Teaching Indonesian...

I am on my final practicum and I am enjoying it a great deal. I am working in a great little country town. The school is well run, the staff are accommodating and helpful, and the students for the most part are engaged in the learning process. I am learning, and learning lots. Hopefully, I will be a better teacher for the opportunity and the experience.

I am teaching three classes; Modern History, Advanced English, and a LOTE class (Indonesian). I enjoy them all. However, the LOTE class raises some interesting issues for me. Most significant among these is the syllabus and the expectations of proper and correct Indonesian. The materials / content that I have been teaching is most definitely Bahasa Indonesia yang baik dan benar. Yet, herein lies part of the problem, which might be best noted as a question..."how often do Indonesians use Indonesian that is proper and correct in their daily lives?"

To be honest, this is not really a dilemma for me anywhere but of my own making and in my own head. The reality is that I have to teach these youngsters the material and content that will allow them to successfully negotiate their half-yearly and yearly exams.

Today was fun because we were doing sentence drills. It was fun because I quite often find myself trying to remember what it was like for me as a beginner, particularly in trying to pronounce the foreign words. Today reminded me a lot of that MTV advertisement that played in Indonesia for a while, "gue banget". This was almost always pronounced "gooey bang get".

What is interesting to me is that a small country town like the one I am in chooses Indonesian. What is even more enlightening is that there are students who are really keen to learn. So, hopefully, I can help them gain an appreciation for Indonesian and the opportunities that being an Indonesian speaker will open for them in the future.

Public Intoxication

Now here is a very disturbing story out of rural New South Wales.

A 9-year old boy and his two 14-year old friends were found roaming the streets of Albury (on the border between NSW and Victoria) at 01.00. The roaming the streets is not the disturbing part. The disturbing part is that they were blind drunk and the 9-year old was talking to Jesus on the porcelain telephone (Australian idiom for vomiting + there is a whole site devoted to the subject).

I am sure that there is more to the story than just the public intoxication and the puking of one's guts in the street. Yet, all the same, at 9 years old there is something definitely to be concerned with on this one.

The incident has been reported to the Department of Community Services.