Murder in E-6

So I came up with a great idea last week which involved disguising a lot of thinking and learning as a fun activity. These are the kinds things I am always racking my brain to try to come up with for lessons. The idea was to stage a fake murder and then the kids would have to identify the killer based on the DNA extracted from a hair sample left at the scene. They needed to use techniques called DNA fingerprinting and gel electrophoresis which, in actuality, would be impossible to do here, but I made adjustments. Just briefly the way DNA fingerprinting works is that DNA samples are cut up into pieces but since every individual's DNA is unique, the number and size of the pieces are different for each person. Then gel electrophoresis separates these pieces by size and creates kind of a graph and unknown DNA samples can be matched with known individuals.

 I wrote out a scenario in which a student got murdered in my room late at night and there was a list of suspects, each without adequate alibis who had already been investigated and interviewed. A summary (written by me with some help from Amber) of backgrounds of all the suspects was also provided. I also created a murder victim out of construction paper and blocked off a corner of my room with orange tape on which I wrote "CAUTION Crime Scene."

Here's the intro: It started out as a normal day on February 1, 2012. Ms. Abby arrived at school at 7:55 am, signed in at the office, picked up a bulletin, and then headed to her classroom, E-6. The usual Vailoa students were sitting outside her classroom. Then she got out her classroom key. But wait…something was wrong. The door was slightly open. Weird. She pushed open the door the rest of the way and stood in shock as the door banged against the cabinets. One of her students lay in a pool of blood in the back corner of the room. She slammed the door and ran to the office to report the incident. But oh no! All the police were off island. Wait! The biology and chemistry students can use DNA fingerprinting to solve the murder! After some initial investigations and interviews there were 6 suspects:

I continued with a detail description of the suspects which included Amber, Quinn, our principal, another science teacher, and two students. Here are descriptions from Amber and Quinn:

Ms. Amber:

Unbeknownst to most teachers and students at LHS, Ms. Amber has a history of violent behavior. She’s spent time in jail for grand theft auto and assault with a deadly weapon. On the night of the murder she stayed at school late supposedly helping students study for the SAT. However, there were anonymous tips that she was seen lurking around classroom E-6 around 8pm. When questioned she denied any connection to or knowledge about the murder, but the interviewer noticed her unwillingness to meet his gaze and her shifty eyeballs.

Ms. Quinn:

We all know Ms. Quinn as the happy-go-lucky, yet slightly aloof, English teacher who enjoys running and baking cookies. But could it be under her innocent exterior lurks the devious mind of a killer? No one smiles that much unless they’re hiding something. She claimed to be at the basketball game at FMS but was conspicuously absent during the fourth quarter, sources say. Her whereabouts are unaccounted for between the time of 7:30-8:30 pm. As a runner she could have easily made it to LHS and back in a short amount of time. How well do you really know Ms. Quinn?


I'm pretty sure some of the vocabulary was lost on them, but I found it amusing and interesting when I was writing it so that counts for something. Their favorite part was the paragraph I wrote about the principal but I decide not to post that on the internet...


I then made up the DNA sequence for each of the 6 suspects and wrote it on the blackboard. They had to collect a "hair" (piece of black construction paper) that the murderer left at the crime scene and turn it in to me to "run through my lab." I then provided them with the gel electrophoresis results from the hair. Then they had to figure out which of the suspects' DNA matched the hair DNA they got at the crime scene. That's were all the work and thinking came in, but luckily most of them were so wrapped up in the whole thing that they didn't notice. Some even stayed after the bell to finish figuring out who the killer was! All in all it was an excellent activity.

Tide Pools in Vatia

Last Saturday I went snorkeling in the tide pools in Vatia. Vatia is located on the north side of the island and to get there you have drive up a giant hill and then back down the other side (this is the same village you have to go to to hike up Mt. Alava). It's unclear whether buses actually go there or not. However, during orientation when we all went on a bus tour of the island, our bus broke down when we were almost to the top of the hill. We had to donate our water so that the bus driver could use it to cool off whatever was smoking under the hood. So anyway we were glad that our friend Dave, who works for the Coast Guard and has a truck, was coming with us and could drive.

Getting ready to climb down the rocks!

