Changes

(Disclaimer: I'll change my mind about all this in a week.)
I have only lived one year of the last eleven in Oklahoma. That was last year when I lived with my parents and went to Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas to get my teaching certificate. I then moved back to Malaysia about 4 months ago.

Over the last few years I've enjoyed going home to see my family and friends. But I never thought it was the place I should be until the last month. It's strange in someways. I have missed so many Thanksgivings but this one I really feel the desire to be home. I'm not homesick per se. I was homesick when I left Malaysia in 2007. It's more like a feeling that it is the right place for me to be. I have desperately missed my active lifestyle from the last year...the 1/2 marathon training, riding across Oklahoma on a bike and other possibilities.

Teaching here has given me more experiences that working in the States would have. In 14 weeks of teaching I have put on a school dance, had my club put on an awareness week which included selling ribbons and performing skits, been emcee for Sports Day and next weekend we will have 200 orphans at the school for Christmas Cheer. The next weekend we will be off for a leadership camp...oh, and I forgot the conference I went to in Thailand. Whew, no wonder I'm tired. I say living overseas crams several years into one and it is doing the same with teaching. Hopefully next term I'll be running a Model U.N. club to boot.

Therefore, I am surprised by these feelings that I should be home, that I want to be home. Lots of good things are here. I keep voicing the fact I want to buy a house here. But, somewhere I wonder if it isn't time to go home, be with my family and put down roots. I really want to spend more time with my family, especially my granny.

I want to do so many thing that I so often find that no matter what I do there is a draw in the opposite direction. I would love to settle down in Bellingham one day but I don't know when and how that will occur.

All this is to say I don't know what the future holds. I love being in Malaysia and will enjoy each moment here to the fullest. I am just musing over what choices I will have to make in July. Happy Thanksgiving.

Shotgun blogging

Well, I haven't blogged in a couple of months so I thought I would sit down and write a few thoughts.

How is school?
School is good. I absolutely love my students. There are a mix of good and bad of course but I often find myself thinking what wonderful kids they are. We have been reading "Rules" in class on Fridays and have an aquarium with a few guppies. I was the organising teacher for our fall dance. I thought it went really well. One thing you have to get used to is the fact that people don't praise each other in Asia. Compliments are rare. A few other teachers thought it went well and I thought it did so I just have to be happy with that. The funny thing was that two weeks later I was emcee for the sports day and that was met with loads of compliments. I scratched my head a lot at that one. The dance was a much bigger affair than reading the placings of students in the 100m etc.

I struggle a lot with how the school is run. The last two years I worked at great schools in the states where they accepted all comers and were run efficiently. Here we have a two day admittance test and only take the best and brightest. The school is run in typical Malaysian style. That means someone comes running in with an 'important' task. You drop everything to do it only when you get it finished you find it wasn't that important. The real struggle is the amount of admin work teachers do. I have to update school folders for all my students, so the first week of school I spent 5 hours typing their biodata into a spread sheet. Now we are finishing our term and I had to write 187 1-2 sentence comments about each student I teach. I then had to write 19 more comments (one paragraph) for my homeroom students. I don't mind this but, for example, I listed an actual instance where a student gave up. The comment was edited to read 'gives up when the going gets tough'. I rarely get to focus on creating great lessons and really just try to tick off all the duties required of me in a week, doing none of them with excellence. Unfortunately I have a personal creed to do things with excellence. Dang those personal creeds!

I go back and forth almost daily on whether or not I'll teach here next year. I have always wanted to teach multiple years in a school but putting up with poor management makes me wonder if it is worth it.

Actually, I was offered a job in Texas in October. I say 'offered' but I was asked to apply which is about the same thing. I turned them down because I feel a duty to finish the year with my students here. However, last weekend I had a 'panic' attack. I was really missing my family and my former active life of running and bicycling etc. Here I work 11 hour days and don't have the support network (living with my parents) that allows me to be active. Again my sense of duty wouldn't allow me to email and see if the post was filled. But then a day will come and I will have some great interactions with students and I think "I'll never leave here." I suppose all teachers fight similar battles emotionally.

How is Malaysia?
I have always fought this problem that I have three distinct spheres: Oklahoma, Bellingham and Malaysia. I feel equally at home in all three. I love being back here. I am often taken aback when people ask me basic questions about Malaysia. I forget that I am very obviously NOT Malaysian. This time the weather has been wetter than any of the other years I have been here and it has been harder because I don't ride my motorbike in KL traffic in the rain, if possible.

Random Tidbits
I'm going to Korea over Christmas, something I've wanted to do for a long time. I'm very excited about it. I had planned on a trip to the Similan Islands in Thailand before that but I won't be making it because I have to take 5 students to a conference on leadership the weekend before I head to Korea. My school year will end on July 23 and I'm not sure what I'll do after that.

My computer hard drive crashed and I've been adding songs again. There are a few songs that I always get. I was thinking about that recently, how I always make sure they are a part of my music library. Some are (in no particular order):
Live--Lightning Crashes
Van Halen--Humans Being
Van Halen--Jump
Billy Joel--We didn't start the fire
Madonna--Vogue
Bruce Hornsby--Mandolin Rain
U2--With or Without You, Beautiful Day and Where the streets have no name
Smashing Pumpkins--Disarm, Tonight, Tonight, 1979 and Bullet with Butterfly Wings
Cranberries--Linger
Some newer ones that I just think of as entire albums
Coldplay--Viva la Vida
Parachute--Losing Sleep
Nickle Creek's first CD
Emmy Lou Harris Red Dirt Girl