I've got some catching up to do! We've been to two more schools, been taught all the ways to die slow painful deaths in our health and security briefings, and made it to our host community since my last post. I would have blogged sooner, but my fellow teachers haven't been dumping their photos fast enough, and I mostly rely on the fancy cameras to take pictures for me. ;)
On Wednesday, we visited SMA Negeri 8, a public senior high school in Jakarta.
Another lovely open air school
This school is one of the highest performing in the regency, and the walls were literally lined with trophies from national and international academic competitions.
The staff we met were incredibly dedicated and knowledgable, and the principal was very involved and supportive, with a school mission for all students to be smart, tough (a focus on building grit), and caring. It was such a great school to see! It also highlighted how the Indonesian school system has many of the same challenges that we are facing in the US. This school is extremely high achieving because admittance (even though it is a public school) is based on test scores. The result is that most of the students at the school are middle to high socioeconomic status, which leaves me with questions about why poor students aren't scoring high on standardized tests. Which are the same questions we grapple with in the US. I would love to have more time here to do inquiry around equity and access. Alas, time is short!
On Thursday, we got to visit our first primary school, and oh my, the cuteness.
That's my friend Craig in the middle. Like I said, I don't take many photos of my own
Students everywhere have been excited to see us and wanting to take pictures, but the munchkins took it to a whole new level. We were actually mobbed by kids with paper and pens asking for our autographs. I signed autographs. What world am I in? When I told a group of sixth graders that I grew up in California, they asked me if I knew Kylie and Kendall Jenner (insert eye roll here). So at the end of the day, I'm glad they have my autograph instead of any Kardashian's.
Then we went to lunch at a Padang restaurant, which is a style of dining where they bring out plates of every kind of food they have, and you eat only what you want. If you finish a plate, they replace that item with more. In the end, you only pay for the plates you ate, kind of like at a sushi boat restaurant.
Alllllll the plates (I may not have eaten the meat, but I did steal all the sauce off the meat plates)
It was a really great way to sample the local cuisine because we got to try a little bit of everything rather than choosing one thing off the menu. Some of my colleagues were wondering what happens to the food we didn't eat (spoiler alert, it goes to a different table), but I was too busy wondering when they would bring out more eggplant. It was delicious! The place was pretty packed, so I wasn't too worried about the food sitting out long and visiting too many tables. I'm also one of the least cautious of the bunch. An hour later however, when we got to the US embassy for our safety briefings, we were told specifically to avoid Padang restaurants where food gets recycled. Oh well, I'm glad we got to try it before it got forbidden! And if I were to get sick, don't worry, I wouldn't bog about it. A princess never explosively poops and tells.