The Resource Room

For two weeks now I have been working at a small school called St Cecilia’s co-teaching seventh and eighth grade reading and spelling with a Jesuit novice called Patrick. This has been wonderful, the kids make me laugh and they seem to listen to
me. And Patrick’s meticulous planning makes everything that goes on during those two periods remarkably smooth sailing. And with only a few falters such as my inability to give a convincing prayer at the start of class or work out how the faculty toilet flushes everything has been fine.

Complications occurred however on the matter of me teaching my own subjects. At one stage, I could of ended up teaching science. Considering that I had dropped Science at the beginning of year eleven and hadn’t really taken it seriously since year eight, I found this difficult to swallow. At another point I was going to take over Social Studies, much more favourable to my humanities flavoured taste; however the majority of the Social Studies course consisted of the history of Micronesia, of which I was certain the students would know more of than I do. I eventually ended up teaching a subject with the abstract title of ‘study skills’, which seems to defy description even of the people who teach it.
The one thing I was certain I was teaching was music. The first time I met Caroline, an American volunteer who teaches Maths at Cecilia’s, was on a sideline at a Cecilia’s vs Xavier soccer match. I was introduced as the new guy who was teaching there.

“Oh cool,” she said, “what can you teach?”
“I dunno,” I replied.

At this moment a long line of possibilities entered my head, from Ancient languages to basic psychoanalysis. It arrived, rather bluntly at a conclusion.

“Maybe music?”

It was an odd choice for me. There was no doubt I could teach it, I’d played instruments longer than I could remember and had helped teach my brother as well. But I had conflicting feelings about music since I knew what a treble clef was. I loved playing but loathed practising. I adored composing yet found theory about as enjoyable as removing my own pancreas. My music teachers were some of the best teachers I ever had, yet my time with music had also revealed a litany of eccentric weirdos who should be locked up, from my tyrannical Primary School bandmaster to the androgynous Nazis of the World Youth Day orchestra. I wasn’t sure I could teach a subject that I feel so conflicted about.

But I understood why I wanted to teach music on this island. The first Sunday mass up at Xavier blew my mind. The boys who lived in the dorm provided the music. There weren’t booklets of sheet music or pages of lyrics or even an overhead projector that I associate with mass music back home. Instead they sang the songs a cappella, breaking into three part harmonies with no directions whatsoever. Everyone on this island can sing and what’s more, can play my instrument of choice, the ukulele. They are all unbelievably musical, but they look completely lost at the sight of five-lined paper. Teaching music on this island was going to be the sort of opportunity I probably would not see again.

And so, with that moment of slight indecision, I ended up being the music teacher at St Cecilia’s. Of course, it still needed to be approved by the school, time was still needed to be made for me, and certain elements needed to be smoothed over. But by the beginning of last week it was settled that, at the start of the new quarter than began after Easter, I would teach eight grade music. And so I spent the week planning. And in order to plan, I had to actually find music.

I began by asking one of the nuns. I have had a life-long respect for nuns, they have an odd way of knowing exactly what is going on. It’s probably one of the perks of being married to the creator of the universe. I approached an old Chuukese nun who seemed to run a large proportion of the school’s affairs from a table in the teacher’s lounge. She opened up a room next to the teacher’s lounge that was dark and musty. As my eyes grew focussed to the light, I saw that the entire room was filled with books. It looked like the mother of all garage sales. She propped the door open with a piece of wood to let the light in and left me to my own devices.
It became clear to me that the entire contents of the room were donated to the school. Some of these boxes were even marked by the group that donated them, mostly community groups or other schools in America. It was very clear from the outset, however, that most of these donations were a failed venture. Whilst there were some extremely useful looking piles of textbooks the majority were clearly donated without any sense that these books were destined for a small Elementary and Middle school in the middle of the Pacific. As I looked further and further, I started to develop a list of favourites in my mind. They included...

> How to Program Your Atari Computer (circa 1980)
> How to Make Money in Local Real Estate
> The History of the American Negro (circa 1970)
> The Christian Approach to Sexual Education (circa 1972)
> A variety of ‘shock fiction’ novels from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s (with tag-lines such as ‘I am your regular all-American girl next door, addicted to alcohol at seventeen’)

And my personal favourite, a music teaching program on vinyl records.

Despite spending a day foraging in the twilight of that room, I was only gifted with a series of music textbooks for a program clearly designed to get children to hate the subject of music. I spent the next day working through the music shelf in the library. The contents of the shelf were...

