Day 4 – A new week, a new school.

Ulan had asked me to come and sit in on some lessons in the afternoon, to get a feel for how the school worked. After another night of sleeping badly, I slept most of the morning; not the best way to recover from jet-lag.

The school is a small one, with just four classrooms. Lessons last one hour and twrnty minutes, beginning at 7.40 in the morning and running until 8.30 at night. Students attend one lesson per day: they go to ‘normal’ school or university or work during the day, and pay to come to this school for additional English lessons. In theory this means the students all come because they want to learn. It also means that teachers have to keep the students happy or else they’ll take their money somewhere else. This makes it very different from the school I taught at in Pakistan, where pupils attended the school all day, wore uniforms, stood up when a teacher entered the room and called the male teachers “sir”. At this school in Bishkek, students are on first-name terms with the teachers.

Writing about the school is a bit difficult. My contract obliges me not to divulge information about the school to outsiders. On the other hand, I still haven’t signed a contract (three weeks after arriving, this sentence is still true.) Talking of other things I haven’t done, nobody has said anything about an HIV/AIDS test, so the test I had done in Germany really does seem to have been a waste of time and money.
There are two kinds of lessons: Grammar, and Talking Club. Their names are pretty self-explanatory. The students are divided into three basic categories: Elementary, Intermediate and Advanced, though there are variations within these.
Picture: The entrance to the school. Note the colour of the carpet.

I’d spent Sunday evening looking over the grammar books. These are American, so the vocabulary includes words like “gotten”, “drop-by”, and “apartment”, the spelling has lots of ‘z’s all over the place in words like “organize’ but a depressing shortage of the letter ‘u’ in words like “color”; of course, there is a strong tendency to boldly split infinitives as much as possible.
[Note for anybody confused: correct spellings/words are: got, flat, organise, colour; and infinitives should not be split.]

The first day of lessons was interesting. Teaching the Elementary classes looked difficult, but Talking Club with the more advanced students looked like it had the potential to be enjoyable. I had the feeling that the school was a little chaotic, but like in other former Soviet countries the school year begins on 1st September, so it was the second day of a new term for everybody. In any case, Kyrgyz people are not the best organised in the world. In fact, they’re probably the least organised people I’ve met. And when it comes to being disorganised, I know what I’m talking about.