.like the pine trees lining the winding road

Written October 16, 2008

Work has started to settle down somewhat.

They’ve finally solidified my teaching schedule down to eighteen hours a week, which is definitely an improvement on the ten-hour schedule they had me on before. Not that I necessarily minded the five-day weekend, but, I mean, I did come here for something to do.

As with many things here, the school day is different than in the States. The day is broken up into the morning and the afternoon; high-school age students go to school in the morning, and middle/elementary-age students go in the afternoon. There are six periods in each half of a day: the high schoolers go from 7:30 in the morning until 12:30 in the afternoon, periods one through six, and the younger kids go from 12:40 until 5:35, also periods one through six.

There is no lunch period, though there is a cafeteria that serves up basic fare like pelminis (sort of like Hot Pockets), cookies, a set lunch, juice, and, of course, chai. I can only assume that this is primarily for the teachers, as I figure that the older kids just eat lunch at home, and the younger set eat before they arrive. There is also a library (that I’ve never been in) and a gym that I’ve never seen used. They don’t have PE or art or any real electives. In fact, I think the only choice they get is if they want to study English or German. (In this, English is the clear preference, because I end up with classes of forty students while the German teacher has classes of six. Sometimes, I wish I taught German.)

Frankly, I’m of the opinion that the students don’t go to school nearly long enough. Of course, I’m a product of the seven-hour school day, and people look at me like I’ve got horns growing out of my head when I tell them that, in America, we go to school like it’s a job. But on the days when I don’t have to go into school until the afternoon, my younger host sister is always all up on me like white on rice, since her parents are at work and her older sister’s at school, whining that she’s bored. I’m always like, “You need to be at school, then!”

Anyway, the grades are divided into “classes,” for example there’s 11a, 11b, 11v, and 11g. I have no idea how they decide the divide-ups in grades, but I have heard rumors that the “a” classes are supposedly the most advanced, while the “g” classes are, well, the lowest on the rung. I have no idea if this is actually true or not, as this information comes from other volunteers rather than from my school, but I have noticed that my “a” classes tend to be easier to teach.

But, the kids are assigned these groups when they enter school, and they take all their classes with the same group for their entire school career. That is, unlike American schools, where students are assigned (or choose) different classes and thus each individual has a different schedule, in Kyrgyzstan class 11a has math first hour, and then English, and then Russian, and so on.

Additionally, as I think I mentioned before, school is only mandatory until ninth grade. However, unlike in America, a great percentage of students here don’t continue their education in the public schools, instead opting to go to “college,” where they finish a condensed version of secondary school in one year rather than two, and then start to learn a trade. It’s essentially vocational school. Students who stay in the secondary schools take classes for another two years, and then have the option of going to “institute,” or what Americans call college. This resulted in mass confusion when I first got here and was telling people that I went to college… people would raise an eyebrow and ask me if I had learned to be a hairdresser or a cook. I hate saying I went to “institute,” though. It makes me feel like I went to a mental asylum. (I did go to college very near an old, creepy abandoned mental asylum, though, which I guess is close enough.)

The vast majority of the classes I teach are in the mornings as I’m contractually only supposed to be a secondary school teacher. My main counterpart and I have rigged it so that she primarily teaches the first class of the week – high schoolers take two classes a week in each subject – and I primarily teach the second. This is nice because it means I can basically write my lesson plans during the first class, as my counterpart does most of the teaching, and I only step in to clarify something or answer a question occasionally. When I teach, she basically operates as translator, when the kids don’t know what the hell I’m asking them to do.

Most of my classes are on Tuesdays and Thursdays, periods two through six. I get there for first period, though, because this is when I can discuss things with my counterpart, as she’s busy as hell the rest of the day and I can barely get a question in edgewise. It’s not bad, though, I only have to wake up at six in the morning twice a week, while the other five days I can essentially sleep as late as I want. Plus, as I’m not teaching, I can take my time getting to school, and I have a few minutes to prepare. On the days when I come in the middle of the school day to teach, I always feel a bit… well, rushed.

