No, you live, you teach and you screw up. Then you learn.

I just delivered my first lesson for the week. I can’t honestly say it was a good lesson insofar as it went according to the lesson plan – actually, it felt like that first scene in The Incredibles where Mr Incredible is trying to save everyone all at once and not succeeding very well: first the thwarted suicide attempt, then the vault robbery by Bomb Voyage being interrupted by Buddy and then the bomb exploding on the train track with an oncoming train. First, I wasn’t as prepared as I should have been – I didn’t have tape or markers handy. Secondly, I rushed through my presentation, so the students didn’t get it as well as they could have. Thirdly, my practice activities (one of which was taken straight from the class’s Ayapova textbook) all seemed to be well above the class’s proficiency level, to the point where one poor girl seemed on the verge of tears when I asked her to participate, because she didn’t know what she was supposed to be doing. But, I knew the material I was teaching and I was feeling more at ease at the head of the class than I was during my first week, and that gave me some leeway to step back and try it again, bringing the lesson back to the presentation and seeing what mixture of explanation, mime and Russian translation the kids needed to see and hear in order to grasp the grammar structures and vocabulary and use them effectively. (Actually, my thanks to Aggie Goldsmith at BAE are due here in spades; taking her course made my life here a lot easier than it would have been otherwise.) ‘Flexibility’ and ‘humour’ were the operative words here: Peace Corps weren’t screwing around when they said those traits would be keys to success. I knew this hadn’t been my best lesson to date, but Emiko told me that it demonstrated my growth as a teacher, that I was becoming more flexible and more aware of my surroundings. Interestingly enough, Emiko also told me that since I am a man at the head of a Qazaqstani classroom, I should have far more leeway to be authoritarian than I would have in an American classroom, and I should take it since the students are much more used to an authoritarian teaching style. (Given the opinions expressed in my post a couple weeks back, I’m feeling both incredibly eager to take this advice and a bit fearful that I might take it too far.)

Indeed, the more I think about it and the more I actually do it, the more I am convinced that those who make education their profession are routinely under-appreciated and under-valued in American society. The platitude ‘if you can’t do, teach’ is in every way a lie: teaching is all doing, even if it is something as (apparently) simple as teaching English. A teacher must be a writer, a director and an actor. A teacher must be an observer, a participant and a leader, often all at once. A teacher must be a judge, an entertainer and a therapist. A teacher must be a disciplinarian and a hell-raiser. A teacher must be a nitpicker without ever losing sight of the larger picture. And the fruits of a teacher’s hard labour are never really his own: ultimately, what he does can only be demonstrated in what his students can command.

(And here, a teacher is heavily encouraged to always dress like he works for an insurance company. At least until he can reach a phone booth.)

That was ‘humour’, by the way: requirement number one.

Site announcement comes at the end of next week. It will be interesting to see where I will be placed: I had a lot of comments, but my only real stated preferences were for a site where both Qazaq and Russian are spoken (to get an opportunity to learn both languages) and for service in higher-level English classes (since that is where most of my experience is). But, wherever God (through Paul and Ekat at Peace Corps HQ) sees fit to send me, there I will go gladly.