Skolashi

After being in the schools for over a month now I think it’s high time for a post on my school that delves a bit more into what’s going on. This is going to be part one, as I doubt I will be able to get everything out of my system without it turning into a novel.

Please note that I have no formal training in education, and that my opinions are all coming based off of having a crappy anthropology degree, as well as being the [successful] result of  crappy American public schools.

I guess the place I should start first off is my schedule. I’ve classes Monday through Friday, with four classes on Mondays and Wednesdays, which are my heaviest work loads. Yes, you heard me. Four classes in one day is the most I work any given week. The rest of the days are either one or two classes. The grades are 1-6, and although TLG strongly encourages us to get into the upper grades (7-12), I’ve elected not to.

Sidenote: I did attend a few of these classes when school first started, but I was way more of a distraction than a help to older kids. Most of them are uninterested about school and their normal teachers to begin with, let alone some random foreigner, and the ones that actually are engaged in class will endlessly hit you with a slew of highly personal questions every.single.class, much to the frustration of your host teacher. I figured it would be better if I just stopped going to these lessons…

So the whole purpose of TLG, and indeed why I am here in Georgia to begin with, is to put native English speakers in English language classrooms around the country. It was a radical new program that began a few years ago by the [at the time of this writing] current president, Mikheil Saakishvili, and it brings in people from America, Canada, and the UK. It’s a pretty great set up, actually. They fly you from your home country to Tbilisi, pay you every month, put you up with a host family that can take care of your dietary needs and creature comforts, give you health insurance and paid vacation, and will also fly you home at the end of your contract.

It used to be that they had two start dates every month, putting the number of foreigners, each month, at 120. Lots of people that did this program were just looking for something to do for a short stint, so they didn’t really invest themselves in the schools or with their families. Some saw it as an opportunity to convert this highly Orthodox country starting when they’re young, and one person was so bold as to actually lock the door of his classroom when his teacher stepped out for a moment and then start preaching his Bible to a whole room of kids. There are horror stories like that riddled throughout the programs history, so it’s no wonder that since last year they’ve cut the number of start dates to two a year and are highly selective with who they bring over. 

Volunteers are not expected, ever, to lead a class, nor teach the students by themselves. Instead, we work with the current English teachers, bringing our Western ideals into the school and helping the kids hear what English is supposed to sound like. When I say "Western ideals," I am basically talking about any type of education method that does not rely on the strictly Soviet style of read-translate-memorize which is so rampant here. 

My two coteachers are on opposite ends of the spectrum. One has been teaching for only a few years, but she's enthusiastic, open to suggestions for activities, lesson plans all the time with me, and has a pretty positive outlook on lessons. The other has been in the teaching business for 47 years. In fact, she had my host dad as a student. While she isn't as super Soviet as other teachers that I've heard of (no corporal punishment, for example!), she never deviates from the read-translate-memorize method I mentioned before. And since she has been teaching for 47 years, and I am her third volunteer, I doubt she's really going to be changing much. Both teachers are technically fluent in English, but their pronunciation of words is highly accented, and there's still a language barrier with them many times. This isn't to say that either of them aren't helpful - they really are, and I'm not trying to bash on them at all. I actually like them a lot, even the older one, who can get slightly terrifying sometimes when she screams in Georgian at the kids. I'm just trying to paint you all a picture of what, and who, I'm working with. 

The books we're using for the early grades are part of a new movement throughout Georgia for teaching English. They're decent enough, and there are a lot of exercises in them that make sense. However, they're ONLY in English. Immersion teaching is awesome and all, but that only works when it's part of a unilateral movement in school and home every single day. Most of my kids have English lessons two or three times a week, with long stretches in between. Added onto that, many times both my coteachers end up speaking mostly in Georgian, and these kids are talking roughly, and this is a very generous estimate, 20 minutes a week in English. Do you know anyone who was able to pick up a language with that little of practice? Cause I don't. 

I can understand for some abstract words, like adjectives and what not, to have a Georgian pairing so the kids can frame the foreign word in their head. However, for vocabulary that has a picture there's zero reason to even think about saying the Georgian word. I've tried to bring this up with my teachers a few times, but they keep reassuring me the students won't understand unless they tell them what it is. I'm skeptical about this, but since I have no idea what they're saying to the kids in class anyway, I'm going along with it for now. Upside is that I'm picking up a lot of vocabulary. I just wish the kids would, too!

