Computer classes and younger students

Computer classes for children in preschool and kindergarten is a topic that can raise some tempers in certain quarters. I have taught computer classes for children as young as 3 who would troop in to my computer lab twice a week for 45 minutes for …for what? The children were too small to see the screen properly without putting cushions on the chair. None of them could read or write. Why were they in computer classes? The answer is, of course, to give their teacher a prep period.

Students at preschool age should be working on a multitude of other tasks more appropriate for their age and developmental level than sitting in front of a computer monitor. I do think that small children should be introduced to computers, but by their parents in very short spurts. When my children were small, they would sit on my lap and listen to a Talking Book and then we’d go out and play.

As far as kindergarten students, computer use should be integrated in with other classroom activities, and should involve only short periods of time. Placing 15 or 20 or 30 students in a lab with one computer teacher for 45 minutes twice a week is basically a waste of time as the small ones will spend a significant part of each period waiting for help from the teacher when the computer freezes or they accidentally turn the program off or they get lost in their program. You know that a computer period is too long when students ask how much longer before the period is over. Activities need to be short and focused

When I was a classroom teacher and teaching second grade, my students loved going in to the lab to work because they were continuing on with something that they had started in the classroom. During those years, I had a rather large first grade class of students that would come in to the computer lab, but I loved having them there because their teacher had a plan for what he wanted them to accomplish, and he had done the groundwork so that I, as the computer teacher, wasn’t creating lessons unrelated to what they were doing in the classroom.

As more and more international schools insist that candidates for teaching positions be computer literate and familiar with integrating technology in to the regular curriculum, life will be easier for the computer teacher who has classes of younger students. The ideal situation, in my opinion, is to have mini-labs for primary students where the computer teacher goes in to the classroom and works with small groups of students on specific tasks with clear goals related to their daily activities. The computer teacher and the classroom teacher work together during this time rotating students using a center model for instruction. This would be a good time to bring in a parent volunteer or two to work with the students as well. In this type of collaborative activity, the kindergartner is developing computer skills while working on other areas of the curriculum.

I’d like to hear other opinions about this issue.

Slang words and the foreigner

I was scrolling through new entries in an expat forum that I follow recently and came across a thread called Gaijin, Farang, Gweilo along with a poll asking how expats felt about being called by one of these words. The poll which had 30 respondents showed that 63% didn’t mind being called by one of these words. However, on other forums, I’ve come across some rather nasty comments about our (we expats) local hosts who call us farangs or in Indonesia bule.

I first heard the word bule when I was living in Papua in Indonesia. Little Papuan kids would scream it as I drove through Timika (a town in the south of Papua). I always found it rather amusing, but I never heard an adult call me a bule until I moved to Sumbawa. Kids and adults both will occasionally refer to me as a bule. I generally take it in stride although as I’ve mentioned to some of my friends including ones who use the term that if I was to refer to them by their skin color they would probably be offended. The response is often what term would you use?

Hmm, I’m not really sure about that. I’ve heard Indonesians from Java and Bali (who can be just as racist as any other group of people) refer to Papuans as Orang Hitam (Black people) or Orang Primitif (primitive people) or Orang Desa (basically a hick, a rube, a farmer – to use some equivalent American terms).

In Bali, foreigners are usually referred to as tourists. These days if some Balinese refers to me as a tourist, I reply, “I’m not a tourist, I’m a bule.” That generally gets a laugh.

I don’t mind what people call me when it comes down to it. What I do mind is how they treat me, and I have to say that with the exception of some government officials, I’ve always been welcomed by people that I’ve met in Indonesia whether they’re rich or poor, young or old. And that is one of the reasons that I’m still here after 18 years.

Habits

Habits. We develop these habits as we age. When I quit drinking and smoking, I had to give up sitting on the veranda watching the sun set every evening because it was connected to scotch and Marlboros. Today my gardener asked why I haven’t been over to the garden – across the road from the house – since I came back from Bali. My reply was that my wife isn’t here. That habit of coming home every afternoon from school and going to check on the fruit trees and the goats is part of my non-smoking, non-drinking behavior. My wife isn't here so I am on a different system.

I did notice today that a number of ripe papayas had large holes in them. My first thought was that it was the monkeys. But, the gardener said that bat have been coming in at night and eating the papayas. For an old city boy, it’s an object lesson in the difficulties of having a farm – pests. The monkeys and the bats are our big problems, but they have to live as well, and the problem is coming to terms with them. Su won’t let me shot them because she’s absorbed a lot of the multiple religions that have crossed this island over the centuries. I regularly watch Indonesians shoot gorgeous parrots, hunt protected dolphins, capture protected birds of paradise, but she insists on not killing any living creatures even poisonous snakes and bugs and worms. We captured a millipede one day whose bit is excruciating and she insisted that I put in a bottle. She dumped it in the jungle across the road all the while speaking to it about how she spared its life and it should just go about its life and not bother us again. Sometimes I feel like Su is a hippy transplant.

