Attempts to go over grammar she thought she already knew were met with impatience and frustration, although any new vocabulary was diligently written down to be committed to memory. Ulan had explained before that it was important to keep the students happy, to be nice to them, and to encourage them. I resisted the urge to tell her what I thought, kept my patience, counted the minutes until the end of the lesson and wondered if I should buy some garlic.
I’m really beginning to hate giving Talking Club lessons to Elementary classes. It’s just no fun, you have to think for them, feed them every single sentence and coax the words out of them. It’s like getting blood out of a stone sometimes. I’m also getting really fed up with having no regular classes, and having no idea of who I’m teaching next. How can I prepare for a lesson if I don’t know who or what I’m teaching until 2 minutes before the class starts? This means I’m trying to make sense of the grammar while I’m teaching it. Do you know how many tenses there are in the English language? I don’t, and to make it worse students from different schools have been told different things, so the arguments range between 12 and 26 tenses, and of course as an Englishman I’m supposed to know exactly how many there are. I haven’t a clue.
The one bright spot in the day was the class at 5.40; they’re Intermediate but this is more due to their grammatical mistakes rather than their lack of knowledge of English, and they are at least prepared to try to speak. I don’t have to feed them the lines: they are the only students which actually ask each other questions instead of waiting for me to ask them individually.
The other classes, however, are hard work. Maybe they’re just not used to me as a teacher. I remember that it took quite a long time to gain the trust of the students in Pakistan, so it would be naïve to expect everything to work smoothly so quickly here. But the chaos of the school, the fact that I rarely teach the same students each day, the fact that I can’t prepare for the lessons, and the fact that all I want to do is sleep, means it’s difficult to build up any kind of rapport with the students.Picture: my bed. It may not be that comfortable, but I would like to spend more time in it.
10.30, home and finally sleep. All I do is sleep, eat and teach; I’m not seeing anything of Bishkek, let alone Kyrgyzstan. I still sleep badly at night, I don’t eat enough and I’m not enjoying the teaching. I’m not having much fun, and tomorrow I start at 7.40 again.
2 comments:
Hey Ben. Thanks for supplying us daily updates, even with a skew of a couple of days (one week?). I hope "now" things are going better, and if not, why don't you consider leaving the school for what it is and have some fun in Kyrzygstan; travelling round and visiting the interesting sites? Anyway, I hope your stay has improved for the better!
"A skew of a couple of days"? I've been here for more than 5 weeks and my blog is at Day 13.
As for leaving the school.... the thought has crossed my mind on several occassions, but I've decided not to for a number of reasons:
-Ulan has done a lot to help me and it would mean leaving him short-staffed;
-the Aiesec girls have also done a lot to help me, and I think they would be really depressed if the first ever trainee to Kyrgyzstan decided to drop out of his placement;
-as you know from my time in Dartford, I tend not to give up and leave when things aren't easy;
-travelling alone isn't much fun. In any case, Kyrgyzstan isn't like Rome with "interesting sites" that you can visit alone. This country is more about the scenery and the people, and you need to know the latter to get to know the former. If I just go off by myself I'll spend a lot of time in taxis and marshrutkas and won't get to know anybody or anywhere interesting. And I don't speak Russian!
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