The other thing that really bothers me is that these books focus so heavily on reading and writing. There isn't nearly enough practice for the kids to actually speak, which is unfortunate, given that this is where they're really strong. Instead, they’re forced to do the same type of exercises over and over again, never really understanding what it is that they’re saying. One of my coteachers told me the other day that, even in Georgian, kids don’t know what verbs, nouns, or adjectives are. My students are all scraping by based on the examples given in the books instead of freely constructed thoughts. Yet examples aren’t necessarily a guaranteed way to get them to form a sentence since many can’t even copy words down correctly. It’s strange, because they’re not stupid. If I sit there and verbally spell out the words, most of my kids can write them (minus the illiterate ones, of course), but they don’t really put together what the words mean in the overall context of the sentence. I’m going to go ahead and blame this one on inconsistent classes, and having English be the only lessons where the materials are encouraging new types of learning (matching, word banks, fill in the blank, etc) in their otherwise very Soviet style schooling.

So instead of encouraging the kids to speak a lot, and thus actually let them progress quickly through this bullshit language of ours, we bog them down by forcing them to read and write. Most of them don't understand the use of capital letters since Georgian only has one form of their alphabet, so all of their written answers have random capitals thrown in. Classes are full of frustrated students who feel left behind and like they are ultimately hopeless cases. I try to be as positive as I can, and always reinforce kids even TRYING to speak, and they're just now starting to get less shy about yapping at me. Most of them now run up, throw their arms around me in a hug that only a kid can give, and then immediately launch into Georgian at a million miles an hour, giggling when I look confused and say "ar vitsi" ("I don't know"). I'm hoping that this shift means that they'll all start being more involved, and since a few of my more problematic kids have already begun actually doing their homework and volunteering answers, I think we're on the right track. 

Classes are a bit chaotic since speaking out of turn isn't really discouraged. A lot of times lessons are filled with kids talking over each other, or them helping each other out immediately if one is having trouble reading something aloud. It's really cute, actually, and you can see that already in these young ages the cultural dynamics of community and cooperation are instilled. Also, every single kid here would be diagnosed with ADD in the States. And I’m not exaggerating. Even my really awesome kids, who are [mostly] quiet, always do their homework, can recite entire stories at the drop of a hat if you tell them to, would be too “unfocused” and “problematic” in America.  The problem most of the time is the disparity in mastery of the material – a few students per class have it down no problem, some kids are sprinkled in the middle who sort of get it, yet most will fall into the category of not having a clue. The best kids get bored with lessons so they zone out, the worst ones get frustrated by lessons and will just stare into space, and the mid range kids see all their friends being distracted so they, too, become unfocused. And then the teacher screams and stomps her foot, and for a second they’re startled, but nothing really changes. Repeat ad nauseum.

There are no real consequences for bad behavior or not working in class. Grades are sort of given, and while students want high marks their drive to get them is not enough to actually put the work in to earn these. So far we have had one test in my 4^th-6^th grades, and they, for the most part, all failed it. We’re talking scores of 2/40 points failed. Again, it’s not that they’re stupid, because the tests we gave them were straight out of their book, and were all exercises they have been doing for weeks. There’s just zero retention of the material, which is a problem I’ve been trying to tackle but find it challenging when my teachers don’t share the same mindset to sit and drill kids (in fun ways!) until they can answer quickly and accurately. I made flashcards for my first graders for colors, and after two meetings, and two pretty intensive flashcard games, you can bet your ass that those kids can tell you what color your shirt is, and that the leaves on that tree in your yard are green. My one teacher noticed what I was doing with the flashcards, and saw that it actually worked, and has started approaching the alphabet reviews we do in the same way. Even though a few letters still trip them up, these little five year olds are able to identify most characters out of context, and pretty quickly. Being the daughter of a behaviorist, this tickles me.

The only thing that works better than flashcards, however, is Hangman. I never saw my fifth graders try harder than the day we told them if we got through our whole lesson and they understood it that we would play Hangman at the end of class. Everyone was actively engaged, and even my shiest kids were particularly vocal. The best part of it was that after that lesson, they remembered everything from the previous class. They were all smiling, were super happy, and we have yet to have a bad class since this breakthrough. Who knew that bribing some kids with a lousy game of Hangman would ultimately be the proverbial Holy Grail of learning English?

I guess when it comes down to it, bribery really is the way to get what you want out of life.  

This is a page out of my third graders book. I forgot to mention above that while these books fundamentally are decent, they piss me off. The vocabulary that's taught is completely bogus. I think it's outrageous that by third grade, my kids don't know the days of the week, or months of the year, or hell, even ordinal numbers! However, they can tell you all about a space rocket, and Ned the astronaut that lives on a space station. Thanks, dicks.