Straight Up Gansta'

So, I’ve told you about my trip to Almaty, my orientation days in Tabagan, my first experiences and my host family in Uzunagach, and my bout with a stubborn stomach bug. It’s about time I tell you about what I actually spend my oh-so-busy days doing. Today was a typical day, I would say, so I’ll just recap a bit. I wake up at 6:55. Marzhan is bustling about from about 6:15 on, trying to get things ready for the day. She is also a teacher, but at a different school than mine. She has to be out the door at 7:25 and I at 7:40. We eat breakfast – it has recently started getting pretty chilly at night, so my early morning trip to the outhouse is getting progressively colder; today I cracked out the long sleeve t-shirt. We get dressed – the students here, regardless of age, wear business suits to school every day. I thought the September 1^st kickoff day was an exception, but no, they dress better every day than I do for most formal events. I’ll get some pictures up soon. Dress code for us, the trainees, is business casual, so I’m pretty thoroughly outdressed by the students, as I forgo the tie, and roll up my sleeves of my button down dress shirt. At least I’m tucking in my shirt, right? So, I meet Susie, a fellow trainee at my gate at 7:40 and we walk the 17-minute walk to the school. I guess it is about a mile, which should be tons of fun if it gets cold enough to snow before we head to post and I buy a winter coat. At the school, finally waking up and regaining feeling in our limbs, we fight through the throng of primary – high school aged students, most of which want to shake our hands or at least practice their English from afar: “Hello! How are you?” To which we respond, “Zdrastvootiye. Harasho, spaseebah. (hello, I’m well, thank you)” or the English response, “Good morning, I’m good. And you?” to which most students giggle and continue on walking. That’s why I’m here though, right? – to get them using English when they wouldn’t have thought to do so.

On the second floor of the school, which is less than 5 years old I believe, 4 other trainees and I spend our mornings learning Russian. We do exercises, play games, work in our workbooks, and make up dialogues. The morning session goes from 8am-1pm. The session today was on food, so we learned the names of lots of foods, refreshed our how-much-does-this-cost skills, and headed to the bazaar to make a list of foods and their prices. Jason and I struck up a conversation with two nice ladies at the meat counter, mostly about the different prices of the different meats, but then about our jobs, how long we were in country, and where we are from. They most have found us strikingly handsome or overwhelmingly charming (probably both), because we walked away with free chucks of bologna. The people here really are generally nice and curious to know what we’re doing here. Since we knew the afternoon session was going to start at 2 and wouldn’t have time to go home for lunch, we bought some bread and fruit (unfortunately not free) to go with our bologna (we really are two good-looking guys) to enjoy some lunch back at the school. After reviewing our findings at the market, we had an hour break.

This week we have been observing classes in the afternoons for 2 hours. Today’s two classes were math and biology, and although most of the teacher’s lecture and directions are way above our Russian knowledge, we are critiquing and learning how teaching works here. We’ve seen that, as in the States, some students are highly motivated regardless of the teaching style, while others won’t participate even if you paid them. The students here are incredibly well-behaved compared to schools I’ve seen at home. The students all stand when someone older than them (including us) walks in the room, they sit in their desk with their arms folded in front of them the whole class, and to raise their hands, they must keep their elbows on the desk. It really is humorous to see the overly ambitious girls that are DYING to answer a question flailing about to get the teacher’s attention while keeping her elbow on the desk. If I every capture that image on camera I’ll be sure to send it your way. After the two lessons, we debriefed for 30 minutes about what we thought was effective and what we would change in our teaching styles to improve the lessons. Almost all of us talked about a need for critical thinking and interactive activities, which are all but absent in some, but not all, classes. I walk home, today arriving at 5:15, lay down until dinner (5:30ish-6ish) and then the evening is “free”. Right now I have next week’s plan floating around in my head, so I will need to work on preparing several things. We start observing English classes next week (we start teaching the week after), as well as starting our English clubs.

The schools here work in shifts, and students either go to school in the morning or the afternoon. For us, we study in the morning, and work in the afternoon, so next week for our clubs we will be involving students who had class in the morning and voluntarily come back in the afternoon to do activities with Americans. I’m sure we’ll be a hit. English clubs are kind of like the Spanish club that I was in high school. We get together in a non-classroom setting and do activities in the target language. In high school we ate, sang, and put on plays for Foreign Language Festival. Monday we 5 trainees are splitting into two groups and having activities in English. The other group will be doing a nature walk, talking about things outside, while Jason and I will teach a group “Cecilia” by Paul Simon and then play various games. It should be fun. Attendance is optional for the students, so I hope we just have kids that are interested in improving their English, although I’ve been told a large number of kids will show up just to see the Americans. We have been warned (and so far it’s true) that we will be, for our full service, walking freak shows that cause everyone to stare. But, only by staring and interacting with me will the nationals get any idea of what Americans are really like.

Along those lines I had a good educational moment with Rawan, my host brother. Last night watching TV, which is mainly American rap and hip-hop videos, he asked if there were lots of black people in America. However, the word for African American is the good old fashioned N-word. Kind of shocking, really. So I said, yes, there are a lot of black people in the US, but that word is considered derogatory (my Russian was more like: that word, very very bad) even though he hears it ALL the time on the TV in the rap videos. He then asked me if they were all gangsters while making a gun with his hand, and I said no. Although I can tell he doesn’t really believe me, because what he sees is 50 Cent and P. Diddy on the TV being cool because they’re so gangsta’, at least I’m one person he’s heard say, “You can’t always believe what you see on TV.”