Sunday, September 25, 2011
Challenges
I wanted to sit down and write about some of the things in my school/Ukraine that make teaching effectively a challenge. I'm sure I will encounter more as the school year goes on, but here's what I've currently been thinking about.
The schedule constantly changes. It is now the fourth full week of school, and there are still changes being made. I asked a student how often it will continue to change. His response, "Every week, of course!" I think he finds my bewilderment amusing. While I find it annoying and obnoxious that the schedule of lessons is never for sure, and that sometimes I'm not told when there are changes, it's also really confusing for my kids. They come into class late or unprepared, without their book or notebook, because they didn't know the schedule changed and didn't know they had English that day. It just makes it harder to get them into a routine where they know they have to bring which books to school on what day, and have their homework done.
I'm not sure what the situation with books is. My school ordered new books for a few of the forms this year, which were late to arrive of course, but there are still many, many students without books. For some forms, it seems like the school ordered a set number of copies that was supposed to guarantee every child a book, while in others I'm under the impression that students were told they had to purchase their own books. So of course, the parents who are already involved in their child's education dutifully bought the book. The parents who are not so involved, didn't. Then there are the set of children whose families are too poor to buy the book, or the book and the accompanying workbook, thus making it harder for those kids to get a good education and help them escape poverty. It's also fairly awkward because I'm in a village and there is no privacy about anything for these kids, so everyone knows exactly who didn't buy the book because their family simply can't.
I'm fairly certain that I'm not considered a real teacher by anyone in my school except my non-counterpart English teacher. And I think that's only because she hasn't actually seen me teach. Because I don't make kids memorize passages and recite them, regardless of whether they know what they're saying or not, I am not legitimate. I let them get up and move - gasp! It's blasphemous, I know. I've been observing the second form this past week, and I find it wildly strange that a group of 7 to 8 year-olds are made to sit straight and still for about 50 minutes.
Speaking of the second form, I also find it completely overwhelming that they're learning the block letters of English, the cursive letters, AND the transcription symbols of sounds, simultaneously [for example, æ and ɔ]. They're also learning Ukrainian and Russian. It just seems very ineffective to put so much emphasis on that, while actually being able to read simple words gets pushed aside.
I'm about to start teaching with my non-cp English teacher. She's very nice to me, but she's also been teaching for 40 years and very set in her ways. She tightly controls everything that happens in her classroom and anything that deviates from that is bad. She wanted me to ask students questions about a text they read, and instead she ended up saying the question to me, which I then repeated to the students, even though they heard her say it first, because I wasn't asking exactly what she wanted. I'm not there for a teacher to dictate to me exactly what I'm supposed to do, I'm supposed to teach the way language teachers in the U.S. teach, a.k.a. the communicative method. I feel like this is going to be a fight.
When I was got to site last December, my school gave me a little room to serve as an office on the third floor. It was really nice for me to have a place to go between classes, plan lessons, and store materials. I also give my individual lessons there. As of this week, I will no longer have that room as it's being given to another (new?) teacher. I will be moving into the room of my non-cp English teacher, which isn't really a big deal. I just wonder logistically how this will work out. There's only one key to this room, which she has, and I don't think we're always at school at the same time. I know she has Wednesdays completely off. I'm anticipating being mostly displaced and finding weird little corners to sit in and work, and having to carry around everything that I need. I don't know what I'm going to do about individual lessons yet/where they will take place now. While the weather is nice, I can do walk-and-talks with my older students but that's only going to last until November, maybe December. I live close enough to my school that I could, in theory, have them at my house. But to be quite honest, I really, really, really don't want to do that. I consider my house the one place in Ukraine that is my judgment-free, safe haven. I don't have to worry about being judged constantly or having kids giggle at the sight of me, or people staring at me, or whispering about every little thing that I do. I don't want to lose the sanity that it provides me.
Also, my counterpart and I don't really speak. Ever. It's awkward. I'm fairly certain she strongly dislikes me. Why, you may ask? I don't know. She's had that attitude towards me ever since she retrieved me from Kyiv after I was sworn in. The only thing I've come up with is that it's because I'm young and American, and the kids in my school think my lessons are more interesting than hers.
The good thing right now about teaching is that it doesn't have quite the same effect on me that it used to. There were days last year where I could physically feel my stress level in my chest as it grew, and I'd get upset about things. Now, I just get this weird feeling of flatness. I don't know how else to describe it. I think it's partly that I know what to expect and I'm also being wildly proactive about managing my stress by running, journaling, and having a routine. I don't know what else to do.
