School

So after being here for almost 5 months now, my actual job is finally starting. Wednesday is the first day of class, and I have no idea what to expect. At my school there are two English teachers, both of whom I really love. I only have to work with one of them, but I think I will choose classes with both and see how it goes! The first two weeks of school I won't be teaching, just observing every English class and deciding which ones I would like to teach and work with.

I get a lot of questions here about what exactly I am doing. I will be teaching English, but that isn't really my main job. Yes, it will be good for the students to learn from a native speaker, but I'm also here to teach the teachers how to teach. One of the main problems here with language learning is that the teaching method is grammar translation. Kids read a sentence, translate it, and move on. They don't really understand it, and many seem to approach it as almost a math problem - if they see one thing, it means write something else, yet they don't understand what it means or why they are using that particular tense. They also have little speaking skills. In Borjomi I was in a 5th grade classroom where they were reading about a fox who "longed and yearned for some food"...pretty impressive vocabulary, but then when I asked them to say their names and one thing that they liked, they couldn't do it. So the education volunteers here are supposed to help demonstrate new activities, ones that encourage speaking, use different methods of learning, and ones that encourage creativity and critical thinking.

Apart from school starting nothing much is new here. I am getting to know last year's volunteers a lot better (most of my group was placed 6 hours away) and they are all really wonderful. I think the oily food is finally catching up to me and I have been sick quite a bit the last few weeks, so hopefully that can be resolved soon too!