Mad-Mid Year

Midyear has come and gone, and now I am looking at a stretch of 4 months left. But, before I can look forward too far, I want to take a glance back at midyear. As Fellows, we look forward the halfway point so we can reunite with each other and basically get a recharge. I'm fortunate to have just about the best team of English teachers and all-around-swell-folks that exist. This year, we met up in Madura, an island off of East Java, to do a outreach with Dr. Jonnie Hill's university. She organized an outreach for pre and inservice teachers in Madura based around the topic of using traditional songs and games in the English classroom. Our welcome dance - Madurese style:

Jonnie asked us to come up with our favorite traditional American games and show how they can be adapted for the classroom. Being that I could only think of games like hopscotch and SPUD (played this a lot with my cousins), and given the fact that I teach police officers - an environment that doesn't immediately lend itself to silly games - I left my presentation to the last minute to come up with something. Luckily, I have some friends who are far more creative than I, and from them I was able to take away the American road game favorite - Madlibs. With that and some funny ice breakers - thank goodness for summer camp counseling - I was set. Two days before, I wrote up madlibs for some traditional American (this part is debatable) fairy tales. I was thwarted in the beginning when my first group of participants had never heard of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and their language proficiency was pretty low. On the spot, I decided to act out the simple story.
It was a smash hit!
Not only did I win their affections for wild hand gesturing and character voices, they got it. They made some really hilarious madlibs, and it was wonderful for me to just sit back and watch them giggle in their groups as they reinvented Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood. We talked about the educational value of reviewing and reenforcing the parts of speech and the possibilities of making their own madlibs out of traditional Indonesian stories.

We were only on Madura island for one night, but apart from the conference, we were  able to sample some of the local jamu - a traditional herbal drink. I wrote about Jamu before when I took a jamu tour in Jogja, but Madura is famous for being the source of it all. It is also famous for having 'sexy' jamus. We had to investigate. We found a little road-side jamu shop within walking distance from our hotel, and we bellied up to the bar. I decided to go with the milder 'muscle' healing jamu, while my more adventurous counterparts took half muscle healing and half sexy jamus (with raw egg!). We waited and decided to all shoot it down at once. The problem with this was that they stuff was so awful that gag-reflexes required more of a sipping in-take. I was the most disappointing, taking a good ten minutes to finish off the nasty stuff. It may have been my skeptical mind, but my foot didn't feel any better for it.

After Madura, we traveled to the small, mountain town of Batu. We had rented a villa overlooking the village below and some pretty spectacular cloud-ringed mountains. For two days, we bules did what we do best, equal parts goofing around (see exhibit A - Dr. Jonnie Hill utilizing our pulley system) and sharing our projects from the first half of the year. For two and a half days I was encouraged my my colleagues, their commitment to their students, and all they are making happen in their corner of the world.

After returning to Jakarta, I had a renewed spirit. I even took some time to meet up with my young friends at the Access classrooms (the groups Loreto and taught swing dancing to before), and do the madlibs with them. They were even funnier. Taking enormous crocodiles to grandma's house...hee hee.