gambling in the casino. We went on the Singapore Flyer, to the Science Centre to see Snow City and to Sentosa one night to check it out. We explored Little India and Arab Street and I started to get an actual sense of where things are in relation to each other. We also spent a lot of time shopping as there are so many malls here. While he was here we also ate a lot, we had French, Mexican, Chinese, Thai, Japanese, Korean, Western, Italian, Indian and Malay food and we enjoyed it a lot. One night we tried out Mario Batali's restaurant in Marina Bay Sands and it was fantastic. The lovely thing about Singapore is the array of amazing food you can find and I can tell you I gained a few pounds while he was here! He also came into my school one afternoon while I had my drama students preparing for our Founder's Day presentation and they are still talking about his perfect Chinese accent and how "hot" he is. I can't say I disagree.

We also spent a night at a great hotel on Orchard Road called the Quincy which has a really cool pool that looks out over the city. Ben's mum sent us the cash, so thank you Ruth Anne! We kept saying how much we wanted to live there because it was so nice.

It was also great to introduce the guy I talk about all the time to my friends here and to meet Ben's friend Jocelyn who moved to Singapore after she taught with him in Putian. I think it was really cool for them to catch up and get to see each other and it was really nice to meet another of Ben's friends.

Overall, it was just super relaxing to have a holiday together and spend some time chilling out. I read some books, we watched a lot of ER and slept in every day. Not having to think about the 12 hour time difference or co-ordinate phone calls was a wonderful break from the reality we have both been living for the past three months.

Saying goodbye was really tough, and I won't soon forget the pain I felt as I watched him walk away from me and back to my flat to gather his stuff and catch his plane while I had to return to work. But I'm really grateful that we had the time together and it's amazing to me that so soon after I left I was able to see him again and have him experience the life I've built here. I feel a lot less lonely since he's been here and my room feels more like a place that we've shared and less like a fortress of solitude. It helps that he hid about a dozen little notes with sweet messages on them all through my stuff that I am still trying to find.

Neither of us knows what is going to happen in the future for us, or when we or if we are ever going to be able to be together but having the memories of his time here with me is something I can't put a price on.

Saturday, July 2, 2011

White Magic

This week was my first week teaching. It will be a week I remember for the rest of my career and in all likelihood I will look back and shake my head at how little I knew. However, I can say that tonight when I got home from work I felt more tired and more satisfied than I have possibly ever felt.

This week I went into a class and an Indian boy and his friends were making strange hand gestures at the back of the class. Being from Canada, I told them to stop doing obscene things and to focus on the class. They giggled and kept doing what they were doing. I soon discovered that what I thought were hand gestures resembling sex were magic tricks. The Indian boy smiled at me when I told him how good he was and told me he is "Black Magic" at which point I lost it laughing.

The hardest part of teaching for me are the gaps when you don't know what to do with your class. Usually this comes down to poor planning and this is the part when kids start acting up. Not having much of my teaching materials yet I spent a lot of this week putting my improv skills to the test and finding ways to engage and occupy my students while I tried to figure out what exactly I should be teaching them and as they say here  "how".

The biggest thing though of course was our school's Founder's Day which was today. Monday I said goodbye to Ben on my lunch break, and took my broken heart back to class to pull myself together and carry on being a teen ranger. Tuesday through to Thursday I found myself at school until 7 or 8 pm working on rehearsing our performance that I wrote and spent the last month rehearsing with our drama students.

The most stressful part were the myriad of last minute changes suggested to our script by the head of aesthetics and our vice principal. However, I chose to have a positive attitude and with the changes the show became something really exciting and enjoyable.

I can proudly say that this day was a success. The drama students really took a lot away from the experience as they shared with me today afterwards and it shone through in their performance. Many people in the school approached me to say how impressed they were with the work that was done and I will tell you that I am incredibly proud.

It was an insane week, full of many setbacks and challenges, but it wouldn't be theatre if it was easy and at the end of the day I can sleep tonight knowing that I taught something this week. I accomplished what I set out to do. In this one day, I consolled a girl who was crying about her relationship with her mom and sent her home with strategies to talk to her about their issues, I figured out a million tech problems, I stretched students to challenge themselves and prove that they were up to the task at hand, I showed the leaders at my school that I can constructively use criticism and keep my eye on the purpose of being there (which is to teach our students something above all else) and I went through the agony of watching my kids perform knowing that once they were there it was up to them to save themselves if things went wrong and watched them do just that.

It could have been a terrible week, I could be depressed, heartbroken, worn out and lonely. But right now more than anything I can say I am proud. My student might call himself Black Magic, but goddamn it, I'm White Magic.