Children leaving home

Dealing with kids leaving home. This is an issue that is going to be something that I’ll be dealing with probably until I’m dead. I made it through the first time when my eldest son left home although I could have dealt with it better. I’m trying to deal with things rationally and coolly this time around. It helps that I have a wife this time to talk about all of this with. The first time things were complicated by divorces and career issues; this time it’s a bit different – if for no other reason than that I’m almost twenty years older and a lot slower.

Mercedes is a first year student at SMA Lab in Singaraja. An Indonesian teacher friend here told me the other day that it was an outstanding school. Mercedes seems to like it from what she says on the handphone. She wants to be a doctor so she’s taking an extra biology class as an elective. I asked her the other day if she was making friends (knowing how important that is to kids around the world, but perhaps even more so for Indonesians who are constantly perplexed by the amount of time that I spend alone (more on that for another post). She said yes she was making friends including a few girls that she knew when she was in elementary school in Bali four years ago. Being perhaps an overly protective dad, I asked her if they were all girls, and she asked if it was ok is she had friends who were boys, but not boyfriends. Hmm, ok Dad how do you deal with that? I thought for a moment and replied that yes it was ok. But (ah, the Dad but), keep focused on your studies.

So she’s pretty much on her own. She lives in our townhouse in Singaraja. The house adjoins what we call the Beach House, and she has an aunt and uncle and three little rugrats living there, and she has another aunt and uncle just 50 meters away down the street. Still, it’s a big jump for an Indonesian kid from a fairly tightknit family. The sensitive one as my oldest sister would say.

So this year I’ll be living in three houses on two different islands – keeping an eye on the end of my teaching career and my family here in Sumbawa, and keeping an eye on my high school daughter in our houses in Bali as she starts off her higher ed career in Indonesia. Higher ed because graduation from high school is still not the norm in Indonesia – mandatory schooling here ends at the end of junior high (and many tragically don’t make it that far due to economics).

Next year, we’ll all be back in Bali; I’ll be able to keep an eye on the kids and help with their homework, and Su will be able to start her new business to keep her occupied once she no longer has to run a big house, a garden, and a crop of kids and animals.

Oh, animals. That’s been one of the questions about how I’m going to deal with moving to Bali. The townhouse is just that – it has about the same space as a small New York townhouse which means no ducks, chickens, geese, goats, and dogs. The plan (another one of those plans) is to get a baby python here and raise it (I’m assuming that it will respond to raising like my old boa constrictor did when I lived in Berkeley, California) and keep it in the small courtyard that we have in Bali.

Back in School

Just watching the Yankees get pounded by Tampa Bay. The Yankees always seem to be on ESPN over here (I’ve probably said this before), but it’s baseball anyway. If I had a chance to come back, it would definitely be as a ball player. One of the things that I am willing to pop for next year when we are living on a restricted retirement income is a subscription to Indovision or the new company that I came across in Bali a few weeks ago. The idea of being able to watch baseball every weekend without having to worry about getting papers graded sounds like heaven. And, with an internet connection, I can just get online to check on players’ stats when I need to. Yeah, definitely heaven.

So the first week of school has passed by somewhat quickly. It was good to see my homeroom class once again after the four week break. I’m going to miss teaching, but not the other stuff that goes along with being a teacher. It’s going to be an interesting year.

On the retirement front, I’m “running the numbers” (as I call my compulsive playing with my proposed retirement budget) again, and things look fairly good. I still have to make a major saving effort this last year of work, but if we can do it, we should be able to live fairly comfortably on the retirement money. My wife thinks that we can rent our house out in Sumbawa rather than sell it, and she’s pushing me to take that route. Financially it makes sense if we can get what she says we can because we can stretch out our first retirement fund from lasting two years to lasting three and a half which means that we can stretch the second retirement fund out to three years from the original plan of two years which means that we don’t have to use the third, and last fund, until I hit the age of 66 instead of 63 which means that by that time we could have reached the stage where our interest and my Social Security will be sufficient to last indefinitely. So this is what I spend my morning breakfast time doing everyday before I go to school. Of course, it would be easier if someone just gave me a couple of hundred grand, but it wouldn’t be as much fun.

There’s a lot of excitement about the “early” retirement – certainly from me, but from friends and family as well. On my part, I suppose that it is comparable to the feeling when I know that I’m leaving a job in one country and moving to another. The sense of the unknown with all the mystery, hope, fear, and risks jangling the nerves and heightening the senses. I can remember how keyed up I was before my first move overseas back in 1989, and then again in 1999 when I moved to Pakistan, and again in 2003 when I moved back to Indonesia, although that was a bit less because it was returning to “home.” This time, I’m as jacked as when I moved to Pakistan. Bali, where my other home is, seems just as exotic as Pakistan once did.

