Day 5 – teaching begins

My feeling yesterday that the school was a little chaotic was wrong: ‘little’ is an understatement. Ulan wasn’t sure where he wanted me, which classes needed teaching, and which teachers were available. To be fair to him, this does seem to be out of his control. New students arrive every day, other students drop out without warning as they realise that this year they have to focus on their university lectures (in universities in Kyrgyzstan, students must attend their lectures or they are not allowed to sit the exams), and one teacher had come back to work not fully healthy. In a small school like this, each teacher makes up 15% of the staff, so one absentee makes quite a difference.
Having said that, when I ask Ulan which class I’m teaching, his first response is always “What day is it?” and then “What time is it?”
When Ulan isn’t teaching, he’s interviewing prospective pupils, fielding questions from current pupils, and trying to keep his staff happy. The school is his business, its success determines whether or not he earns a living, and he is there from 7.30am until some time after 10.30pm every day, as well as Saturday and often Sunday work too. And he repairs the toilet, which breaks every couple of days.

Without a proper timetable prepared for me, each lesson began with Ulan saying something like: “Take this class. They’re Intermediate. Talking Club. Talk to them, involve them, get to know them, I’ll be with you in 5 minutes.’ These, of course, were five Kyrgyz minutes, which often lasted longer than the lesson itself.
Mostly I was greeted with curiosity from the students. Who was I, where was I from, what was I doing there. And, usually after they'd found out my name, whether I was married. Invariably my reply of 'No' was met with the question "Why not?"

Below: Chenghiz, sitting in the school office. You see? There are people here called Chenghiz.

Naturally, the students enjoy Talking Club more than grammar, and when I tried to teach grammar to one of the “less-able” Intermediate Classes I soon ran into trouble. If a student doesn’t understand the grammar, you can try to explain it. If a student doesn’t speak English well enough to understand the explanation, somebody else in the class can explain it to them. If none of the students speaks English well enough, what do you do?
One class asked me outright: “If you don’t speak Russian, how are you going to teach grammar to us?” [Actually: "You no speak Russian... teach grammar???"] That was a good question. I didn’t have a good answer. They did: “How about we have Talking Club today?” Since it was my second day, I decided this was a very good idea.
I mentioned this problem to Ulan, and he wisely decided not to send me to teach grammar to any more Elementary classes.

At the end of the day I was knackered, but still, sleep took a few hours to come. Jetlag when flying from west to east is meant to be harder to shake off, but I’d been hoping to adjust more quickly than this. If I could fall asleep before midnight, I could get up at a reasonable time and adjusting would be easy. But lying awake until after 3am makes it difficult to wake up in the morning.