Salaamatcizbe,
Happy November! Happy belated Halloween and Día de los Muertos. I hope you are all fat and happy with your candy consumption. We had a small party here at the school with lots of candy. Someone’s parents had sent candy corn, twix and crunch bars, so we had a sugary feast in between our lessons. I wore my striped sweater, covered one eye, put a knife between my teeth and played the pirate for a while. I drew a picture of a parrot and taped him to my shoulder to complete the costume, and I would say the day was a success. We were hoping to go out to a café to celebrate that night, but we were informed that our final language test was Thursday, not next Monday as it was scheduled. So Wednesday was spent reviewing and studying for the oral exam. The exam is PC’s way to measure our progress both since we got here and throughout our two years. They rank us from Novice Low to Advanced High, and their goal for us at the end of PST is Intermediate Low, but they’ll let you serve with a Novice High rating. The test is just a conversation between you and the tester, who in my case was a very small, pleasant Russian woman. She wore a floppy hat that covered bright red dyed hair and around her smallish eyes was a good amount of blue eyeliner. I think she was about 65, although everyone looks much older here than they are. Maybe she was 55. Regardless of her age, she made me chuckle, and the interview/test wasn’t too painful because I was sitting across from this cute grandmotherly woman. We talked about me and my hobbies, my family and my job. It took about 30 minutes, and I received an Intermediate Low rating, which is just where I need to be, and amazingly impressive considering my absence of Russian knowledge in August. I would’ve done much better if she didn’t ask some obscure questions like, “what is your favorite activity to do with your students in English class?” I’m definitely lacking all of the verbs and vocab to answer that. I simply had to say (in Russian, at least) “I’m sorry, I don’t know how to say that in Russian.” But the test is over, and that is reason enough for celebration.
This week, in the afternoons, we have been leading teacher workshops with teachers around the village of Uzunagash. Konsulu, our Technical Facilitator, contacted the local education department who invited about 40 teachers to come further their education with American Peace Corps volunteers. We split the 40 teachers between our two schools, and then split the twenty at our school into two groups. Each day Alex and I conducted a 1 hour session with 8-10 teachers and then switched with Mary and Susie, repeated the session with another group. The teachers therefore had 8 different 1-hour sessions in which we tried to accomplish two things: first, many teachers in the country teach in a very bland, by-the-book, translate-this-sentence way. We wanted to introduce them to as many activities that involve different aspects of teaching. We did separate sessions on teaching speaking, listening, grammar, critical thinking, and warm ups. Second, the teachers get very little real life practice in English at their jobs, so we had them actually do all of the activities we taught them about. Some of them were definitely lacking in English ability, but others were surprisingly knowledgeable about the subject. The “conference” went well, and Konsulu even managed to pull together some official certificates (at the teachers’ request – everybody wants a certificate for just about anything they do) saying they completed 8 hours of “training.” It was a little strange to be teaching teachers, having only 2 months of actual teaching experience, but they looked up to us and really enjoyed the material and activities we presented. I am excited for my second job up in Petro where I will help train teachers from the entire oblast (like an American state).
Swearing-in is just around the corner (next Friday, to be exact) and I have a very interesting feeling of being glad to be done, but at the same time knowing that I haven’t even started.
Keep me posted on what is happening with you – I definitely feel disconnected from everything familiar at times, and need some state-side news. Seriously – write me.
With love, as always,
Philip
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