For the past two months, we, and five other Dartmouth students, have been teaching and influencing children and their community on a small island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, experiencing firsthand what the education department has taught us. It is difficult for us to imagine that the future and value of the education department is being questioned, debated, and challenged in Hanover. We have heard pieces of the dialogue, and we wanted to voice a perspective that may be missing on campus.
Our days are spent at Majuro Middle School and Marshall Islands High School, the one public middle school and the one public high school on Majuro, the capital of the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Every day we enter classrooms with no books, no windows and not enough chairs or desks for all the students, who can number up to 40 in each class. Graffiti-covered walls, the smell of urine permeating the open-air halls, the water that puddles inside classrooms -- these have become familiar to us. High school students who graduate typically leave with a second-grade English reading level. The struggle to master English is a concern, but so is the strikingly low competence in our students' native language, Marshallese. By any standards, our students and the school communities are lacking.
How do you teach a hungry kid about nutrition? How do you teach a student who lives on a 30-mile long and half-mile wide snake of an island about mountains, much less Siberia and Sudan? How do you make a child care about multiplying fractions when she spends her day in fear of her alcoholic father? How do you make reading English relevant to children whose native language has no word for "read"? How do we help our kids appreciate the information we present them, yet help foster a respect for their own culture and traditions? How much responsibility can we assume for righting the historical wrongs of the United States government and its involvement in the nuclear testing and atrocities that occurred in the Marshalls in the past five decades? And most importantly, how do we give our kids, in just 10 weeks time, the skills, the abilities, and the desire to enable them to help themselves? Every day we ask ourselves these questions and so many more. The struggle to answer them is a continuing one, and it is one that will not end when we return to the U.S.
As important as these questions are, and as much as we struggle to find the answers, we realize that they would not exist nor would we have the ability to answer them, were it not for the education department. During our time at Dartmouth, the education department has repeatedly introduced us to these issues and many more and we have spent time within Dartmouth's academic arena exploring them. But not only have we addressed these questions academically, the department has given us the space to examine them within the context of our personal lives. Now they have gone one step further in giving us the opportunity to be here and the resources to be effective while here.
Our internship has proven to be not only a lesson in teaching and in education, but in resourcefulness, flexibility, creativity, organization, cooperation, and diplomatic relations. We are using our entire fund of knowledge and all our capabilities; we have rarely, if ever, been called upon to incorporate so much of ourselves, much less our education, in one task. Our experience with the education department has been characterized by the value it places not only on traditional academic study but also on application of subject matter. Perhaps our work in Majuro is the ultimate application of what we have learned through the education department.
We feel purposeful and our days are fulfilling, and because of this we know we are lucky. Much of what we sought from our college experiences has been realized in this opportunity. Finding this sense of purpose, knowing that we have the ability to affect children's lives positively, especially kids who are in need of our concern, attention, and love, has been meaningful and will have a lasting impact on our lives.
Half of us here have futures as teachers because of our involvement in the education department's Teacher Preparation Program; for us, this experience will shape our careers and goals. But for the others, this time in Majuro has been equally significant. The things we have seen and the things we have done will return with us to Dartmouth in the spring and will be carried with us throughout our lives. We are certain of the impact this program has had on us, and we are confident of its positive effects on our students and on Majuro. What more could anyone ask of an academic department at Dartmouth?
