Chicago!!!

I just got back from my whirlwind trip to Chicago, and it started and ended with a bang.

As many of you know, I let the secret out and told Kate a few days before I flew out that I would be going to see her in a few days.  After trying desperately to recover, I finally had to admit that I indeed was coming to visit.  It was almost better that I told her in the long run, though.

I stayed with my friend Dave Woo (or Wave Doo to his friends) and got to meet his beautiful bride Grace.  They were wonderful hosts and allowed me to sleep in a spare bedroom they had.  I had to ride the L all the way into downtown and then back out a little bit again, but found it without any problems.  The ride was pretty interesting though.  About two stops into it, a man climbed on in a powder blue tanktop and had what appeared to be either homemade tattoos or tats done by an artist with the skills equivalent to me when I was four years old.  The doors closed and he proceeded to stumble around in the middle of our train because his hands were full.  In one, he held a brown bag with a can of malt liquor in it (I read the label later when he sat down by me) and in the other hand a lit cigarette.

After about twenty seconds, he raised his voice and said, "ATTENTION CITIZENS OF CTA!!!  I AM TRULY SORRY FOR THIS INCONVENIENCE OF THERE BEING SMOKE IN THIS TRAIN.  I WILL THROW IT OUT AT THE NEXT AVAILABLE LOCATION.  I APOLOGIZE AND THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION!"  He threw it out at the next stop, but little did I know he was just beginning.

He then sat down and started chatting about a fight club he was starting that night and asked a few people--me included--if we wanted to join.  It only was going to cost five bucks and you could beat up whoever you wanted using whatever techniques you wanted to use.  While it sounded enticing, I turned it down.

I met Kate the next morning and was able to meet lots of family members as well.  Saturday morning we went to the expo and got her number and perused all of the running stuff.  We didn't just watch Kate, her sister, and her mom.  There were three other people running that we cheered on as well.  Two of them were uncles of hers and one of them was a friend some of them trained with in Arizona.

This was the lead pack.  Finished in 2:04.  Unreal.

The marathon was one of the most inspiring things I've ever seen.  Some key family members and I saw everyone at mile 2, then right before halfway (13.1), and crammed our way up to a fence where the runners had about 400 meters left.  In my hour standing there, I saw somewhere around ten or fifteen people literally fall down because their bodies would not keep going.  Every time it happened, there was someone there to pick them up and help them to the finish line.  Running has always seemed like such an independent sport, but yesterday I saw 37,000 people come together to finish.

Kate finished all 26.2 of the miles!  I was and still am incredibly proud of her that she attained the goal she had worked so hard to accomplish.  She is pretty amazing.

I had to leave the hotel at 3:45 am this morning in order to make my flights.  I went to bed around 11:30 am and got a good four-ish hours.  Here is where my other story lies.

I was in the security line trying to figure out which of the two lanes would be faster.  I finally settled on one only to realize ten seconds later it was the wrong one by far.  The lady in front of me was short, late 60's early 70's, Brooklyn accent and had a husband with thick glasses.  She was bossing him around and finally pushed her things through the x-ray machine.  She then started talking to herself or her husband, I'm not sure which, about how she couldn't figure out where to go next.  With no signs directing her where to go, she started to climb up on the x-ray machine belt to go through and be x-rayed.  Someone in TSA stopped her and she asked him where they were supposed to go.  With (bloodshot, read: early) wide eyes and my jaw hanging in disbelief, I simply pointed to the metal detector and answered her question, "Where everyone else went."  She ended up sitting directly in front of me on the flight from ORD to MIA.

Many of you might be thinking to yourself, "Wow Stephen, you went down to support Katelyn and barely wrote anything about actually watching her."  I had to get all of the comedic stories out of the way first.

It constantly becomes harder and harder to leave my home.  There have been times over this four-month endeavor that have made me feel like a bit of a nomad.  I hardly have a home in Santo Domingo, yet it felt like I was getting on the plane to go home.  However, when I left, it felt like I was leaving my home at the same time.  I use that latter term not to define a certain place, but a person.  It is almost like a little game that commences upon the start of every visit, only to end with bittersweet emotions.

Regardless, I am so glad I was able to be a part of something so important.  I was not only able to support her in her quest, but I was able to meet so many family members that are incredibly important to Kate and have helped shape her into the person she is today.  It gives me something to look forward to when I get back and move to Minneapolis.

I am still terrified to move with no job, but this weekend gave me something to look forward to.  Every moment spent with Kate helps me realize the plan God has for my life right now includes her.  Meeting her family this weekend helped cement that even more than before.

