I've been living in Apia, the capitol of Samoa, for about 2 months now. The holidays came and went. I spent them travelling in New Zealand. I returned to Samoa the first week of January. The new group of volunteers had another 2 weeks of training that some other volunteers and I helped out with. Afterwards, it was time to start working at the National University of Samoa (NUS).
Chris and I worked together to update the English Support Program which he introduced to the campus last year. We developed an assessment tool and a 10-week course for new Bachelor of Education students. The goal is to increase the level of English of student teachers so that they can enter the field more fluent in the language than teachers in the past have been. It's been nice to use what I studied at Gonzaga more directly. We finished giving the assessment and are in the process of starting the classes. Hopefully one more week to get students signed up and then we'll start the class the 4th week of class.
I've also been teaching an art class for first year students. It's an intro to art course and the lead art instructor has told me here biggest goal with the class is to get students interested in art so they take more art classes. So far I've been doing activities to help the students draw from observation. Hopefully next week we'll start some more "fun" projects using more than their pencils.