One of the other bizarre things about the school I teach at are the bells. Namely, the location of the switch that triggers them. The damn thing is just sitting out in the hallway, like a light switch. This means that anybody just walking down the hallway can set it off – including students. It’s not unusual for me to be in the middle of teaching a class when the bell will just randomly go off, likely because some student didn’t want to sit through the rest of his math class or whatever. Even weirder, the bell trumps the actual time, so even if it gets set off by an unauthorized person with twenty minutes left in the period, class is still considered “over.” And, of course, this screws up the schedule for the rest of the day. Who engineered that brilliance?

But, teaching as a whole isn’t bad. Working with the motivated students is definitely worthwhile. However, dealing with the unmotivated ones is ridiculously frustrating, as there’s really very little I can do with them. If students just aren’t working, I make rounds and ask in my angry Russian school-marm voice, “Why aren’t you writing? What are you doing?” I have become expert in these phrases. Usually, it’s enough to get a sheepish look and at least an attempted impression that they’re going to do work.

But with disruptive students that don’t care how much I yell at them or plead with them are another story altogether. As I mentioned earlier, my eighth grade class is just ridiculous because it’s so large, and it’s impossible for me to control it alone. Even with my counterpart, it’s rough going. There is a gang of boys who always sits in the back and basically ignores everything I or my counterpart do, and is generally disruptive.

Corporeal punishment is not unusual around these parts, but I don’t particularly want to employ it, and my counterpart doesn’t either. Unfortunately, there’s very little disciplinary support in schools, which is probably why so many teachers resort to smacking kids around. Beyond the fear of getting physically struck, there’s very little real motivation to behave, as teachers are technically not allowed to kick students out of class, getting sent “to the principal’s office” is unheard of, the school never calls home about students, and there’s a de facto rule against failing. In the case of the eighth graders, I would definitely assign seats to keep the troublemakers farther apart, but unfortunately there are not enough chairs for the students to sit in, making assigning seats impossible. Uhh.

I favor humiliation. Getting singled out is about one of the worst things that can happen here, collectivist culture and all. One day, I dragged one of the boys to the front of the class and basically proceeded to tell him he was stupid. Not exactly one of my most “encouraging students to learn” moments, but he had been in the back of the classroom playing with the ringtones on his cell phone until I took it away, and then he kept on pulling some girl’s hair who was actually trying to participate in the class.

Finally, I stopped the exercise I was trying to coax the rest of the class through, and asked him to complete a sentence. Of course, he hadn’t been paying attention the entire time, so he had no idea what in the hell was going on.

My Russian is still not all that great, but I have enough to be able to lecture at this point. “Why is my Russian better than your English even though I’ve only been studying it for three months? Because you don’t listen. Why don’t you listen?”

You could have heard a pin drop. I made him stand in the corner for the rest of the period. The thing about lecturing in Russian is that it’s usually extremely effective… provided that I don’t mess up the language. The word that really makes me nervous is “to write,” which, if you stress it incorrectly, turns into “to pee.” Yeah. I never say it in front of the class, because I’m just not willing to risk the mistake. Which, I mean, is kind of difficult, given that “to write” is a pretty common classroom word, but I just want to practice it until I get the pronunciation down to a science to save me the repercussions of telling a class to pee in their notebooks. Best case, it would send the class into hysterics, worst case somebody would actually listen to me for once.

Then there was the Hitler guy. You see, there actually used to be a huge population of Germans that lived here, many here during World War II. Their legacy looms about still, even though most of their descendants have repatriated themselves. There are towns here called “Luxemburg, Kant, Rotburt,” and other some such. Unfortunately, part of the legacy they left is that occasionally the Kyrgyz like to shout out “Hail Hitler” to anybody who happens to be of European decent. (Or, rather, “Hail Gitler.” I have no idea why the “H” got replaced with a “G.”)

One of the eighth grade hooligans decided to “Hail Hitler” me in front of the class, where I proceeded to storm over (probably with a very frightening look on my face, judging by the way the class shut up and the kids leaned away), grabbed him by the shirt, and walked him out of the classroom. No, I’m not supposed to kick kids out of class, but I’m not even going to put up with that shit. I told him that when he actually understood what the hell he was saying, he could come back.