50 days

Today is the fiftieth day that I have been here.

I look back on the experience so far and the relationships I've built, and it's been quite the whirlwind.  At the same time, I feel like I have missed a lot back home.  I had a conversation with another person who works at the school a few days ago that centered around how it's hard when the supporting cast of people in our lives either are not here with us or are here but are not enjoying themselves.  I think both of us are struggling a little bit in that regard.

Now on to some things that have happened in the first month.  Teaching is going well, but I'm drowning myself in grading.  It's a struggle to know how much work to assess.  I've been talking a lot with other teachers here about how grading goes against everything in education, and grades should be geared more toward just a simple pass/fail.  Why should we grade a student down when they do a quiz early on in a unit and get a 3/10 but clearly show they possess the skill and also be able to tell they will be fine in another week.  All they need is a little more practice.  Why can I not turn that assessment into something more qualitative?

Our school system is built around quantitative results.  It's hard to justify giving a pass/fail when everyone--students, teachers, parents, administrators, politicians--want quantitative results in order to gauge everyone in the process.  Everyone thinks numbers are needed to gauge the success of a student.  People think numbers are detrimental to gauge the effectiveness of a teacher.  What happens if I have brilliant students one year and ninety percent of them go on to major in biology in college, only to have artistic and non-analytical students the next year who struggle mightily in science?  On paper, my thoroughness will have dropped significantly as a teacher, no matter what I do because I will have kids who just don't understand the content as well.  And that's okay.

Any good professional educator will raise the argument of assessment changing every year depending on the students in the classes, which is absolutely true.  But if society moving to standards-based curriculum and inquiry-based instruction with the student constructing their own knowledge, then teachers should be moving to formal assessments of the benchmarks in place and nothing else.  Much of the motivation for high school students will be thrown out at this point, because so many of them are motivated by getting good grades.  One could rephrase that and say students are motivated to not fail.

My students are great, but the sense of entitlement they all feel they have is wearing on me a little bit.  My forensic science class was acting out crimes and doing an observation activity about two weeks ago and all of the skits called for the students to make some fake money.  Instead of making fake money, one of my seventeen-year-old juniors pulls out somewhere between six and twelve U.S. one-hundred dollar bills.  I told her I was uncomfortable with her pulling out that much money and she just looked at me and said, "Oh don't worry Mr. McMahan.  It's not really a big deal."  It's not a big deal because 96 percent of all the students who go to this school have access to that kind of money.

On a lighter note, last Friday was a holiday, "dia de las Mercedes."  I do not know who Mercedes is, but I'm very appreciative of her.  I ended up going to the north coast and stayed in a villa with seven other teachers about 200 feet from the beach.  The drive was about 200 kilometers and took about 3.5 hours.  We literally had a good highway for about half of the drive and then turned off to go up and over a mountain range.  The road had switchbacks up the side of a mountain and was pretty incredible.  The road was MUCH worse than this and had a lot more curves, but this is as close of a youtube video as I can find that shows what it was like:



We had a great time.  I'll leave you with a "selfie," the self-taken picture of me and the beach.  Hope everyone is doing well!!!

Rough week

This week has been the first week of school, and the first time I've ever had to start school from the beginning.  Ingraining the normal processes of school is very difficult and time-consuming.  For instance:

"The papers are to be turned into this box, but when you turn them in, you need to make sure there is a proper heading on them.  While you do that, please notice extra assignments are located over here next to the turn-in tray.  The other trays are for papers that have been graded and need to be handed back to you....."

Over and over and over.  Compound that with no actual space to hold things for them because of a certain living situation, and you find yourself in the middle of a very frustrating situation.  I still have no internet at my house except for the one spot where my 13x9" computer has to sit within a 15x11"rectangle on my kitchen counter in order to steal the internet from a person with the wifi network labeled "HOME" that works sometimes and doesn't work others.  Sometimes I am able to video skype with people and other times I receive a page in Spanish that says I need to enter my username and password.  It will magically work again about a half hour later.

I am leaving for the weekend tomorrow to go to the mountains and hang out with all the new teachers, so I don't have a lot of food in my house.  In fact, today on my way home from work I bought a pizza and a jar of pickles at a supermercado on the way home.

It would have been a smart idea to test my oven before I bought something to bake.