I spend a lot of daydreaming time doing the “next year at this time, I’ll be …” One of my friends replied the other day to my comment that I had so much to do in Bali during my three weeks there recently. He said, “Yeah, but you were there for three weeks, next year it will be forever.” Right, good point. I need to constantly keep that in mind, although my plan of announcing to the faculty and my students that I’m retiring is to put me in a box, so to speak, so that I can’t get cold feet at the last moment and back out thinking about the security of a nice salary and comfortable surroundings and doing what I love doing. I need some new challenge and some juice to get these old bones moving.

Playing with Feedburner and Settings

One of the great things about having a vacation at home in Bali is having access to the internet. So I found out about rss, podcasting (which I already knew about but had only tinkered with),feedburner, and xml. Now I think that I have things set up, but I'm not sure how long I will remember all this when I get back to work.

I'll be leaving tomorrow. In fact, by this time I'll already be in Lombok crossing the island with a view of Rinjani.

Still in Bali

I know that I said that I would write more about family today (and maybe I will), but the sunsets have been so spectacular lately, in addition to the weather. I do the sundowners thing every sunset these days. It's just so wonderful that I can't let it go by. I make an effort to be at home to see the sun set every afternoon. There's a scene in an 80s movie that I really liked about just thing. The movie is about Chicago as well which makes it even better. Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines are Chicago cops that want to retire and run a bar in Florida, and when they get there they're wandering around the pier and everybody is staring up at the sky and they ask what they're doing and the reply is watching the sunset. Yeah, precisely why I want to retire.

I just read some articles on the cnn online site about retirement for my generation, and I sure as hell don't want to work until I'm 75. The goal is get out before they carry me out. Jim Morrison said it as well as anybody – trade your time for a handful of dimes.

OK some family stuff. The photo is three of my children and two of my nieces and a cousin. The only one really smiling is daughter #2 who loves photos and attention and is the outgoing and troublesome child of the group. My wife and daughter #1 were out in Sumbawa getting my daughter's graduation certificate so she could register for high school here, and I was the cook and responsible adult so we went shopping. Since the car was in the south of the island, and I wouldn't let the unlicensed teens drive the motorbikes, we took a bemo (small public transportation), It was a lot of fun for everyone except for my son who found it somewhat embarrassing to be in a public bemo. The younger kids have never heard the stories about my somewhat tenuous financial situation when I was younger. So they got to hear it today. Ahh, getting old.

podcast test

This is a test to see if my podcast is working, and I can get a link to it from here.

Family in Indonesia

Well, the foot is better, and I can walk without much pain. So I decided to dig all of the weeds and dirt out of the ...hmm, not sure what to call it. It's this area around the balcony that acts kind of like a flower box, and for me, living in the kampung, it's as close as I'll get to my gardens back in Sumbawa. I dropped all the dirt off the third floor balcony down on to the little patio we have just off the kitchen. Su was rather irritated as it was mud and splashed all over the walls and windows. She calls it the landslide. I told her that I would clean it tomorrow when it dries. It was lots of fun.

Now a link to a blog a few days ago about family. As I was in the process of dropping big mud balls and weeds down to the ground, one of my brothers-in-law saw me mucking around and came up to see what I was doing.

“What are you doing?” he says somewhat obtusely.

“Cleaning the flower box.” (I know where this conversation is going.)

“OK, I'll help.” (He starts looking around for tools.)

“That's ok you don't really need to help.” (I'm hoping that he won't so I can slip into a work/meditation state.)

“Oh, I want to.” (Rude of me to tell him no.)

So he set off to find some tools (I was doing this with bare hands.) While he was gone, one of our neighbors from Sumbawa who dropped in on their way back to Sumbawa from a visit to his wife's parents in Java appeared suddenly from the stairway, and we went through the same conversation. So it ended up that the three of us were digging all the weeds and dirt and cigarette butts out of the flower box and dropping them downstairs.

So here's the point, and I'm writing this so that I remember it in the future when the family irritates me over one thing or the other. Family members and neighbors will drop what they're doing and come and help you if they see you starting in on a project. They don't make a big deal out of it, they just do it. Sometimes it's really hard, dirty work, but they cheerfully do it anyway. They don't expect something for it, it's just part of being a family member or a neighbor. I don't know how many times this has happened over the last 18 years. (There are good and bad points about this actually, but I'll get to them tomorrow.)

The main point today is to remind myself that when I do something like take all of them to the Treetop Adventure and pay for all of them and they don't thank me, it's just part of being a family member or a friend. They just expect me to pay because I have money and they don't. The reciprocity (that good old word from Anthro160 with Stevie Garbarino) is that they do stuff for me where they provide what they can – their labor or local knowledge (my brother-in-law from Denpasar who constantly drives me there from Singaraja) or their time (running to shops doing errands for me).