The schedule constantly changes. It is now the fourth full week of school, and there are still changes being made. I asked a student how often it will continue to change. His response, "Every week, of course!" I think he finds my bewilderment amusing. While I find it annoying and obnoxious that the schedule of lessons is never for sure, and that sometimes I'm not told when there are changes, it's also really confusing for my kids. They come into class late or unprepared, without their book or notebook, because they didn't know the schedule changed and didn't know they had English that day. It just makes it harder to get them into a routine where they know they have to bring which books to school on what day, and have their homework done.
I'm not sure what the situation with books is. My school ordered new books for a few of the forms this year, which were late to arrive of course, but there are still many, many students without books. For some forms, it seems like the school ordered a set number of copies that was supposed to guarantee every child a book, while in others I'm under the impression that students were told they had to purchase their own books. So of course, the parents who are already involved in their child's education dutifully bought the book. The parents who are not so involved, didn't. Then there are the set of children whose families are too poor to buy the book, or the book and the accompanying workbook, thus making it harder for those kids to get a good education and help them escape poverty. It's also fairly awkward because I'm in a village and there is no privacy about anything for these kids, so everyone knows exactly who didn't buy the book because their family simply can't.
I'm fairly certain that I'm not considered a real teacher by anyone in my school except my non-counterpart English teacher. And I think that's only because she hasn't actually seen me teach. Because I don't make kids memorize passages and recite them, regardless of whether they know what they're saying or not, I am not legitimate. I let them get up and move - gasp! It's blasphemous, I know. I've been observing the second form this past week, and I find it wildly strange that a group of 7 to 8 year-olds are made to sit straight and still for about 50 minutes.
Speaking of the second form, I also find it completely overwhelming that they're learning the block letters of English, the cursive letters, AND the transcription symbols of sounds, simultaneously [for example, æ and ɔ]. They're also learning Ukrainian and Russian. It just seems very ineffective to put so much emphasis on that, while actually being able to read simple words gets pushed aside.
I'm about to start teaching with my non-cp English teacher. She's very nice to me, but she's also been teaching for 40 years and very set in her ways. She tightly controls everything that happens in her classroom and anything that deviates from that is bad. She wanted me to ask students questions about a text they read, and instead she ended up saying the question to me, which I then repeated to the students, even though they heard her say it first, because I wasn't asking exactly what she wanted. I'm not there for a teacher to dictate to me exactly what I'm supposed to do, I'm supposed to teach the way language teachers in the U.S. teach, a.k.a. the communicative method. I feel like this is going to be a fight.
When I was got to site last December, my school gave me a little room to serve as an office on the third floor. It was really nice for me to have a place to go between classes, plan lessons, and store materials. I also give my individual lessons there. As of this week, I will no longer have that room as it's being given to another (new?) teacher. I will be moving into the room of my non-cp English teacher, which isn't really a big deal. I just wonder logistically how this will work out. There's only one key to this room, which she has, and I don't think we're always at school at the same time. I know she has Wednesdays completely off. I'm anticipating being mostly displaced and finding weird little corners to sit in and work, and having to carry around everything that I need. I don't know what I'm going to do about individual lessons yet/where they will take place now. While the weather is nice, I can do walk-and-talks with my older students but that's only going to last until November, maybe December. I live close enough to my school that I could, in theory, have them at my house. But to be quite honest, I really, really, really don't want to do that. I consider my house the one place in Ukraine that is my judgment-free, safe haven. I don't have to worry about being judged constantly or having kids giggle at the sight of me, or people staring at me, or whispering about every little thing that I do. I don't want to lose the sanity that it provides me.
Also, my counterpart and I don't really speak. Ever. It's awkward. I'm fairly certain she strongly dislikes me. Why, you may ask? I don't know. She's had that attitude towards me ever since she retrieved me from Kyiv after I was sworn in. The only thing I've come up with is that it's because I'm young and American, and the kids in my school think my lessons are more interesting than hers.
The good thing right now about teaching is that it doesn't have quite the same effect on me that it used to. There were days last year where I could physically feel my stress level in my chest as it grew, and I'd get upset about things. Now, I just get this weird feeling of flatness. I don't know how else to describe it. I think it's partly that I know what to expect and I'm also being wildly proactive about managing my stress by running, journaling, and having a routine. I don't know what else to do.
Money
I've heard this before so I figured I would share it.
50 years of Peace Corps has cost the same as five days of the Defense Department budget.
50 years of Peace Corps has cost the same as five days of the Defense Department budget.
West and East
Despite the very obvious western bias of this graphic, I really enjoy it. I also really enjoy when I find a well written article about Ukraine and its importance due to its geographical location and history. Molodets (good job) to The Economist for Viktor's Dilemna.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
I Get It
“That’s the one problem with living abroad. You end up getting those weird feelings like, Oh, I can’t leave; I can’t stay.”