> SEVEN books of hymns
> One book of nursery rhymes (circa 1962)
> One outdated music textbook (circa 1973)
> One biography of David Bowie

I made a bet with myself that I would go through all of the books and leave the Bowie biography as a treat at the end. I began with the music textbook from the seventies. I am afraid that you readers will never be able to appreciate the book in the flesh, but to give you an idea, think interracial preteens in matching sweaters representing time signatures. Oh yeah. The highlight was a double page collage of pictures entitled ‘The Music Teacher’ wherein a middle aged man with mutton chops in a suede suit and a paisley shirt undertook various activities with teenagers dressed in the fashion of the day in what was then considered music class. I showed Caroline this and said that this was exactly the kind of music teacher I wanted to be. She told me that while she would be impressed if I could grow the mutton chops, western culture had already messed up the island enough without tan suits and paisley shirts.

I only made it half-way through the first hymn book. It blew my mind. I had previously believed that Anglicans had consistently the most boring hymns of all the Christian churches. The Anglican hymnbook is nothing compared to the mind-numbing blandness of the Mormon Church’s hymns. If I had to endure that once a week I would demand multiple wives. I gave up on the book of nursery rhymes when I realised that a song entitled ‘America’ had directly stolen its tune from ‘God Save the Queen’ (the anthem not the Sex Pistols song). I was so disgusted that I refused to read it any more. I spent the rest of the day reading the David Bowie biography to make myself feel better.

The third day called for the final frontier. It was a room next to the library, they called it the Resource Room. It was perhaps more aptly described as the ‘dump everything that looks vaguely useful’ room. I asked the nun for the key. She handed it to me, looked me in the eye and said simply, “Good Luck”

Oh how I looked.

I looked until it hurt to look anymore.

I levelled mountains of miscellaneous textbooks. I searched caverns of teacher’s guides to every possible form of mathematics humanity is yet to discover. I saw the word literacy so many times I felt unwell. At last, my eyes fell upon a box, the binding was fading. It read...

Music...

Of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints.

“Bloody Mormons” I shouted to myself, “there aren’t even any of you on this island anyway.”

And I collapsed in frustration behind a pyramid if textbooks.

I woke up at lunchtime. It’s actually quite hard to tell when it’s lunchtime because the younger years seem to run around playing no matter what time of day it is. But
when I spotted my eighth graders outside I knew for certain that it was. I gained my composure and walked across the room to the door, preparing to spend a good half an hour eating a peanut butter sandwich, talking to a couple of students and generally feeling sorry for myself. I turned the knob, pressed against the door, and realised to my upmost dismay that I had been padlocked inside the resource room.

My first thought was “who would actually want to padlock this room? What are they afraid of? Are the Mormons going to come and steal back their mass books? Is there anybody on this island who would actually want to read about basic algebra so badly that they would steal from a school?” After this series of rhetorical questions passed my mind, I then realised, with a touch of horror that I could actually be here for a very long time. I had not seen anyone else enter the room the entire time I have been working at the school. If there was any form of campus security then that was the first I knew about it. I wasn’t even sure if I was going to spend only one day before anyone would check the room, I would have to rely on someone noticing me missing and I had only been on the island for two weeks, that wasn’t exactly guaranteed.

Rather than resigning myself to this fate, I went up to the window to see which of my students I could possibly contact to get me out of here. Outside I noticed a particularly amiable eighth grader named Ratul. Ratul was a plump little guy with an odd haircut and a stupid smile that never seemed to leave his face. He said “yeah man” in an almost identical manner to a friend of mine from high school and we’d already created a secret handshake. I decided he was a pretty safe bet to get help.

“Hey Ratul!” I shouted a little bit pathetically out the window.
“Mr Joe? ”
“Hey Ratul, I’m stuck in the resource room. Go tell Ms Caroline I’m here.”
“Yeah man.”

Ratul ran off, presumably to find Ms Caroline. I waited several minutes to be rescued, but there was no sign of either of them. I later found out that this delay was due to my accent, for what Ratul had heard was “Her Ratul, I’m stuck in the resource room, DON’T tell Ms Caroline I’m here.” He ran off, quite happy to follow my orders but a little puzzled as to the bizarre variation of hide and seek we were playing. This, however, got me no closer to rescue.

It was Jerry, a local Chuukese teacher who also taught eighth grade that eventually found me. He was walking into the library when I pleaded to him. “Jerry, Jerry, I’m stuck, get me out.” Whilst about equally bemused as Ratul before him, he pulled out his keys and gladly freed me from the educational Bastille I had been stuck in. And as I walked into the fresh smell of outside, I thanked him for his efforts and shelved my plans for a battering ram made out of Mormon hymnbooks. And I was a little more determined to teach music at St Cecilia’s.

