I'm back! I'm back!

Around mid-January my keyboard broke. I woke up one morning and realized that my g, h, and apostrophe keys were broken. For about a minute or two I thought I would be OK. After all, there’s 26 letters and like 12 punctuation marks in the English language, surely I would be able to exist without two letters and a single punctuation mark. Man, never underestimate the value of a single key. I think g is worth two in scrabble and h is worth four, but anything I wrote was practically unreadable. Once I tried typing the word “lagging” and got “lain.” Then I tried to quote someone and recognized the futility in that. It’s amazing how different something looks between quotation marks and not. And to top it off I couldn’t even explain to anyone what was going on because I couldn’t tell them my g and h keys were broken because I couldn’t type g or h. Whatever, I got a new keyboard and I’m ready to rock.

My students took the TOEFL on January 13th. Once again, I think I was more nervous than they were, particularly because this year I was completely on my own as far as TOEFL preparation was concerned. The results of my students’ TOEFLs would reflect directly on my ability as an educator. That made me kind of jittery. Of course what made me more jittery was when three of my students showed up without photo IDs… after I had been telling them for six weeks to bring photo IDs. The nice man at the door let them in anyways, even though it was against procedure. His explanation was, “Oh Marshallese are just this way.” They better not be that way when they go to college in the States or else they’re going to have some real problems.

Currently it’s FAFSA season. Marshallese students are very dependent upon the US Federal Pell Grant in order to fund their college educations. However, due to simply being way the heck out here and not being familiar with filling out forms, many students never receive a Pell Grant even though the only requirement is to complete the form. I made 150 copies of the FAFSA and accompanied them with two pages of detailed directions in order to help them fill out the application. In the end I received about 70 (out of a graduating class of 167) and maybe five of them were completed correctly on the first attempt. It never occurred to me growing up in America, but filling out forms and applications is a learned skill. I learned to look for certain fields, to understand that a four blank space with MMDD means month and date, and that I should add a zero if the month is single digits. It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that these “little” skills, or lack there of, might be just as obstructive to my students’ chances to succeed in college overseas as any lack of academic skills might be. I mean if they can’t even bring a photo ID after 6 weeks of reminders or fill out a form, how are they going to register for classes, choose a major, or file their taxes? Deep breath.

In more uplifting news, I brewed my first batch of beer. Since beer is incredibly expensive here, I finally sucked it up and tried my hand at it. The good news is that it cost me about $10 to brew 60 bottles of beer. The bad news is that it didn’t taste particularly good at the start. It had a sour after taste, which according to online beer research is the result of “wild yeast,” basically randomly occurring bacteria in the air which found its way into my beer. However, I noticed that the more I let my beer sit, the less sour after taste it had. I’ve concluded that the sour taste was the result of sugar that had not finished fermenting. Either way, I’ve got cheap beer that does the trick. I win.