The start of the school year ...
There are two bathrooms in my school. They're labelled in Kazakh. One is labelled "Bathroom". This is the women's bathroom. The other is labelled "Women's bathroom". This is the one I'm supposed to use. Suffice to say, this was explained to me too late.
School has begun, more or less. In Kazakhstan, the beginning of a school year isn't an intantaneous event, but a process that lasts a couple of weeks. I'm not supposed to start teaching until next week - Peace Corps asks that schools let volunteers observe classes for a week before starting their actual work. There's a lot to learn. But I did teach a class when the teacher just didn't show up for a class I was going to observe and I felt bad for the students. This is normal. At one point, the director of the school called a half-hour all-teacher meeting in the middle of the school day. She had some paperwork for them to do, I think. So the children wrestled in the hallways. Once as I was walking from one class to the other, students briefly stopped kicking each other to ask if I would teach their class, since they didn't know where their teacher was. I managed to get them into the classroom and seated, and was just wondering what I was going to do next when the teacher showed up.
To make up for this temporal ambiguity in the effective start of school, they have a big party for the symbolic start of school, the first bell. On September first there is almost no school, but the children all come with their families and listen to speeches by dignitaries give them flowers, and listen to younger students sing Karaoke. I was a dignitary! I gave a short speech in Kazakh. I stood up and said "Good morning" first in English, then in Kazakh. When I spoke the Kazakh - a foreigner speaking Kazakh!- the audience gasped. The Karaoke? This one little seven-year-old wore a silvery shirt and white pants and did a big MTV-style arena-pop performance. He was a good singer, and a convincing dancer. But through his white pants the world could see that he was wearing underwear with cartoon animals on it. At the end, they run around the audience ringing a little hand bell and the school year begins! Then everyone goes home.
I'm very optimistic about teaching math. I'm being paired with a good, down-to-earth teacher, who's also the vice-principal. It's very fortunate that I speak Russian, since I was able to request that, at least for now, they get parallel math instruction in Kazakh while I try to get their English up to the level where they can get new material in English. It turns out that there's a lyceum in town that has been teaching the English of math for years, and they'll be able to help. Math classes here are one day of lecture followed by two days of students doing problem on the board while their classmates pretend to follow along and the teacher berates them. ("You don't know the answer?" one teacher asked the poor student, holding the chalk and staring sadly at the board, everyone's eyes on his back. "Then you don't know math," she said.) There's room for some different pedagological methods, and I'm free to conduct my English math lessons however I want to.
Fall has already come to Northern Kazakhstan. The leaves are turning, and the nights are cold. The clouds burn off in the late afternoon. Soon it will be necessary to buy a big furry hat. I can't wait. For the hat.
School has begun, more or less. In Kazakhstan, the beginning of a school year isn't an intantaneous event, but a process that lasts a couple of weeks. I'm not supposed to start teaching until next week - Peace Corps asks that schools let volunteers observe classes for a week before starting their actual work. There's a lot to learn. But I did teach a class when the teacher just didn't show up for a class I was going to observe and I felt bad for the students. This is normal. At one point, the director of the school called a half-hour all-teacher meeting in the middle of the school day. She had some paperwork for them to do, I think. So the children wrestled in the hallways. Once as I was walking from one class to the other, students briefly stopped kicking each other to ask if I would teach their class, since they didn't know where their teacher was. I managed to get them into the classroom and seated, and was just wondering what I was going to do next when the teacher showed up.
To make up for this temporal ambiguity in the effective start of school, they have a big party for the symbolic start of school, the first bell. On September first there is almost no school, but the children all come with their families and listen to speeches by dignitaries give them flowers, and listen to younger students sing Karaoke. I was a dignitary! I gave a short speech in Kazakh. I stood up and said "Good morning" first in English, then in Kazakh. When I spoke the Kazakh - a foreigner speaking Kazakh!- the audience gasped. The Karaoke? This one little seven-year-old wore a silvery shirt and white pants and did a big MTV-style arena-pop performance. He was a good singer, and a convincing dancer. But through his white pants the world could see that he was wearing underwear with cartoon animals on it. At the end, they run around the audience ringing a little hand bell and the school year begins! Then everyone goes home.
I'm very optimistic about teaching math. I'm being paired with a good, down-to-earth teacher, who's also the vice-principal. It's very fortunate that I speak Russian, since I was able to request that, at least for now, they get parallel math instruction in Kazakh while I try to get their English up to the level where they can get new material in English. It turns out that there's a lyceum in town that has been teaching the English of math for years, and they'll be able to help. Math classes here are one day of lecture followed by two days of students doing problem on the board while their classmates pretend to follow along and the teacher berates them. ("You don't know the answer?" one teacher asked the poor student, holding the chalk and staring sadly at the board, everyone's eyes on his back. "Then you don't know math," she said.) There's room for some different pedagological methods, and I'm free to conduct my English math lessons however I want to.
Fall has already come to Northern Kazakhstan. The leaves are turning, and the nights are cold. The clouds burn off in the late afternoon. Soon it will be necessary to buy a big furry hat. I can't wait. For the hat.
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