March

Well I realized I haven't updated in nearly a month, so I figured it was time.

The reason I haven't updated is because I honestly haven't been doing too much. My semester break is finally over so I've just been teaching and grading papers. I teach 9 class and three different subjects - Speaking, Writing and Cross Cultural Communication (CCU). The speaking classes are fine, there are fun games and activities you can do with speaking. I love the CCU class because that's a topic that's really interesting to me anyway and the students are fairly advanced and we can have interesting conversations. I don't like the Writing classes. The students are good but it's supposed to be "paper writing" and it's just a boring subject and honestly these students are never going to use the information i'm teaching about - thesis statements and how to write a good conclusion and stuff. I'd be doing more good just trying to teach them speaking or something.

I gave my writing class an assignment to write a one page story with the prompt "lost and found." A lot of the girls wrote about what was basically domestic violence as if it was a good thing, which was disturbing to me. Maybe that's something I can bring up in my CCU class. I'm hesitant to bring it up in the writing class because I don't really know what the social norms about that are here in Indonesia. But my impression from the stories makes it seem like they believe that if a father or boyfriend hits you, you deserve it and should be thankful that they are teaching you a lesson.

I lost some weight while I've been here and people keep saying "You used to be fat, now you are more slim. Why? Do you dislike Indonesia?" It makes me laugh every time.

I think my kitten died. At least, it disappeared and we haven't seen it for over a month. I miss it.

I guess that's all that's going on right now.