Institute gives teachers overview of CNMI history

Fourteen teachers from Saipan are scheduled to complete today the 2011 Teachers Institute sponsored by the NMI Council for the Humanities.

The Teachers Institute is a bi-annual program that gives teachers an overview of CNMI history, from the first human settlement of the archipelago 4,000 years ago to the social, economic, and political issues confronting Commonwealth residents in the 21st century.

The program, which is open to all K-12 classroom teachers in public and private schools, requires the completion of a three-week course that allows teachers to satisfy history certification requirement.

This year’s program featured eight instructors, including visiting historians Carlos Madrid and Dirk Spennemann, local historian Don Farrell, former justice Jose C. Dela Cruz, Jessica Jordan, and Scott Russell.

Today’s session, the last for the program, will feature local historians Lino Olopai and Brenda Tenorio who will discuss Current Issues and Cultural Preservation.

“I think [Teachers Institute] is a really rewarding experience for teachers,” said Russell, executive director for the Humanities Council.

According to him, the program is beneficial for all teachers, not only for those who come from other countries such as the Philippines or the U.S. mainland.

“Local residents who have lived here all their lives…they’re quite surprised there’s a lot of things that they’ve never heard about,” he said.

Russell noted that they have fewer participants this year compared to previous years, saying they used to have between 35 to 40 teachers for the program.

“I’m not exactly sure of the reasons yet. We’re going to have to sit down with PSS and figure out what exactly the reason was,” he said.

Russell also noted that they know that some teachers on Rota and Tinian had recently taken another course that would also allow them to receive PSS certification.

The executive director disclosed that they were supposed to implement this year a new format wherein the instructors will hold separate presentations on the three islands instead of just having it on Saipan and teachers on Tinian and Rota participating remotely via teleconference.

“We said we wanted to make this equally rewarding for all teachers and so we set this thing up and then it turned out that there wasn’t any teachers on Rota and Tinian that really needed it so we had to go back to just having it on Saipan,” he said.

All participants will receive completion certificates.