Model school, school practicum and final days of training

Swear-in was last week, on December 10th, and with the busyness of training, packing, and saying goodbye to friends and host family, I’m feeling all sorts of emotions. I’m safe at site in Nganjuk and I’m looking forward to meeting new people and becoming closer with my community. However, school is out for it’s end of semester break, soo while that is happening, I have two weeks to integrate… or catch up on the sleep deficit I’ve had from the past ten weeks. Or catch up on what I’ve been up to over here in this hemisphere…

The last three weeks of PST are what PC Indonesia calls TEFL Week, Model School, and School Practicum. During TEFL Week and Model School, both during the same week, trainees learn new techniques for the classroom then immediately put them into practice by formulating a lesson plan and teaching it to an after-school class with another trainee in their village. This took place at a madrasah, or religious school, with middle-schoolers in Manisrenggo. It also happened in the afternoon, when temperatures were at their peak, and we had just finished five hours of Javanese language class. Despite this, I was eager to get into the classroom and start utilizing all the information we had been exposed to from weeks prior.

Writing this now makes it seem like no big deal, and I was more eager than nervous to get started. I was teaching with a co-teacher, another trainee in my village, named Elisa. My one worry was learning her teaching style to best work together, to ensure we both worked well together while meeting the needs of students. This definitely took some trial and error. Each day of TEFL week was focused on one component of English teaching, which included reading, writing, speaking, listening, and vocabulary. Our first lesson focused on reading, and we were way, way, way, and I mean way, too ambitious with the language level of our students. This was one of the most difficult parts of Model School and School Practicum, because these weren’t our students. We had just met them. We didn’t know if they knew past perfect tense or if they knew how to even introduce themselves. Now I know to aim low. We made a lesson plan focused on reading a passage about what we did over the weekend. Perfect past tense (that’s I went, I saw, I shopped). Easy right? They didn’t know anything. An-y-thing. We finished our first lesson feeling defeated, although the other three pairs of trainees in Manisrenggo felt the exact same. We overshot the language level of our students. The next day, we aimed much lower and focused the week on sentences to describe yourself. I am tall. I am smart. She is kind. He is funny. The days got progressively better, our lessons improved, and we became much more prepared with classroom management.

The following week, we went to a new school outside of Manisrenggo and taught with a counterpart, an Indonesian english teacher, for the first time. At 6am every morning, we’d pile into Gina’s host dad’s angkot, zipped through the sawah, and stumbled out into the schoolyard. Hearing "Ya jamalu" blaring over the loud speakers as students trickled in on their bikes or on the back of a parent's motorbikes still makes me feel uneasy, but a bit nostalgic of those ten days.

Those ten days of teaching, observing, and being exposed to an Indonesian school were so invaluable looking back now. It was difficult working with our counterpart, who wasn’t involved as much as we had hoped. Our classroom was part of a recently constructed building, still unfinished. The concrete holding the brick walls together would get your clothes caught if you leaned against it, the floors were nonexistent, and the rectangular holes in the walls meant for windows were still reinforced with bamboo. It was also the final two weeks of the semester, so students were taking finals. (I plan to go into the Indonesian school system later in service). One of the days I also had a 103 degree fever, and taught anyway. Not a good idea, but I didn’t want to make up the require two hours of teaching. When I wasn’t teaching that day, I was huddled on a wooden bench in our small, closet of a teachers room, trying to stay awake. These minor setbacks only prepared us for the reality of education in some Indonesian schools, and we only became more prepared for life at site.

I am grateful for the hospitality of our practicum school, for the friendliness of the teachers, and the openness of our counterparts to meet four people one day, and work with them in the classroom the next day. As those final few days approached, we were reminded, and relieved, that PST would soon be over. On our last day at the school, as we funneled into the principals office one last time, we were greeted with THREE heaping cones of nasi kuning. We ate, we laughed, and we said our goodbyes to the school.

The next day was our last hub day at IAIN Kediri, the Islamic university in Kediri where our training was held. We learned a few more things about community entry, and learned about policies and regulations as a PCV. It was becoming way more real, and swear-in was right around the corner. TEFL week, model school and school practicum were probably some of the most useful weeks during PST. Finally putting everything we had learned together and seeing students excited and motivated to learn English made me be so much more excited to start teaching at my school.