Potato Week
Well, university started here at the beginning of September, but our schedules are still irregular. Case and point, this week is ‘potato week.’ A working-holiday (whatever that means) for staff and teachers to go to the villages and harvest potatoes. It is not scheduled in anyway, but everyone knew this week was coming.
My work right now involves co-teaching about four 80 minute classes with my counterpart. We have had little time together since a recent death in her family has taken her off guard. I also have started two English clubs for teachers in my faculty: TOEFL Prep and Conversation. We meet once a week for each. I will also be observing and doing needs assessments to find out what types of trainings my zafkafedra (faculty head) would like to have me help with. Other than university work, I will also be training with the local FORUM English Association. I’m very excited to work with these ladies. Several are already great leaders and motivated to improve the quality of English education. Interestingly, the English teachers here have more opportunities to receive continuing education trainings or participate in professional development programs than do other teachers. Hopefully, some of the methods we present will also transfer to other disciplines as teachers share what they’ve learned. The biggest challenge that I see right now, and this is not unlike teachers in any country, is finding out how to motivate teachers to think critically and reflectively about their own teaching.
For fun, I also volunteer to teach short English classes twice a week at a local daycare. In part, it is so I will have a link to my host family even though I’ve moved into my own apartment. My 6 year old host sister attends the daycare after school. Here kids have a 6 day week, but they only attend classes half of the day. I’m still working out the scheduling for this group. It is proving to be an amusing challenge since most of my little students speak Russian and I don’t. It’s really not fair to ask the 6 year old Kyrgyz-Russian speakers to be translators. Needless to say, we are using lots of mimes, songs, ASL, and pictures.