'Nuff said for today.

Family life in Kampung Bugis

So before I fell down the stairs, I had spent the entire day tearing apart the storeroom which was filled with rusty tools, broken toys, old newspapers, love letters from before Su and I were married, and assorted other junk. I enlisted all the little kids and they dragged all the detritus of 18 years in Indonesia and deposited them in the living room of the beach house (which badly needs repairs). Then I started on the library which was full of broken toys, 80 Asmat carvings, and a thousand books. I sprayed all of the statues and put them in the empty storeroom for later during retirement when I hope to sell a few on Ebay.

I cleaned all of the bookcase, put the books back in order, and then we started the hard work. We had to take the statue cases and get them down from the second floor library to the second floor of the beach house. A brother-in-law came by to see what I was doing and got involved. He called his son over, and another of my brothers-in-law and a neighbor. We put a rope around the bookcases that held the statues and lowered them down to the ground floor, then carried them around the block to the beach house entrance, and finally stored them outside the beach house until the second floor is cleared of junk so that we can stick them up there for Su to use next year when she opens another baking business.

It was after all this that I slipped on some oil and fell down the third floor stairs. So I have two badly swollen, cut and bruised feet. Why is it always my feet? Actually I’m fortunate that I wasn’t more seriously hurt; I could just as easily have broken my neck so I guess that it just isn’t time to go yet.

More later on family in Asia stuff.

some fourth of july lessons

July 4, 2007

Watching the sunset from the balcony this evening. A friend called to wish congratulations. I had a difficult time figuring out what the congrartulations were for. I got it eventually. Maybe I have been in Asia a long time. I remember shopping for my wife for some specialized medicine in Singapore 15 years ago or so. I can still remember the route from the hotel to the shop. But then again, I can still remember being at a Cubs game on the Fourth of July, so I guess the remembrance game washes out.

I’m kind of laid up today. I fell down the third floor stairs last night. Kind of embarrassing as I just told I friend who was commenting on the steepness of the stairs that I have never fallen down them in 9 years. Great. Now I have two feet that are somewhat the worse for wear. The lesson for today is not to spray antique carvings with insect repellent while you are walking down steep stairs.

A Teacher's Vacation

Yesterday was my birthday and today was Mercedes’. She turned 16 today. My god, how hard to believe that I have a 16 year old daughter and a soon-to-be 36 year old son and a grandchild on the way. Time turns quickly.

So sixteen is no the big birthday for girls here – 17 is and Mercedes is already coming up with wild plans for her 17th birthday. Today was fairly tame but highly enjoyed by all. I took the kids to the Bali Tree Top up in Bedugal. I’ve been there before when I brought my students on a field trip to Bali almost a year ago, and I figured that the kids would really enjoy climbing around. It turned out that they did, but not just them, six of the adults took part and they didn’t want to stop. It was a rather expensive afternoon, but the kids will remember this for a long time.

I spent all of the time filming or doing ground control work so I didn’t get a chance to do this again. Maybe next time.
So far this vacation is fairly on schedule for what we wanted to get done in a relatively short period of time. Things done: 1) We enrolled our eldest daughter in a good high school. If she does well, she should be able to get in a good college; 2) We got our second daughter a new American passport so she’s good now until she’s 18 and needs to decide on what citizenship she is going to take – Indonesian or American; 3) We bought the eldest daughter a new handphone so she can keep in touch with us, and perhaps more importantly, we can keep in touch with her; 4) We retiled the second floor bathroom and put in a new toilet; 5) We put a new toilet in the downstairs bathroom; 6) I fixed the phone connection on the third floor (after waiting six months for the family to get a repairman to do it); 7) I’ve finished updating half of the cyberbali site; 8) I answered a lot of back emails; 9) We showed our guest, friend, and handyman around part of Bali; 10) We had a birthday party for Mercedes and Rebecca; 11) I bought Sam a new handset for his PlayStation; 12) We bought Meredith some new Barbie things; 13) I managed to see my old friend once so far. Not bad for the first week.

We have another 12 days to try to finish up the rest which includes: 1) renewing and adding to our retirement time deposit account; 2) opening a bank account for Mercedes and getting her an ATM so we can keep her supplied with money; 3) fixing two windows in the bathrooms; 4) fixing a window on the third floor so that it doesn’t fall off during the rainy season; 5) opening a haj account for my wife; 6) opening student savings accounts for three of the kids; 7) talking to a visa agent about what my visa options are next year when I retire; 9) finishing the cyberbali update; 10) finishing some social studies lessons for next term; 11) reading the PEW study on American Muslims which I downloaded and printed; 12) rereading the Nine Parts of Desire and write a review; 13) learning about the physical requirements of setting up a network; 14) and there’s some more but I don’t have my plan book available at the time.