A Bit About my Job

I teach senior-level high school here in Tonga, and a school called ‘Api Fo’ou College. It’s one of the largest schools in the kingdom, with over 1000 students and about sixty staff. I work for an hour and a half to three hours a day Monday to Friday (every day I have two classes, three days a week I have four). I also get a grand total of fourteen paid weeks off a year (that's "paid" for me) so it’s pretty sweet. We call it “faka Tonga” which means “the Tongan way” (a.k.a. in Canada as not working very hard).

In Form 5 History the subjects I teach are (or will have taught, by November) International Co-operation (the League, UN, and Commonwealth), Unification and Resolution to Conflict (China and Palestine/Israel), and International Relations (Tonga since 1946 and World War II). I'm not sure if I teach World War II as an example of international relations breaking down, or of relationship building to fight other nations, but anyways. Form 6 History is Origins of WWI, Origins of WWII, and the Cold War. Then I teach Form 7 History – the Pacific, and Form 7 Sociology. Form 5 to 7 is equivalent to grades 11-13.

The school begins at Form 1, and when I see students in town who are not my own, particularly younger kids, I am often mistaken for Quintus. Quintus is the other Canadian who teaches at ‘Api Fo’ou. Quintus is also African-Canadian. But, it seems, all us Canadians look alike and it’s hard to tell us apart!

Typically my students are great, particularly forms 6 and 7, with only form 5 giving me occasional cause to take some kind of action. Last week I had one of those days, but it was much more fun than usual. I had one student who joined the class a day before a test (students are still appearing, even weeks after school has started). I told him to come attempt the test next class in order to see what he’d been missing. I could already tell from day one he was some sort of troublemaker. He came the next day, and chose to fill in the test with joke answers. I marked it correct or incorrect as I felt, and added my own joke corrections to his ridiculous answers. I would later find out that he was not a new addition to the class at all, but instead was skipping a different class where he did not finish an assignment that was due. Evidently he enjoyed the joke so much that he chose to attend my class three days in a row (the day before, of, and after the test in order to get his "mark.") Foolishly, though, he wrote his real name and homeroom on the attendance sheet and was discovered "out of place" by the office staff. Still, I had a lot of fun while he was with us.

For example, he included “Iran” to his answers for the permanent members of the League of Nations Council. So I crossed out his only correct answer (Britain) and replaced it with “North Korea.”
To the question “which League country withdrew from the Council in 1933?” He answered, “John Edwards.” I marked it wrong, and wrote, “John withdrew in 1937, and the correct answer was Barack Obama.”
For the question, “What did the Abyssinian crisis prove to Hitler about the League?” He answered, “Hitler is not a man he is a monsters and is actually evil.” I added, “You forgot that Hitler sold his soul in 1929.”
Finally for the question, “name a problem you think weakened the League, and provide a historical example,” he wrote, “All people just want their freedom. Black people in Fiji are oppressed by Australia and they want freedom from the white people” (he may have thought I’m Australian, most Tongans assume this if not American). I added, “We are all oppressed by Purple people. And with your freedom, where would you get corned beef?” An aside: Pacific countries that once practiced cannibalism now eat mass quantities of Australian corned beef. An eerie coincidence...just what exactly does corned beef taste like? At the bottom of the test I wrote, “A very intelligent effort for only one day of class! You will A+ the exam!"