Silly me.  I figured that because my stovetop works, my range oven would also work.  However, after turning it on (to a random temperature, of course:  see picture.  I have the option of +, -, or five dots.  I'm guessing the middle is between 250-500 degrees....not to be too specific.)  I found out that all it does it pump out gas like crazy.  I spent the next two hours trying to figure out whether or not there is a pilot light that was out.  However, I couldn't figure out--and still can't--how to get to the pilot light.

After pulling out the range and looking at the back of it, I finally found a model number.  I proceeded to google it and found absolutely no information.  I actually found out the model number does not exist.  I even looked at the Whirlpool website for Puerto Rico, Central American, and Mexico.  The results gave me nothing.  If you can figure it out, please let me know.  The brand is whirlpool and the model number is nwf30714rq0.

If you figure this out, skype me.  I'll be up for a little bit.  I have a few pickles I need to eat for dinner while I figure out what I'm going to eat for lunch tomorrow--raw pizza?

Triple Threat

I have become obsessed with checking out the Atlantic Ocean.

Right now there are two hurricanes in the ocean heading west along with a third tropical depression forming off the coast of Africa that looks like it could become a hurricane in another three or four days.  These hurricanes have a super small chance of actually staying this far south to where they will hit the Dominican Republic.  And I find myself in this weird mindset of being deathly afraid of them, but also wanting nothing more than to have to scrounge for boards to cover my windows with.  It's a weird catch-22 of sorts.

I start school on Monday, finally, but not without some setbacks still.  Today the school was in a panic when I arrived at 730 because the ethernet cable had supposedly been cut, meaning no internet in our rooms.  Apparently someone is installing a fire alarm system throughout the school and "accidentally" cut a wire on the roof that morning.  Luckily it was a false alarm and I was able to log in and use my computer normally.  However, I am still not able to use any wireless functions, which does not bode well, especially for my forensic science class.  It's such an internet- and computer-based course that I'm a little worried we may not get wireless in the room.

I have started to get lesson plans figured out, but it's difficult.  The school is on a rotating schedule with seven periods, but I only see five of them a day.  So day one, I see ABCDE, day two I see FGABC, and so on.  This basically means every seven days of school I see each class five times.  Yikes.  It can get confusing quickly.

I'm worried about my content that I have for both classes, or lack of content.  Teaching here is proving to be quite the struggle in terms of resources.  There are very little, and I'm going to be experimenting with putting almost everything online, including having students turn things in online.  I just hope it will actually work!

Once again, as every teacher does, I worry about my content mastery of the material I will be teaching.  It's a daunting feeling knowing that I am responsible for all of these students' educations and will have a profound impact on where they go and what they aspire to be after high school.  I have the power to turn them into a scientist, or to make them absolutely hate it.  It's scary.

Meanwhile, I will leave you with this picture.  It is a little blurry, but this is the first cockroach--and I hope and pray the last--that I have killed in my apartment.  My finger is in there purely for showing the size of it.  The actual body was about two inches long, and the antennae were as long as my index finger.  It was moving pretty quickly too.  These are pretty hard to kill without pretty much breaking the exoskeleton open and having stuff go everywhere.  Let's just say I am no Bear Grylls.  I don't know how that guy does it all the time on Man vs. Wild.

I will be at school all weekend getting last second things prepared for my class websites and trying to get as much of a jump on the next four months as I can.  I am almost one-tenth of the way done with my planning.  If I can double that in the next three days, I will be very, very happy.  ¡Hasta luego!

No one said this would be easy...

The end of this week has been an epic struggle.

I feel like setback after setback has occurred and I haven't been able to really do a lot about it.  I received a key to my room roughly a week after I got here, which means that week was literally squandered.  When I received that key on Monday, I was told we couldn't log into a computer till Thursday.  When I asked if I could get online via the wireless network, I was told the wireless network wasn't set up for me yet and I would have to wait.  When I got my computer up and running--by myself without any help--on Friday, I did not have access to my gradebook.  I still don't really have access to my gradebook, but have access through the teacher's username that I'm here for while she is gone on maternity leave, which brings around a whole plethora of more issues.

I still have no internet at my house and am stealing it from someone that has labeled it "home" somewhere around me.  The signal is super weak and works about 50 percent of the time.  It works well enough to skype about 5 percent of the time.  After being told when I got here I couldn't get internet at my apartment because it required a 12 month contract, I started e-mailing the teacher about possibly splitting it, and I wanted to get a plan that would work for her.  After a weeklong struggle with that, I finally got the okay, only to find out I can't get that kind of internet because they don't have service where I live.  I am yet again wondering if I will just need to adjust to "normal" internet service meaning I will have to call people back five times per every ten-minute-long skype conversation.

