english lit in kazakhstan

Sometimes I love teaching. It doesn’t happen every day, or necessarily every week, but every so often I get chills from a great classroom experience. On a day to day basis, teaching is OK. Nothing earth-shattering. No fireworks. No horror stories. Just OK. Of course some days are simply rolling nightmares in 45-minute intervals, but yesterday was different. This year I’ve been teaching an English Literature class as an extra, optional class for my 10th and 11th grade students. I started with fifteen interested students who met once a week for 45 minutes. I designed the class around five famous short stories which we read and wrote essays on in two week segments. For each essay I created vocabulary sheets with English-Russian translations, vocabulary practice worksheets, comprehension and discussion questions, and a choice of several essay topics. The stories this semester have included: Catfish in the Bathtub, The Tell-Tale Heart, A Pair of Silk Stockings, If I Were a Man, and The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World. (Read them. They’re good.) The attendance numbers have steadily dropped as the semester has progressed, leaving me with the dedicated, interested, hard-working students. I would prefer to have 8-10 kids, but I’ve always had at least three or four students, one of which hasn’t missed a single class or assignment. I plan and teach this class by myself, as a form of productive outlet to supplement my weekly grind of teaching kids who more or less don’t care about learning a foreign language, regardless of how amazingly cool the teacher is. And it has been going well. I love to see the students picking up new phrases and vocabulary and using them weeks after reading them in story. I thoroughly enjoy watching students struggle to think through complex ideas and express themselves in a discussion, saying how much they loved or hated or completely didn’t understand a story.

I got chills yesterday from a discussion about Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “The Handsomest Drowned Man”. Throughout the course I’ve been trying to introduce ideas such as symbolism and social commentary, literary effects and writing styles, but I hadn’t had much success when asking questions like “What symbols can we identify in The Tell Tale Heart?” Or even, “What do you think the beating of the dead man’s heart might represent?” As I sat planning the night before, I made a list of things to bring up and discuss about Esteban, the gigantic main character from the story. I was ready to teach the class; prepared to wait patiently while they tried their hardest to make some deeper connection, to find some unobvious meaning; I had resigned to give them my answers after theirs fell short of real insight. But in this session, just the opposite happened. With Marquez’s story, they got it. Not only did they confirm all of my ideas about the symbols and purpose of the text, they introduced a couple of valid, new ideas I hadn’t thought of. That’s when I got that tickling sensation down my spine and the hair on my arms stood up. I’ve been told to pay attention when that happens because something special is happening. And that moment was special. Because isn’t that what education should be? A collaborative search by the students and teacher for knowledge, understanding and insight, using each other as guides and sources of truth? I think so. The only thing lacking now is to create that situation in a typical, mandatory lesson in which we learn vocab, translate a text, and answer True/False questions about it. One challenge at a time.