Kiddos

I've spent a lot of time complaining about school, or how child shenanigans make me want to choke said children. At the end of most days I usually feel pretty useless and superfluous in the classroom knowing that most of my kids still can't say simple things such as, "This is my pencil," and they've been in English class for over three years. These crappy feelings are amplified any time I try to ask them, "How was your weekend," which is a question I pose at the start of every week to my upper grades and they still struggle to give me an answer. Tests, and grading said tests, are also heartbreaking, as it's physical proof that I really am not doing anything for these kids. It's a sneaky hate spiral where I constantly am wondering why I, an anthropology major out of school for almost five years, thought it would be a good idea to go to a country, where I don't speak the language, to teach kids my own language with it's insane rules and contradictions.

And then little things happen.

I'll come into a classroom and the first grader, who is from Russia and didn't know any Georgian so has been learning Georgian and English at the same time, will run over to me with a notebook, throw her arms around me and then show me, with an insane amount of pride, something she drew. And she'll tell me what all of the things on the paper are, in English or in broken Georgian, as well as what color they are and if she likes them or not. She's always done with her in-class work first, and it's always perfect, and I always make sure I give her, secretly, an extra sticker. Nothing big or flashy - just one of the tiny, colorful smiley face stickers they all go bananas for. She'll put it on her workbook page, and then hide it with her hand so the other kids can't see that she has a smiley and they don't, and we'll wink at each other because we know something no one else does, and then suddenly 9 am doesn't seem quite so early.

Or I'll get assaulted after a particularly trying fifth grade lesson by two of the girls - one, the top in the class, and the other her very shy friend. They'll stammer and ask me if I like My Little Ponies, and I'll exclaim happily, "I DO! I love it! It is one of my favorites!" (What? I can be a 26 year old and love the Little Ponies, dammit!). And then we will yap at each other about who our favorites are, and even the shy girl who doesn't like to speak up in class will grin and go on and on about Pinkie Pie, and they will pull out their notebooks and show me page after page of My Little Pony drawings. So now it's once a week, after class, that they will stop me on my way out of the room and show me their latest drawings, and we'll talk about how silly Spike is, or how Rainbow Dash always does the craziest things. It's my favorite part of dealing with the hell that is fifth grade.

Walking into school when it's grey and drizzling and an altogether dreary morning, one of my little fourth graders with particularly bad body odor will be waiting by the front door of the school so that he can give me a hug and a "good morning!!" before he runs off to class. There's a fifth grader who likes to lurk at the top of the stairs so she can hop over to me, arms outstretched, and grab me to give me a kiss on the cheek and say "hello" cheerfully. How can mornings be crappy after that?

I still think it's hilarious that all of my kids, with the exception of my too-cool-for-school sixth graders, love Hangman. Like, love love it. As in, beg me to play it. They come running up to me, their hands at their throat, mimicking choking (which was really startling the first time it happened, as I thought I was going to have to perform some heimlich maneuver bullshit or deal with a dead child and I was SO not prepared for that kind of thing!), saying, "Mas! Mas! Chamokchobana!" ("Teacher! Teacher! Hangman!")

My after school club originally started out as a place where kids could get help with their homework. Not many came for that, however, preferring to play Hangman endlessly on the board. They're for the most part pretty good at it, except for one girl. She is probably my favorite student of all, and she is just the absolute worst at Hangman.

What is that I don't even...

When I first started at school, I couldn't get her to talk for the life of me. She couldn't read, she didn't like speaking, even in Georgian, to the other kids. I asked my coteacher if she was alright, and was told that she is very slow. She was never called on, never offered her hand for answers, and most of the time she just stared out the window. Anna always came to English club but never participated, instead standing off to the side of the gaggle of voracious kids who all wanted to shout letters out for Hangman. And then one day, as I was walking home, I heard running little footsteps coming from behind me, and the third grader appeared at my side. She smiled shyly and said, "Hello." I was so elated that she was speaking that I may have been a little overly enthusiastic in my response of, "Hi! And how are you?" But she giggled and very haltingly said, "Fine." She giggled even more at my poor attempts of Georgian for talking about the day, and then we parted ways when she went into her house.

But the next class period, she was looking in her book and following along. The next English club I threw on a movie on my computer for the kids, and she and I went to the back of the room and worked on reading. She slowly started to raise her hand in class more to read passages or give answers. My favorite part of her transformation, though, has been her responses in dealing with the other students, particularly ones who give her crap and say she is stupid, for her to be quiet and give up trying to read. Because now she'll yell at them and keep going, and it's awesome, and I want to fucking put a million lights on her and say, "You will never be able to touch this kid as long as she wants to keep going, you little assholes!"

But I can't do that, so I just give her a lot of high fives.

