Sunday, June 15, 2008

Fly with me

So my clubs have increased exponentially in size. Kids come, have a good time, then show up the next class with their friends, their neighbors, and their cousin visiting on vacation. Folks in the adult club get a sample of what I’m doing in class and then send their kids the next day, older siblings drag along their younger siblings, and so I no longer have classes with only four kids: now I have 20, 25, 15, and promises of more in the weeks to come. It makes planning tricky as I have to teach the kids who showed up to every session and have mastered “Hello, how are you? My name is Aygul” as well as find a way of intensively reviewing the basics for the new kids. Some days it feels like I’m just going in circles repeating old material, reviewing old material, and then running out of time before we can get to the new stuff. I’ve made a kind of peace with myself knowing that these summer clubs are more a symbol of my involvement with the community (they’re open to whoever shows up, while the school-year clubs are only by invitation from the principal and the other English teachers) than actual instruction.

The best part of the summer, however, is the five-day work week. For six months I have lived a six-day work schedule with a single day off (Sunday) to rest, recuperate, and seek out non-Turkmen companionship. When there’s only one day off, it becomes a source of minor anxiety to decide whether to spend that precious time connecting with people at site, going on field-trips with my students, or coming into the city for internet and American people time. But only working Monday through Friday means that on Saturday I can go on field trips and spend time people at site (see below), and then still have AN ENTIRE OTHER DAY to go to Ashgabat and pretend to be American for 5-8 hours on Sunday.

Last week I used my newly discovered Saturday to head with the eighth graders to Serdar Yoly (again) where the picnic was a bit lame until we found the swings. We arrived early, around 7am, before the swarms of kids (and my bio-rhythms) were awake so we had the playground all to ourselves. At first they just sat on the swings swaying slightly, using them basically as mobile chairs. At first I was annoyed – what a waste of a good playground swing! -- but soon it became evident that they didn’t know how to swing. When a boy pushed a girl’s swing, she went may be a foot and started squealing that it was too high. You must understand, I have this thing about swings. Swings are the closest thing we have to self-propelled flight; they simultaneously launch the imagination and create a breeze as the wind whips past your face and through your clothing. So when one of the kids got up to whisper something in a friend’s ear, I stole her swing and was soon getting a good 15 feet of air and terrifying my students that I was about to die. But they’re 16 and not about to be out-done by their stodgy old teacher so before long they were competing for who could get the highest. I even got Altyn, my fellow English teacher, on and up and going strong. The pictures don’t do the morning justice; they doesn’t capture the happy sighs and squeals, the laugher, the flashes of fear, joy, exhilaration, and discovery across their faces as they soared higher and higher. They can’t capture a kid’s first flight.

Saturday, June 7, 2008

The Song of (Brown) Summer

The weather heats up, we pop Benedril pills to be able to sleep and ignore the pools of sweat and flies, and dream of vacations (Turkey with the parents in July) and upcoming conferences (i.e. clubbing, drinking, English language socializing, and, to quote one of my most infamous fellow volunteers, “blowing up”). The stores are overflowing with juicy tomatoes the size of softballs and apricots that look like they came from a Tropicana commercial. The Coca Cola is flowing like a river through my over-caffeinated system and I spend my time playing on the computer, writing letters, watching the same imported movies and TV shows repeatedly, hanging with the host family occasionally, and planning my lessons that continue despite the end of the school year.

My summer clubs began last Monday and I’m working out the kinks of each group’s needs and eccentricities. Out of my 8 English clubs, some have as many as 10 or 11 kids; others have as few as 3 or 4. My adult club has 4: two guys who are at a mildly conversational level and just need help with advanced grammar like the difference between past simple and past perfect continuous (I have to study before class as much as they do) and two guys who don’t know “what is your name?” Each club requires a little creative problem solving. With the younger kids I’m still working out the details (the advanced kids are bored and getting apathetic, the really ignorant are struggling and getting depressed), but I’m a bit proud of what I’m doing with the adult class. I plan two lesson plans at once, each filled with intense worksheets and dialogue constructions. I teach one side of the room and give them an assignment to do on their own. As they work, I run to the other side of the classroom and check up on what the first group has been working on. I advise them, reward them with a sticker for good effort, teach them a little, and then give them another assignment to work on as I run back to work with the other pair. I’m exhausted at the end of the two hours, but it’s the kind of exhaustion that comes after running a race you know you won.

Other than that, my only offerings to the internet void are recommended reading: “Will in the World” by Stephen Greenblatt, which isn’t so much a biography of Shakespeare as an adventure/theology/philosophy/romance/horror book with a strong narrative story and alive, memorable characters. And I hesitate to wildly recommend “Darkly Dreaming Dexter” by Jeff Lindsay and its accompanying Showtime television show as I don’t know what it says about me that I really enjoy a story about a charming, entertaining serial killer. And of course I’m in the middle of a slight “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” series obsession, but that should come as a surprise to few.