Frankly, if I was teaching alone, I’d probably be kicking kids out left and right. See, another one of the oddities about the system here is that if kids don’t show up to class, it’s considered the teacher’s fault. The result of this is that some teachers, rather than actually teach the class, will instead roam the halls looking for errant students. My counterpart is awesome and doesn’t do this, but I think the school knows where their butter is, and she’s an amazing teacher, so they don’t nag on her as much.

But I have no real desire to teach kids who don’t want to learn, so if I didn’t have my counterpart to help me manage the unruly ones, I’d just kick ‘em out. To be honest, I think it’s a better arrangement for everybody; the students who want to learn get more attention because I don’t have to spend valuable class time screaming at miscreants, the miscreants get to go off and vandalize something, and it’s less stressful for me.

But one of the more annoying parts is that, in addition to being a conversational English teacher, I’m supposed to be teaching about English-speaking countries, as stated before. However, this week I just decided to hell with it, because it was damn near impossible to combine the two and have it be an actually efficient lesson. My counterpart, though, still urges me to teach the students about the countries, because apparently there are questions asked about them at the national exams.

Which, I mean, frustrates me, because all I get is 45 minutes a week with these kids. It is physically impossible for me to teach both a comprehensive English lesson AND a social studies class in this time. Especially because my Russian isn’t strong enough to teach a class about foreign countries in it, so I would have to teach the whole thing in English, with my counterpart translating, so it would be extremely slow. I mean, if it’s more important for the kids to know about Australia than conditional statements, I can dig it, but it means that the English lesson is gonna get shelved. And ANY Kyrgyz teacher can teach kids about Australia. I’m here because I speak English, not because I know a hell of a lot about England. (I don’t. I actually know more about Asia. Heh.) Plus, not to mention, there’s no guide to what the students need to know about these countries. My counterpart just told me to teach “the most important things,” but, I mean, what are “the most important things” about New Zealand? The capital is Auckland, my roommate from college studied there, there are a lot of sheep, they call themselves Kiwis, the Lord of the Rings was filmed there, they have a really good rug-

No, wait, this just became awesome. The most important thing about New Zealand is clearly the All Blacks. Most New Zealanders would probably agree.

Fuck yeah, teaching.

Written October 14, 2008

There are good days and there are bad ones.

On the bad days I lay in bed in my dark room devoid of direct sunlight or electricity and bemoan the fact that, despite the fact that I consider my life to have been at least moderately successful thus far, I don’t have a pot to piss in. Literally. On the good days, I think that at least I have a hole with a roof over it, when, at the bare minimum, all you really need is the ground.

When storm clouds gather and I just don’t think I can take it anymore – the flies, the heat, the cold, the endless flash-drag-breathe of gold teeth smoking lips forming words heavy and precious like Faberge eggs scattering away, untouchable, unknowable, always lost – I breathe and try to take solace in vices that aren’t quite mine. Vodka, and tea. This is post-Soviet country, and there’s nothing these things can’t cure, comrade. Clink the glasses, curse the government, down it all, take another round. (This is the ritual for both beverages.)

There is a certain curiousness to this experience, which I guess just comes with the territory, like angry natives. It’s just so lonely, and there’s no other word I can find in all the languages I know to describe it better or less petulantly.

I have definitely started to irrationally hate the word “hello.” While few students are willing to converse in English, most are more than happy to lob their single confident word at the lone foreigner, a two-syllable bomb that explodes on contact and then spreads like a cancer through the hallways or the street until every being with a voicebox is chanting it. It’s my daily collective greeting, an unholy symphony on my way to work, at work, during work, on my way home from work, and at home, where my family speaks Kyrgyz while I’m trying to learn Russian and each unfamiliar noise just beats sour because I don’t understand and God if there’s anything I hate it’s not understanding. And the word “hello.”

