Making full use of a bule?

I’m sitting in my room right now as I sweat away, hoping against logic that the power (and with it, AC and water) will come back on sometime soon. I’m not going to write about the power outages, I just wanted to let everyone know why the writing might be slightly delirious: dehydration!

I am going to use this blog for a vent session though. While it has really been going on since I arrived, there have been several instances lately that made me realize that me being here is not solely about furthering the English knowledge of the students.

“Of course not Aaron; you’re there to further cultural exchange and understanding too!”
This is true my naïve friend, but that’s not quite what I was thinking.

The last week or so roughly ¼ to 1/3 of my class time just hasn’t happened. There have been numerous reasons for this, but the one that took out a whole class was me going on a ‘socialization’ trip to an elementary school and a middle school, socialization apparently means recruitment, and of course the pesantren wanted to trot out their ace in the hole: a BULE!
Despite my sarcasm, I really have no problem with helping out on something like this. Truth be told, I kind of enjoyed them, and I really do want to help the school. Even when I was asked to, let’s say, ‘focus on the positives’ about how long I was staying and other details about the school, I was more than fine with it. Things like that happen in the US all the time, it’s all part of the recruitment game right?
What I was having problems with, and I’ve put an emphatic stop to this now, is that we actually canceled a class so that I could go on one of these trips. I subsequently sat in a classroom and was gawked at by about fifty 12yr olds. Now I know this probably satisfies the cultural exchange aspect of my grant and it probably helps the school, but at the cost of my students. I’ve become committed to my students enough that I care much more that they learn than that some 12-year old gets to go home and tell his parents’ he saw a white giant.

This eventually gets to my point: I think that schools here, not just mine after talking to other ETAs (in fact the other schools may be worse), care much more about the prestige of having a bule, than of actually making the most of my limited English expertise. I can appreciate that the schools have worked hard to get us, and it is a badge of recognition to have a true blooded native English speaker, but I actually want to make a difference in some students’ lives.

On that note a positive tangent: we have started a national competition between the 32 schools of the ETAs’ that will result in one student from each school getting to go to Jakarta for 3 days, all expenses paid. For my students, many of whom haven’t even been to Makassar, the provincial capital, this is a life-altering experience.
I’m so excited for them! I can’t help but think of when I went to my nation’s capital and what a dramatic change that produced (literally every significant thing I have accomplished since then can, in part, be traced back to that trip).
Because of that I was more than a little displeased when my favorite (and most advanced) class had half of their time with me wasted as we listened to a woman talk about dengue prevention(ok that’s worthwhile, but doesn’t need to take 30mins of class) and then decided that our classroom was the best place to entertain her in.
I decided it was better I didn’t enter the classroom because I might say something not so nice.

The other reason that there has been less than the scheduled class time is that students and teachers simply don’t show up on time. I know America is ultra scheduled, and I’ve been enjoying getting away from that, but when a class starts 45mins late?!
It’s very frustrating, and the teachers are often more guilty of being late or not showing up than the students. I find it pretty appalling how little the teachers care about the students. In some cases if the teacher has anything else to do they’ll cancel class (couldn’t they at least get a sub, or give some sort of assignment?!). This is made all the more aggravating because the students are so overwhelmed with the number of courses (19 for high school here). Apparently the Indo strategy is quantity over quality. It just doesn’t make sense to my scientific, logical brain, but I’m dealing with it (all part of the cultural exchange, right?!).

The nice thing about Indonesia is that even when I get really frustrated this is such a laid back country it takes all of about 30mins to get me back to ‘tidak apa-apa’ (closest translation: no worries).
I thank you all for sitting through that 30mins (in which the power came back on) with me, and I hope I didn’t sound too whiney or rambling.