Howzit? I apologize for the long silence. Blogger may or may not be blocked in Turkmenistan so I will be having my parents post my blogs from here on out. I get to the internet café about every week, so their postings should become more frequent.
I’ve been teaching fulltime for about a month now, and I am beginning to get into the swing of it. No longer am I terrified before every lesson I teach. Now I just have the normal persistent guilt that accompanies everything I do (thanks Catholicism). I teach five classes and four clubs every week. That adds up to about twenty-five hours of classroom teaching a week and another twenty-five or so hours of preparation. The job keeps me pretty busy. I spend most of my day teaching, preparing to teach, or taking a break from preparing to teach with 30 Rock, sudoku, or Aha’s classic “Take On Me”.
I may be busy but I am certainly lucky to have the supportive community I have here in my village. Both my students and my colleagues have been nothing short of wonderful. Despite the limits to our communication, my fellow teachers have made me feel like a real teacher. I’m included in the teacher room discussions (and gossip), and all the men teachers go out of their way to shake my hand and inquire into my life. (Men and women from different families never shake hands.) The teachers and administrators have shown interest in my life here and my projects at school. Many of the teachers have students in my classes, and they are always interested in how their child is doing.
Some teachers even want to learn English themselves, so I teach a once-a-week English class for teachers. I’m always glad when teachers attend, because village life is very busy, especially for the women teachers. Many effectively have two full-time jobs: one at school and the other at home taking care of their husbands, their children, and their other relatives. There is always more to do: animals to feed, bread to bake, meals to cook, toys (weddings) to ready. During the class we all share our knowledge of English, Turkmen, and Russian with each other. The language learning is quantitatively slow, but we have fun trading words and stumbling over the different pronunciations of each language.
This last week we had “English Week” at my school. The other four English teachers and I organized sayings, skits, songs, and plays to be performed before school everyday and at a big show at the end of the week before the Turkmen Flag Day holiday. (Yes! No school on Saturday for once.) Students decorated the front hall of the school with English-themed posters (sometimes quite loosely themed as with the wordless pictures of Snow White). For the last couple of weeks we spent hours and hours preparing both in class and after school for the performances. On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday before school students performed short numbers (like “If You’re Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands”) as students waited in the school courtyard before starting. Despite a few problems with the microphone and those always noisy 9th Form boys, the mornings went without a hitch.
Then came the “big show” on Friday. We were to perform several numbers including renditions of Snow White, Cinderella, “Yesterday” and the crowd favorite “Hello Goodbye”. As with mock trial, up until the last minute I was increasingly worried that the whole thing would fall apart. The somber “Yesterday” of Paul McCartney fame would descend into a shouting match between the girls and boys. Cinderella would break her ankle instead of her glass slipper. Snow White would play the diva card and demand her own trailer. There would be only one way to get the performances right, but there would be dozens of ways for the entire shebang to descend into chaos.
At first, chaos seemed tipped for victory as hundreds of students began pouring into the tiny auditorium instead of into their classrooms. The original plan was to allow only the older and more talented students out of class to watch the performances. However, the student body seemingly outflanked us by sneaking into the auditorium en masse between periods. Luckily, the administrators present were able to muster enough force to get all of the students out of the auditorium as quickly as they came. They then organized a brilliant blockade allowing only qualified students into the much quieter auditorium. The next battle lay with the sound system. First, the microphone wouldn’t work, then it worked too well. When the musical numbers needed to be lined up, we had to skip through one hundred random Turkmen songs before finding those loveable Liverpudlians. The side curtains were only a few feet wide, not quite enough to obscure the dozens of actors and singers who insisted on backstage access. (Oh, those actor unions and their strange powers.) However, while the chaos of the crowd and the lack of professional amenities such as curtains or lights continually threatened to overwhelm the little stage and your humble narrator, we ultimately pulled the whole thing off, all the while making the director happy and many more students interested in English (even if only because they would like to hand others poisoned apples, and despite your narrator’s appearance approximating more Keith Richards than Paul McCartney).
1) I’m glad we did it: it is a great way to showcase your students’ talents in English and cultivate even more interest among the other students. 2) I’m also glad it’s over: the stress combined with my oil- and fat-heavy diet could have been lethal. (Hey, I’m not that young anymore.) Next English Week: bouncers, scalping, Ibsen, and “Like A Rolling Stone”.
Sag Boluñ!
