Back to School

I have been trying to wait for something interesting to talk about, but it doesn't seem to be happening that way, unless you count a benadryl-induced dream about John McCain saving my crashing airplane something interesting. (Really, I couldn't have come up with Matt Damon or anyone better?)

My counterparts are really great, I love them! They are not only ridiculously nice and fun to be around, but are receptive to the changes I want to make in their teaching styles and we work really well together, which is important since I don't know the native language very well and they don't know what type of activities I want the kids to do.

I have been observing classes and I finally chose my schedule for teaching. I will be working with 5th grade, 6th grade, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 11th grade classes. Some of them are really small, with only a few students each, while others have up to 30 students and are foreseeably going to be the bane of my existence. Discipline here is pretty non-existent because there is no punishment you can actually give, apart from yelling at students, which when done in English and they don't understand English, usually elicits laughter. Which usually elicits an evil narrowing of the eyes look from me, which I have found sometimes works. My counterparts take to stomping their feet and banging rulers on desks to get attention, but then it sort of reminds me of some music performance since there's so much banging going on. I also tried moving the talkers to other parts of the room, which would make total sense in an American classroom. Here though, instead of just talking the kids start yelling to each other across the room.

But luckily, despite the noisiness, I enjoy the students themselves and they seem interested in learning. The main challenge will actually not be the noise, but rather the discrepancy in the curriculum and their actual knowledge. English was started at my particular school only three years ago, yet due to (good intentioned but perhaps a little misguided) governmental education reforms and agendas, some of the older classes are learning out of advanced books that kids in other schools don't reach until their 10th year of studying English. This leaves a lot of kids behind and lost through no fault of their own. So how do I go about teaching something like "when to use a gerund" to kids who don't understand me when I say "what did you do yesterday?" I'll let you know after I try it tomorrow! (for those of you who don't know what a gerund is, look it up! I've used it 9 times in this blog post alone!....ps. I'm amazed at how little of English grammar we are actually taught, I didn't learn most of it until I started studying other languages.)

I'll also be taking some tutoring lessons for Azeri and Georgian. soon I will be able to yell in more languages!