Day 11, Week 2: A full Monday

In to work at 07.40. Who and what will I be teaching? An Elementary class, Talking Club – of course. That’s a hard way to start the week. These were different classes from Thursday, so I could at least begin without much thinking: “Hello, what is your name?” But in a class with only a few students this needed some padding.

Next class: Elementary Talking Club. Great. “Hello, what is your name….?” the excitement was killing me, but the pen joke still got a chuckle. This was a harder class to teach: many of the students don’t seem to want to speak English, and it’s a struggle to get them to read the words I write on the board: “My name is…….” While I think to mysekf ‘Come on, say it, just say the word I’m pointing to on the board… hello? Anybody home?’ I remembered something a teacher of mine used to say to some of his pupils many years ago: ‘the lights are on, but nobody’s home.” I can understand what he meant.

I’m not helped by the fact that in Russian you say “My name Igor” (i.e. without ‘is’.) The less intelligent students don’t see the point in using the verb so they simply leave it out.
And then another Elementary Talking Club… I did manage to teach one Intermediate class that I’d covered last week, but only three students were there so that was a little odd.

Picture: some of the wall-hangings in the entrance to the school. I'm not sure I teach with love or with courage, and I certainly don't teach people how to fly.

I also had a one-to-one lesson. This was with a charming young lady called Selena: 18 years old, I think, with as much warmth as a stone at the bottom of a pond. As far as I could make out, she had been teaching herself English in addition to what she had learned in school, which meant she had a wide-ranging vocabulary and wide-ranging grammatical mistakes. It’s strange to hear somebody speak English reasonably well and yet with so many very basic errors: the meaning is clear enough but the grammar is appalling. With her warmth and her wit the lesson just flew by: as far as she was concerned her English was nearly good enough to sit the Toefl test and she just needed some extra lessons to refine her knowledge; as far as I was concerned she just needed to suck the blood out of somebody’s neck to revive her personality. She certainly didn't need to be taught how to fly, she could just turn into a bat and fly back to her coffin.

I can’t say I was delighted when I learned I would be teaching her on a daily basis.

Home, lunch, sleep. In the afternoon I had my ‘regular’ classes, or at least my ‘regular’ hours. Ulan sent me to whichever class he thought needed covering. Students were unimpressed at having their regular teacher replaced by somebody who spoke no Russian and I was unimpressed at not having any regular classes to teach. Only my 5.40 class was familiar, and it was nice to walk into a room and to recognise most of the faces.

Picture: since I was asked, here's a photo of my toilet. Note the colour of the carpet.

By the end of the day at 10pm I was exhausted. The good news is that the teachers are paid on a daily basis (so no repeat of my Serbian adventure when they managed to dodge paying me for my 7 weeks of “work”), and even better is that Ulan is grateful for the overtime. With the extra class in the evening (from 8.30 – 10pm), my salary for the day was equal to three days of normal work. The bad thing is that at the end of the day all the teachers have to wait to be paid, but of course first Ulan deals with any students that have questions or problems, so it means sitting and waiting for roughly half an hour when all you want to do is go home and collapse into bed.