Aliamanu Elementary School

I have now completed two weeks of my student teaching at Aliamanu Elementary School in Honolulu, Hawaii. I am having a wonderful experience! It is hard but rewarding work every day to keep the kids challenged and focused on learning, but I am lucky to have a wonderful mentor teacher and a wonderful group of students.

So far, I have been working with a second-grade class as well as with a fourth-grader one-on-one who is newly arrived from China. The second graders come from diverse linguistic backgrounds. My second graders speak Spanish, Vietnamese, Japanese, Marshallese, and Samoan. They all amaze me with how quickly they have picked up English! I am lucky to be working with very small groups of students. While this is common in ELL (English Language-Learner) classrooms, there are still many schools that have ELL classrooms with so many students at so many levels that the instruction necessarily suffers.

In addition to getting to know the students, I am still getting to know about public schools in Hawaii. The physical environment is the most noticeable. Very few schools have indoor hallways. They almost all have classrooms that open directly to the outdoors with sidewalks and covered breezeways that connect them. Air conditioning is also rare. Despite Hawaii's tropical location, the heat here does not usually compare to the heat and humidity of the mainland East Coast or Midwest that I am accustomed to. I guess we can thank the ocean tradewinds for that. For that reason, classrooms rarely have windows or screens for that matter. They have "jalousies," which are similar to shutters or window-blinds that can be opened or closed to allow air to flow. The nearly daily rainbows, the intermittent rain showers, the relaxed attitude that pervades is making for a very unique experience.

Because a picture is worth a thousand words, check out a few of the pictures I took of my school here.