-NYT
-NYT
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Observations From This Week
I did end up teaching this week. Not a full schedule, but not bad. I also taught a good number of individual lessons. Here's what I noticed/decided:
So much gets lost in translation. What I said: "She gave me the list in the hall." What I wanted to say: "She handed this list to me in the hallway on her way out. No discussion because god forbid she spend more than one minute of her time talking to me in any given week."
I spent part of last year debating whether it was better when my 7th form classes behaved like monsters or zombies. I've decided I prefer zombie mode.
Which reminds me: I'm teaching the two 8th form classes now instead of the 5th form. This is a bummer. The little kids are fun and usually more willing to work. The 8th form classes were my worst last year and not much seems to have changed over the summer.
I had an individual lesson with one of my sixth form students. This is how this situation came to be: Some woman knocked on my door. I answered. She asked if I would tutor her younger brother who's in the sixth form, and then she said his name. [Side note: Ukrainians name people by their last, first, and patronymic names which usually results in a really long, fast blur where I rarely remember anything but the first name]. I have three students with this first name in my sixth form class. One is an excellent student, one is mediocre to low, and one is non-existent. I figured this was probably the sister of the mediocre student (I even tried to figure out which student she physically resembled). Nope. It's the non-existent student, aka the student who rarely has his book, or paper, or a pen to write with and who usually just distracts everyone around him. When he showed up, I knew we were going to have to work on all the really simple things because in class I can tell he doesn't know/understand much English. This is fine. It became apparently quite quickly that I will probably spend my next lesson with him teaching him the English alphabet. He's been "studying" English for four years...
There's a staircase in my school that is for teachers only. I didn't know this until a student told me. My first thought: awesome. Then I thought about how sometimes I get mobbed by hyped up, semi-psychotic children and I thought about how I could just stand on the landing between floors and none of them would be able to follow me, and then I thought: AWESOME.
I had a penis shaped clay-mation thrown into my office this week. Oh, children.
Only one student in my 11th form class did their homework (and he only wrote one sentence) for the second lesson of the year. This didn't really surprise me. I don't know if it's a good thing that I now have realistic expectations or just sad that my expectations are so low.
In theory, Ukrainian students can be trilingual by the time they finish secondary school at the age of 17 (they study Russian, Ukrainian, and English languages starting in primary school). How many American schools can claim the same?
September 16 is the day my village was freed from the oppression of fascists. There was a flower ceremony at school to commemorate this holiday.
So much gets lost in translation. What I said: "She gave me the list in the hall." What I wanted to say: "She handed this list to me in the hallway on her way out. No discussion because god forbid she spend more than one minute of her time talking to me in any given week."
I spent part of last year debating whether it was better when my 7th form classes behaved like monsters or zombies. I've decided I prefer zombie mode.
Which reminds me: I'm teaching the two 8th form classes now instead of the 5th form. This is a bummer. The little kids are fun and usually more willing to work. The 8th form classes were my worst last year and not much seems to have changed over the summer.
I had an individual lesson with one of my sixth form students. This is how this situation came to be: Some woman knocked on my door. I answered. She asked if I would tutor her younger brother who's in the sixth form, and then she said his name. [Side note: Ukrainians name people by their last, first, and patronymic names which usually results in a really long, fast blur where I rarely remember anything but the first name]. I have three students with this first name in my sixth form class. One is an excellent student, one is mediocre to low, and one is non-existent. I figured this was probably the sister of the mediocre student (I even tried to figure out which student she physically resembled). Nope. It's the non-existent student, aka the student who rarely has his book, or paper, or a pen to write with and who usually just distracts everyone around him. When he showed up, I knew we were going to have to work on all the really simple things because in class I can tell he doesn't know/understand much English. This is fine. It became apparently quite quickly that I will probably spend my next lesson with him teaching him the English alphabet. He's been "studying" English for four years...
There's a staircase in my school that is for teachers only. I didn't know this until a student told me. My first thought: awesome. Then I thought about how sometimes I get mobbed by hyped up, semi-psychotic children and I thought about how I could just stand on the landing between floors and none of them would be able to follow me, and then I thought: AWESOME.
I had a penis shaped clay-mation thrown into my office this week. Oh, children.
Only one student in my 11th form class did their homework (and he only wrote one sentence) for the second lesson of the year. This didn't really surprise me. I don't know if it's a good thing that I now have realistic expectations or just sad that my expectations are so low.
In theory, Ukrainian students can be trilingual by the time they finish secondary school at the age of 17 (they study Russian, Ukrainian, and English languages starting in primary school). How many American schools can claim the same?
September 16 is the day my village was freed from the oppression of fascists. There was a flower ceremony at school to commemorate this holiday.
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