Back To School Blues

August 26, 2009

September and the first day of school are quickly approaching and I am terrified. Still, I am doing my best to enjoy the last few days of summer. The sun is still really hot, but there have been some nice breezes in the last few days that make my daily treks to school for teacher meetings enjoyable. The walks have also been more interesting and even slightly treacherous as the street is all but covered with dry harvested sunflowers. The dead brown flowers are piled in huge heaps every few yards on either side of the street, somehow reminding me of the aftermath of a mass genocide (I know its morbid, but that is seriously what went through my head). The harvested seeds lay spread out on the edges of the pavement in perfect rectangles neatly lined by stones, and the heads of the flowers spill all the way into the middle of the street so that cars have to weave around the flowers and seeds like an obstacle course. A few houses have also laid out their homemade mud bricks to dry on the street, and I would hate to see a car weave around a sunflower pile to crash into a pile of bricks.

It is strange to be really busy again. I have been lesson planning all day today, and yesterday I spent several hours on it too, in addition to having a Kyrgyz lesson and helping my host mom and sister do yet more canning (salad this time). I was apparently an essential part of this process because Apa and Aijamal are observing Ramadan (locally called Orozo) which started on Friday. They needed me to taste the salad to make sure it had enough salt, and they couldn't do it without breaking their fast. I told them I didn't know how salty it was supposed to be, since I had never made canned salad before, so they had to call over a neighbor anyway.

I don't know how they are doing this fast. I would have to cheat for sure. It is too darn hot and the days are still really long. They pretty much sleep all day, but still. My host dad isn't fasting because he works at a hospital and needs to keep his energy up all day. I am glad, because I would feel really guilty if I was the only one in the house not fasting. At dinner time we all sit down together and Apa tells me and Ata to eat, but she and Aijamal wait the five minutes, or whatever, until they get the official go-ahead from TV that it is sunset. The TV station shows some footage of Mecca and some Kyrgyz imam in a kalpak says some stuff and then we all omen together. I didn't do it the first time because I figured this was a Muslim thing, and being as I am neither Muslim nor understand a word of what the imam said, I probably shouldn't participate in the prayer, but Apa and Ata gave me the stink eye, so I did it. Whatever, a little extra prayer never hurt anyone, and it is nice that they want me to participate in their family activities.

So, back to me being terrified about school starting. Right now, I am more or less fuming with frustration. I am sorry to say that I expected a lot more out of my counterpart. She had been telling me about all of these conferences and teacher trainings that she attended where she learned new and innovative teaching strategies. I had assumed that I could learn a lot from her about teaching. Yesterday I had to confront her directly about the specific form her lessons usually take (she has been skirting around the topic all summer) and I almost screamed when she told me the answer. She typically writes a text on the board, the students copy it down and note the new words, and then the next day they read aloud the text or recite sections by heart. When I asked how she teaches grammar, she said that she assigns exercises once or twice a month. That is it.

I hoped that we might have had a misunderstanding, so we moved on to lesson planning. She asked me if I had prepared topics for the first two quarters. I said no, because I don't know the level of the students and I also don't know the required curriculum. I suggested that we start out all grades with a review of the basics: alphabet, numbers, greetings, simple present tense, etc. and go from there. She seemed confused, and then I realized why when she showed me last year's calendar of “topics” along with the books that they came from.

The books are absolutely horrible. The problem isn't only that they are old and made up almost entirely of Communist propaganda, but they don't teach anything. There is no explanation of grammar and very few exercises. It is all just short texts with a few translated vocabulary words. The list of “topics” looks something like this: 1. “Knowledge is Power” 2. A.S. Pushkin 3. Anna Rodinova 4. Kyrgyz Folklore 5. Jack London 6. “John Reed: Champion of the Russian Revolution” 7. “For Peace and No Alcohol” 8. “The Moscow International Book Fair” 9. “The Future Belongs to the Youth” 10. “Golden Rules of Etiquette for Children” okay, you get the idea. Do you see any pattern at all? Neither did I. If you continue on, you will find some more Russian authors and poets and a lot of English-sounding names that I have never heard of. Why would Kyrgyz students read about Russian authors in an English class? That's what their Russian literature classes are for. And aren't there enough authors in the English language that they don't have to pick out ones so obscure that a British lit. buff like me hasn't even heard of them?

What is really sad is that these are the good “topics.” Thank God they skipped over the ones in the book like “V.I. Lenin Visits the Orphanage,” or “My Mother is a Member of the Communist Party.” I'm not even kidding you, that is straight from the book. I really need to make a copy of the “Lenin Visits the Orphanage” story. It was the first page I saw when I looked at the books I was going to be using back in June, so it has a special place in my heart.

I hope that all this work I have been doing has not been setting me up to getting taken advantage of. I hate that they are looking at me like I am the expert, but I can't deny that my ideas for teaching must be better than theirs, even though I have virtually no experience. My fear is that the students might be going from getting Russian imperialistic bullshit fed to them from those textbooks to getting American imperialistic bullshit from me. I can only teach what I know, so there is going to be a lot about America in my lessons, and at this point I can't help but believe that I have better teaching methods than the local teachers. So, am I really any better than the Soviets and their atrocious textbooks? Or am I creating a moral dilemma out of nothing? For those of you who like philosophical problems, this would be a good time to use the comments option on the blog. A little discussion might be nice.

August 28, 2009

I'm still terrified about the start of school, but I am beginning to feel better because I decorated my classroom yesterday. It now has a tiny bit of color and at now at least there are a few items in the room that don't pre-date the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Thanks to Ramadan, I am finally getting into the kind of eating routine I initially wanted to get into. Apa is finally letting me fry my own eggs or whatever else for my own lunch. I'm going to try to keep this up because it is working out well for me. Ramadan has also started some interesting conversations with my family about religion. We can't get very far because of the limits of our language, but it is still very interesting. My host dad was trying to make some sort of comparison between Mecca and what he called “Square Time” (Times Square. Remember, he went to America), but I didn't get it. I think it is interesting that several Kyrgyz people who speak a little English have asked me (upon learning that I am Christian) “We Muslims believe in God, who do you believe in?” I find it hard to believe that they don't know enough about Christianity to know that we have the same God, but nevertheless, it is interesting that they ask. Once in Osh, I had a conversation with an English-speaking girl at the pool that went something like this: “We are Musilm. Do you like Muslims? What religion are you? Vegetarian?”

Last night I had a dream that I was walking around in Uzgen when I came upon a Burger King sign. I reminded myself not to get too excited, because there is a Burger King sign in Osh in front of a Kyrgyz gamburger stand (a gamburger doesn't even slightly resemble a Burger King burger). When I got closer, I realized that there was actually a Burger King building behind the sign, but when I got up to the door, it was boarded up. In my dream, I moped away, but around the corner, there was a McDonald's. This time, the door was open and the lights were on. I ran inside, but I was fooled again. It was only a Kyrgyz store that smelled like a Kyrgyz store: stinky fish and greasy kielbasa. I bought some yogurt and woke up.

Now I am eating some yogurt that I bought yesterday at the Kyrgyz store in the center of my village. It tastes like greasy kielbasa because it was sitting next to it in the fridge at the store. Yuck.