The Seven Year Itch

By far the greatest moment of my first week at Xavier was the moment I was given the keys to my office. This moment did not occur on the first day of my time here and in fact only occurred about four days in. It started with Father Martin’s entry into the faculty staff lounge. The faculty staff lounge, despite the term faculty staff lounge, is really just used by the American volunteers and us Australians. The Jesuits, bar one or two of the younger novices, rarely if ever make any appearances there. The Principal walking in meant that something big was about to happen.

At this stage, the occupants of the lounge were indulging in what seems to be the primary activity of the volunteers here, playing annoyingly simple games whilst waiting for the hideously slow internet to load. At the time, the game that was in vogue was called ‘Super Text Twist’, which involved forming as many words out of a certain sequence of letters as humanly possible. The fiery passion with which this was played had astounded me upon first arrival. Randy, my fellow Australian who hails from Riverview, had a particular aptness for the game and at the time of Martin’s arrival was furiously typing into the computer as the clock in the bottom right hand of the screen approached zero. When it did, Randy snapped back his head in disappointment and became immediately aware of Father Martin’s presence.
The priest held up a set of keys. Randy smiled, as if this entire conversation had progressed telepathically. He stood up immediately and looked at me. I had to come to. And wordlessly the three of us exited the lounge and began walking down the hall.

We walked into a section of the school that I had never entered before, where the walls seemed thicker and with no windows letting in any natural light. I later found out that when the power goes out (which is a daily occurrence) that this section of the school is pitch black, even in the middle of the day. The school is a converted Japanese signal station, and such quirks are rife throughout the building. It is, for interest’s sake, completely bombproof, a point highlighted as we walked through a metal door about as thick as I am. The priest stopped at an innocuous wooden door, turned to look at both of us, and inserted the oldest, brownest key into the doorknob. He smiled, and turned.

As he opened the door and watched our eyes widened, he simply said “Boys, your office.”

It was gigantic upon first sight, the white walls and green tiled floors seemed to extend into an absurd gargantuacity that reminded me of Alice in Wonderland. It was twice the size of any of the other volunteer’s offices, which we had envied while we had stuffed our work into the corners of the teacher’s lounge. It had a row of book cases, with one shelf full of missals but the rest empty for us to place our books that we had brought from home (between the two of us we have quite a considerable collection). There was a window overlooking the school’s lawn that bathed the whole office in beautiful natural light. And best of all, two antique desks in the far corner of the room. After a quick round of scissors, paper rock to decide who would get the larger one (Randy won) we sat back behind them and contemplated the satisfaction of calling this office ours.

We made plans immediately. There was a fridge, we would have drinks. There was enough room for dancing, we need a disco ball. If we could hook up a sound system... oh the possibilities. We told Sami, the chief partier of the faculty, about our new office.

“Ah yes, that was the party room.”

And with a strangely poetic look into the distance he followed up.

“The parties will return to that room.”



This was the high point of the week. The low point was what followed quite quickly as we returned to the faculty lounge to report back what we had seen. We described the size, the light, the parties, the location, everything. We were babbling almost incoherently. At this point Lydia, one of the Americans who taught literature (and had a passion for Sylvia Plath which gave TJ and I no end of pleasure) turned to us and broke our poor little hearts.

“Oh that room, I know that room, that’s the scabies room.”

Of all the things you don’t want your room to be called, the ‘scabies room’ must place around the bottom of that list.
“When a kid in the dorm had scabies we had to put him in isolation. And we put him in that room.
“Are scabies infectious?”
“Incredibly.”

This all seemed to convenient to be true. However, the Americans have a generally limited capacity in understanding straight-faced humour. Tom had reported to me that you have to go “Jokes” every time you employ sarcasm otherwise they just think you’re weird. I then asked Sam, a burly Math teacher who was also dorm moderator, about the room.

“Oh yeah, the scabies room. You should be alright though, Scabies is only infectious for up to four months.
“When was the kid in isolation?”
“December.”

After that, the room lost some of its shine. We worked there, but we didn’t move much stuff in.

I checked scabies on Wikipedia. It seems pretty nasty. The article told me that the symptoms of scabies (known as the seven year itch) take two to six weeks to show after infection. It then had a picture of a Norwegian AIDS patient with scabies that almost made me vomit.

So I guess I’ll just have to wait 2-6 weeks.

And I’ve switched to medicated soap.