Sometimes, when the class is giggling over my mangled Russian or they’re trying to cheat me in the bazaar because they figured out I’m foreign, I just want to pick everybody up by the neck – the merchants, the choir of hello-ers – and scream, “Don’t you know how goddamn hard this is?”

But, I mean, it would be pointless because they don’t. Somehow, I don’t think most people do, because most of us aren’t harebrained enough to go gallivanting off to a country that most people haven’t even heard of without learning any of the native languages and just living with a family and trying to work at the school. It takes a special kind of person to be that variety of stupid.

And, well, that’s me.

It’s not all bad, either. Sometimes I’ll be teaching and somebody’s eyes will go from cloudy confusion to yes and I just want to punch the air in victory because, hey, that’s something. When I conduct transactions in Russian semi-successfully, or see the mountains looming over the city after a rain, or my neighbor’s three-year-old shrieks in joy when I come up the walk (he can’t speak Kyrgyz very well yet, so he hasn’t gotten to “hello”), it’s something, it’s a small thing, a button to tuck in my pocket to worry at when noun declension and the word “hello” threaten to make it all come undone.

Other volunteers are going home. They go back to America all the time; I remember a game I used to play when I was younger, with a large clear plastic tube. Halfway through the tube a bunch of holes were drilled, and you’d insert small plastic sticks perpendicularly through the plastic cylinder, and pour marbles in the top. One by one, you’d remove the plastic sticks and marbles would drop out as the supports lessened; finally, somebody would pull the last one and all the marbles would tumble down to the bottom of the shaft. Well, the supports are lessening and the marbles here are dropping; they have various reasons, too sick, too little structure, just fed up. Sometimes I wonder if the ground’s just going to fall out from under me, and I, too, will drop to the bottom and be on a plane back West, a casualty of so many things that could go wrong.

And if I did at some point, I don’t think that anybody would rightfully blame me for doing so. I mean, this is ridiculously difficult. I could just throw up my hands and be like, “Bitches, please.” But then… I know, for the rest of my life, there would be the small voice in my head, somewhere around my central fissure whispering, “Hey, you, quitter. Yeah, that’s you. Quit-terrrrrr. Who quit? Oh, that was you. Can you spell it? Q-U-I-T-T-E-R. What’s it in Russian? Oh, wait, you don’t know because you QU-“ …and I’d just as soon freeze to death in a Siberian winter with no electricity than deal with THAT.

But, if the quit urge has risen, now is not yet the time. Am I a hundred percent happy here? Well, no. But, to be fair, I’ve never been a hundred percent happy anywhere, so it’s unreasonable to hold this experience up to the bar of “completely satisfied.” Besides, I wasn’t exactly aiming for happy while doing this, because I don’t know what the hell I want. It’s hard to find happiness when you’re not even sure what you’re looking for. I do like being pleasantly surprised, though, and I figure that there’s a slim chance I might find it while knocking about. Maybe snowballs do have a chance in hell, if they end up in the Devil’s Frigidaire. You never know, and that’s my motto, my mantra, my reality.
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I am an amalgam of homesickness; I long for random pieces and places of experience and thus miss them in mosaics. I am homesick for the rolling hills and college ivy of Massachusetts, the old stained couch that’s too big for my living room in Michigan, the random bump in the lawn I named “county hill” in Indiana, my grandmother’s red tool shed in Kentucky, and the bamboo fountain I walked by every day on my way to the train station in Kyoto. These all attack me at different times, and it irritates the hell out of me because, no matter what I do, I can never have all these things. Aren’t you supposed to be homesick for one goddamn place rather than a schizophrenic salad of misplaced nostalgia for random things?

What I do have is rogue gypsy nucleotides messing with my DNA, a job, and a hole in the ground to piss in. Which, despite all my complaining, ain’t all that awful.

I like to think about my (hopefully) dignified, respectable future. Mostly, what I want now is to smile behind my cocktail at those future respectable dinners, where there will be unquestioned electricity and less sheep fat than there is now, to smile beyond the rattle of dinnerware and moderated use of the word “hello,” when people tell me that they want to see the world.

I will smile because I will have lived it.