She really is terrible at Hangman. Even using a book to help her with words, they always get misspelled anyway, and games always take a way long time to play. But it's alright, cause she's getting better with distinguishing between "e" and "i" (which is a super common problem across the board with most of my kids), and she'll also draw stick figures with Mickey Mouse ears. And that's all sorts of awesome.

The fact of the matter is that I will never be an effective teacher for these kids. I lack the necessary fluidity in their native language to really actually properly teach them the differences between adverbs and adjectives, or how verbs change based on their tenses. I'm pretty much demonstrative only for those things, and that's fine. But I think I'm way better for these kids than I give myself credit for (she said humbly), in that I provide a lot of positive reinforcement for them even TRYING. Especially the super shy ones. Sometimes all they need are a few weeks of friendly smiles for attempting to read, or give an answer from the book. I completely disagree with how my teachers will just write off students who are struggling, or scream at them for making mistakes, since making mistakes while speaking is a whole part of learning a language. But that's a whole cultural can of worms I can't even attempt to break into, so all I can do is work around it, offering whatever kind of support and encouragement I can to these fairly disheartened kids.

And it must be working, because sometimes I get a bunch of little flowers from my little kids.

An Unsent Letter

Dear Punky 5th grader,

You are not as badass as you think you are. First off, you are in 5th grade. Secondly, you weigh like 70 pounds. And lastly, it's hard to take you seriously when you are wearing a Hello Kitty hoodie. So shut your pie hole and stop sassing!

Just sayin'.

Love, 

Me

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.

I'm mobile, bitches!

I've finally gotten my iPhone all hooked up to Georgian cell towers, so check my badass self out! Subsequently, this might become more like a Twitter feed, with numerous smaller posts, but I'll still do big uploads every few days. Gotta keep things interesting, after all! 

I'm currently sitting in the teachers lounge at school. This is the fourth day so far, and I've a break between classes, so I figured I'd give some first impressions on being a teacher. 

First off, English is stupid. I've known this for a while, but having to teach all the rules and stuff to kids, and watch their tiny heads explode from definite articles, prepositional words, and messed up spelling, has only solidified this opinion. Especially coming off a language like Georgian, which fundamentally is logical, simple, and whose alphabet is specially tailored to it. Also, these kids start learning English and Russian in first grade, on top of Georgian. So that's three different alphabets, three different grammatical structures, and three different pronunciations. Georgian kids are badasses, and I am officially done complaining about how hard it is to learn a language. 

Secondly, the staff here has not disappointed in terms of hospitality. They all are very welcoming and nice, and always try to talk to me either in broken English or my ridiculously bad Georgian. I think it's funny that no matter how hard you try and inevitably slaughter the language, they will laugh at you, but then help out. Being from a supportive, somewhat mean family (I say "mean" because we all make fun of each other a lot, and that's how we show affection...), this isn't that out of the ordinary. I also really like it when they make fun of my abysmal Georgian and then hand me a cup of chacha and make me eat dumplings and cake. 

My coteachers have also asked me if I like Georgia every single day. It's like their go to "we should try to talk to the retarded American" question. This question also, every day, inevitably leads to "do you like Georgian men? Do you want a Georgian husband?" I've found that men here know one English word - "boyfriend." Any time I try to use an excuse like "Oh, I have a boyfriend in America," which I totally don't but I don't feel like being endlessly courted by men here so I lie, all the men in the room erupt in ridiculously hearty laughter. They then tell me they've heard that before, and since Georgian men are the best I will soon change my mind. Given that I can't cook, and they sure as hell can't either, if I ever did end up with a Georgian man we would shortly starve, so I think I'll stick to non Georgians for now. 

Finally, the school itself is...if I said rough shape that would be giving it way too much credit. It would fit in well in Detroit, lets say that. The walls are fucked and cracking, I've yet to find a light that works, the stairs have holes in them, the railing is messed up, and some rooms have that musty "haven't had a breeze blow through in 40 years" smell. But none of that matters. The kids don't notice, and neither do the teachers. All the rooms have drawings on the walls, and posters and flowers and curtains and tablecloths on the front desk. After I initially noticed all of these negatives, I stopped seeing them. 

The kids are all very bright, very enthusiastic, and they pick up on things incredibly fast. One of my co teachers called this school a big family - she meant it literally, as we have several pairs of mothers and daughters, sisters in law, brothers in law, etc. But it also functions as an extended and unrelated family due to it's size. My biggest class is 10 kids, the smallest is 4. The kids all know, respect, and generally like their teachers, and there is a level of familiarity present that you don't really find Stateside. 

So these are just first impressions, and I'm sure they'll change and that come mid semester I'll be frustrated by something. But for now I'm gonna just chill and suss out my place in this crazy chaotic workplace.