Bring it on

Alright. It’s the fifth of October. I’ve got three classes to deliver today and two more team-teaching lessons to prepare for Wednesday. All unit lessons must be planned by the end of the week. Activities to choose for Game Fair and Health Day tomorrow. Site placement at the end of this week, plus intensive preparation for language testing next week. Welcome to PST in earnest. Bring it on.

I’m sorry I haven’t been to Ecik in awhile, and that my blog posts have gotten less frequent as time has gone on, but I simply didn’t have time this weekend to get up there – hopefully sometime before site placement I will be able to upload these posts from our favourite Ecik internet cafe (which is a basement, by the way, below a store, with five computers on mounted desks on the walls). It’s 300╤ an hour ($2.00), but man, is it ever worth it on the weekend! Ecik itself is a pretty cool town – I actually enjoy Ecik more than Almaty, since you get the benefits of being in a city (like a downtown, a bazaar, flush toilets and internet access) without the massive pollution. And the scenery is nice, too (not that it isn’t from Almaty, of course – just that it can’t always be seen).

I talked for two hours with my entire family yesterday, which was awesome (thanks, Skype!). Dad’s birthday was yesterday – I sang John McCutcheon’s birthday song. Mom’s birthday is on the same day as both Halloween and the Peace Corps swearing-in ceremony, so on the one hand it will be really hard to forget and on the other hand it will be really hard to contact her with everything that will be going on.

My full day of teaching three classes is over; it tired me out, but not as much as I thought it would. Two of the classes went well, one went very poorly. I am in the unfortunate habit of assuming the students know more than they do, and as a result one of my classes (for 8th form) was unreasonably and unrealistically difficult – based on a Robert Lewis Stevenson poem in Step 10 of our unit in the Kuznetsova textbook, with a lot of bookish vocabulary and weird constructions – and I was asking them to do critical thinking exercises based on their own feelings and experiences, which they weren’t yet ready to do (in English or in Russian!). Emiko suggested that it might have made a good university-level lesson plan, but not a good idea for 8th form in a Qazaqstani school; that lesson plan definitely goes in the mental recycle bin (it also didn’t help that I was teaching two groups instead of one and that they were being rowdy and noisy throughout). But I did learn a few things from that class (the first of which being to choose level-appropriate material for lesson planning, and not from the local textbooks). My other classes went okay, though – they were level-appropriate and the activities were good, but I still need to work on making my instructions clear for the activities I do. Today is Health Day and Game Fair, and I’ve got my activities prepped and ready to go. I’ll be monitoring Health Day activities and taking pictures at Health Day for the counterpart presentation during teacher training – hopefully I’ll post some of them on this blog. The same group of students who were at English club are likely to come to Health Day – and it’s entirely likely that Health Day will turn out to be a slight variation on English club, but I’m sure it will be fun all the same.