To get to the tide pools you have to stop before the village of Vatia at a great look-out spot where there is a sign for the National Park. It's a short hike down to the tide pools from there. It's pretty steep and basically at the end you're just climbing down the rocks. It's a little bit tricky to actually get into the tide pools because periodically big waves crash over the place where you have climb down the slippery rocks into the pools. If we had known how deep it was we probably could have just jumped in instead of climbing down the rocks. We all made it into the tide pools eventually. We waited for a big wave to come and then tried to make it down before another one came. A couple came while while we were still on the rocks so we just had to hang on and close our eyes.

 Once we got into the tide pools, the snorkeling was pretty cool. I took a lot of underwater photos, but only some of them turned out well. (The two photos of me are courtesy of Lauren). I saw an awesome blue fish and got a couple ok pictures but I couldn't get as close as I wanted to.

The cool blue fish

We also saw this cool bivalve mollusc but we weren't sure exactly what it was. It would open and shut if you waved your hand in front of it. I took a video of Lauren's hand making it open and close, but for some reason I couldn't upload it onto my blog :(

Malota

The beach at Malota

It’s been a while since I’ve updated, but a lot of stuff has been happening. On the 15^th was Amber’s birthday, but since it was a Sunday we couldn’t really do much to celebrate. Luckily we had the 16^th off from school for MLK day. Some students were easily convinced that we didn’t have school on Monday so that we could celebrate Amber’s birthday. Another student, when asked “Who’s Martin Luther King Jr.?,” shouted out, “He’s the guy who freed the slaves!”

So anyway on Monday we went to Malota (emphasis on the last syllable) to celebrate. Malota is a village way on the west side of the island—so far west that it’s actually on the north side. The buses don’t go that far and a lot of the road along the way is still damaged from the tsunami. I think the road actually ends a little ways after Malota. Basically almost all of Malota is owned by one family who are friends of our landlords so we got to have a barbeque and go swimming on a private beach with our landlord’s family, the family who owns the beach and a bunch of World Teachers who came along to celebrate. All of us teachers packed into the back of our landlord’s truck for the ride. We were probably quite a sight—a truck full of 8 palagis. I would say the 3 of us Leone teachers have almost attained celebrity status on the west side of the island. Everywhere we go we are followed by a chorus of students yelling, “Hi Ms. Quinn, Hi Ms. Abby, Hi Ms. Amber!” and enthusiastic waving.

Our landlord and his granddaughter

All the kids tried to fit in one kayak

The weather was not the best with the off and on rain, but it was still a fun day. All the little kids enjoyed swimming and playing in the sand immensely, in a way that you just don’t anymore after you reach a certain age. It’s fun to try to see the world through the eyes of an 8-year-old sometimes. We had tons of food including pineapple, rice, potato salad, bbq chicken, turkey, gravy, pork, sausage (no Samoan meal is complete without at least 3 different kinds of meat), pumpkin bread, cookies, and Quinn and I brought a cake. It was quite a feast.

Of course at school the next day I had several students bombard me with comments and questions: “I saw you on Saturday!” “What were you doing?” “Where were you going?” “That’s my village!” “Did you see me? I waved.” People don’t usually go any farther west than Leone unless they live in one of the villages because it’s mostly just houses and beaches. So a lot of students saw us who don’t normally see us on weekends and they were excited that we got to see them and their villages. 

Just on a side note since I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but there is a lot of village pride in AmSam. When introducing themselves the first thing people will say is “My name is ________ and I’m from the beautiful village of _______.” And, yes, they almost always use the word beautiful. Village loyalty is the cause of most of the fights that take place at school. Even if you are not personally involved in the disagreement, you have to go defend the person from your village. Students from different villages have staked out certain “turf” at school. Different areas around the campus belong to certain villages and that’s where those kids will hang out during lunch or before school. The area around my classroom is the Vailoa turf, home of the 2Ala boys. Quinn’s area belongs to Aloao (aka Alaska) or the Snow Boyz, and Amber’s classroom is in the Taputimu turf, home to the Tap Town Riders, who are also a rap group and have personalized t-shirts. It’s also pretty common to get the name of your village tattooed somewhere. It’s mostly the boys who are part of these “gangs” but the girls hang out in their designated turf as well. I use the word “gangs” loosely because they aren’t like what we would think of as gangs in the U.S. They seem a bit tamer. Yes, there are a lot of fights, but to my knowledge there are never weapons involved and people are never killed or even very seriously injured. That being said, it’s still a problem, and, in my opinion, an unnecessary cause of violence.