We visited a really nice hotel with a gym, an awesome pool, a spa, and weekly classes that go along with it.  It's month-to-month and super cheap at only 25 dollars a month.  However, the initiation fee is somewhere between $150-$175.  It would essentially be about 65 bucks a month for the four months.  Maybe I should do it though, just so I have something to do.  It would be better than sitting at home twiddling my thumbs three weekends a month.

On the bright side, I went to Ikea today (had some swedish meatballs, too) and managed to get out with spending just under $200.  I bought some real pillows, a blanket for my bed, some hand towels, and a bowl to wash my produce in since it's not safe to eat unless I wash it with an anti-bacterial water purifier.

I'm excited to actually have a lot of prep time next week in my classroom.  I'll be able to pump out my yearlong curriculum plan and start getting unit plans and lesson plans going as well.  The beginning of a schoolyear when working with complete new sets of curricula for both preps is quite complex.

I miss my home.  I do miss Seattle and all of my friends, too, but my home has morphed throughout this last year from being a place and a set of people to a person.  Every day that passes is another day closer to being able to be home again.  If you're interested in how to support me right now, prayer always helps.

La Picturas!!!

Pictures of my time here thus far!  I wish I took more, but I am a terrible person at making sure pictures get taken.  Anyway, here is a photo essay of what has happened so far.

These are all from my time at the hotel the first night.  The pool is on the eighth floor of the hotel!!!

This is where I ate a few days ago.  A pier over the water.  It was incredible.

SQUID!!!  I did not eat this.  Because it looked gross.

These are my friends, Marc and Julia.  They have a little boy named Caiden who is SO cute.  He is two.

This is my drinking water distribution.

This is the club where all the old men meet and play dominoes every night.

This is my life so far!!!  Love you all!

First week

I finally was able to walk around SD today by myself.  At least walk around my neighborhood a little bit.

Today I went to a mall with all the other new hires--around eleven--and spent THE ENTIRE DAY trying to get cell phones.  Mine was easy because I'm not here for that long.  I bought a cell phone and an hour of minutes for 1,800 RD, which equates to about 50 dollars.  Every time I want to put more minutes on my cell, I need to apparently get a card that anyone sells--cell phone companies, grocery stores, street vendors, etc., and then put the number in my phone and I'm off.  If you have skype and I'm away for a day or weekend and you're wanting to get a hold of me, my phone number is 829-696-2700.  You should put it in as an American phone number so it dials with the 829 as an area code.  The Dominican area code is not valid and I have a different, "lesser known" one.  Whatever that means.

Today I sat down and had a cold Presidente with two senors at the closest El Colmades to my apartment.  El Colmades is very much like an American convenience store, only they sell water, beer, wine, cigars, and candy.  But they deliver it to your door.  I met two older gentlemen sitting outside of it today and struck up a conversation.  And by conversation, I mean that I understood a total of about ten percent of whatever they said.  They probably think that number is closer to fifty because I nodded yes to a few questions instead of looking confused to all of them and saying "No comprende, lo siento." to every question they posed.  I think their names were Eduardo and Andrew.  I cannot be sure though.

PS, a five-gallon water jug delivered to my door costs around 45 to 50 RD, which equates to somewhere between one and two dollars....after tip.  It's a beautiful thing.  I've been rationing my water drinking, but I'm not really sure why.  Clean water is "hard" to come by in this country, but it costs me around three dollars every two weeks.  While it may be a strange process to get it, it's coincidentally cheaper to get than clean water in the states.

I also met my super today.  Her name is Aimee.  Or Amy.  She is in her late 40's and married, and I talked to her and her husband Jorge tonight about doing dinner once a week just to talk and learn Spanish.  You see, Aimee is great at English, but Jorge wants to learn more Ingles.  Yo hablo espanol no bueno, muy poquito.  I would like to learn how to hablo mas espanol.  Hopefully Jorge, Aimee, and I will be able to figure out a night where we can do dinner every week and help each other learn a different language.

Tomorrow I am going to a beach called Boca Chica, and going to a really good restaurant called Boca Marina.  I will let everyone know how tomorrow goes.  For now, I still am missing a shower curtain rod, and wondering if I should start looking for a squeegee to start mopping the floor up.  Which one will be easier to find?  Either way, at least I have a bed to sleep in tonight.

Pray I have patience to wait till the school year starts in order to maintain a busy schedule.  Right now I feel like I am twiddling my thumbs just waiting for something to happen.