Day 7: the first “full-day”

I hoped that working from 7.45am to 8.40pm would be an exception and not a regular thing. I was right, but not for the reasons I thought.
The lessons passed in a slow blur and I by the end of the day I didn’t remember too much about any of them. Each lesson in the morning was Talking Club with Elementary students; each class was really hard work to teach; each lesson began in the same way: “Hello, what is your name?” Sophisticated humour was introduced when, remembering the confusion my name caused in Pakistan, I made very clear that my name was not in any way associated with a writing instrument even though it rhymes with my name. It’s a simple joke but it gets a chuckle every time, and it’s a good way to start a lesson with people possessing a very limited knowledge of English. “Teach a man to fish and you’ll feed him for life,” goes the saying. Make a student laugh and you’ll have his attention for the next 3 minutes.
Picture: jokes can be made of this.

It’s not that the lessons weren’t enjoyable, it was just that I was overwhelmed by all the different names and faces and my sleep-deprived brain couldn’t cope with the endless repetition of “Hello, what is your name?” There were plenty of nationalities: mostly Kyrgyz, plenty of Russians, and the occasional Kazakh and Uzbek, and even a few Tatars. Interestingly, it seems that Jews are considered not to be Russian (and don’t consider themselves to be Russian either) and are a thought of as a separate race. On the other hand, this is the first Muslim country I’ve visited where Jews can openly admit to being Jewish.

After a lunch break it was back to the school for my regular classes. By 8.30 I was exhausted and looking forward to sleeping. Ulan had bad news: he’d taken on extra students and now there were three classrooms full of students waiting to be taught. Apparently he’d told them to come for the lesson but hadn’t expected so many to turn up on the first day; his plan had been to stick them all in one room and teach them himself, but now he had too many students for that. Feeling guilty about letting him down, I and the only other teacher left reluctantly agreed to teach one more class each. The only good thing was that Ulan promised to pay us double for the overtime – my last boss at Carrot & Bush refused to pay me anything for overtime, let alone double, so this made a refreshing change. Working is much easier when your boss isn't a complete arse. The bad news was that this class will now be ‘mine’ and I’ll have to teach them every day – so working from 7.45am to 8.40pm will not be a regular thing because I’ll be working until 10pm instead.