In other news, all the World Teachers took the Praxis test on Saturday the 14^th because it is a requirement for the WorldTeach program. For those who don’t know, the Praxis is a standardized that teachers need to take in order to get certified. There are also Praxis II tests which focus on certain subjects, kind of like the SAT and the SAT II. Since WorldTeach paid for us to take the test, it was a good deal for the people in our program who want to continue teaching after this year. But since I have other plans for the future, I saw it as just kind of a waste of my Saturday morning. It also doesn’t really make sense to have us take the test in the middle of our teaching year, but I think next year WordTeach is changing their policy and requiring volunteers to have taken and passed the Praxis before arriving in AmSam to teach.

I’m also continuing to play soccer with the Leone village team, but right now it’s the futsal league instead of regular soccer. The soccer season ended mid-December. Our team lost in the semi-finals and then lost during the consolation game so we ended up getting 4^th place over all. As I’ve mentioned before, futsal is basically just indoor soccer on a basketball size court with only 5 players on each team. The season doesn’t start until February but we started practicing at the beginning of January. I’ve made some friends on the team and it’s a nice break from doing school stuff. We practice at the school that’s about a 5 minute walk up the street from my house. Occasionally there are little kids who ride their bikes around or chase the balls for us. One of the little girls who is in 3^rd or 4^th grade decided to befriend me and likes to talk about random things. The other day she caught up with me on the way to practice and this is how our conversation went:

Me: “Hi!”

Her: “Are you a tomboy”

Me: Laughter….”Why? Do I seem like a tomboy?”

Her: “You walk like a boy.”

Me: “How do boys walk?”

She proceeded to demonstrate the “boy” walk and the “girl” walk while I watched.

Her: “Kids at school call me a tomboy.”

Me: “Well it’s ok to be a tomboy. Ok I’m going to go practice now.”

At school things have been a little crazy since the 2^nd semester started. For one thing, I keep getting kids added to my classes. A few are kids who just needed to rearrange their schedules but some are kids who have been moved up from the lower level. But this doesn’t really make sense with science since the upper and lower levels for the same grade don’t necessarily correspond. For example, lower level freshman take General Science, while upper level freshman take Physical Science (the class that I teach). So I’ve gotten more kids in my Physical Science and Biology classes because of that. And there are only 2 Biology class (I teach both) so they were already big and I’m getting ALL the new kids. Right now my 6^th period has 31 kids. I have 22 desks so kids just have to sit on the floor. I put in a request for more desks but realistically I don’t have much hope (my fan has been getting fixed for 2 months now). I only have one class in which kids don’t have to sit on the floor. I got a handful of new kids in my chemistry class just because I’m such a popular teacher J This is flattering, but is still stressful. It was already difficult to do lab activities and now it’s even worse. Last week I had my chemistry and biology classes extract their own DNA from their cheek cells and then look at it using microscopes. It took me a while to get all the materials and dig out test tubes from the abyss that is our chemistry closet, and it was stressful for me to be the only one monitoring 25-30 kids doing this activity, but I think it turned out ok. There were a few kids who got lost in the shuffle, but I think the majority of student really enjoyed the activity and thought it was really cool.

The school schedule has also been messed up to make room for Samoan Day practice which is scheduled for February 10^th, although inside sources tell us it will mostly like be pushed back a couple times because kids aren’t ready. During a usual schedule we have 6 periods every day, but now the schedule is we have 5 periods Monday through Thursday and 4 periods on Friday to allow for extra practice time. As far as I know during Samoan day each of the classes will perform traditional dancing and singing. I think it will turn out to be pretty cool once it all comes together. A lot of the kids hate going to practice, though. Amber and I got into trouble for harboring fugitives in our rooms while they were supposed to be practicing. These are kids who have said they aren’t going to come to school on Samoan Day anyway. I feel bad for some of the students I have who have lived in Hawaii or California for most of their lives and don’t speak Samoan. It would be difficult to learn the songs and dances while it comes pretty naturally to all the other students. But anyway I’m excited to watch all the kids perform when the actual day rolls along.