Waoooooo, we're half way there, WAoooOOOO, living on a prayer!

Well folks, I am now officially half way through my training! Hooray! It’s a little exciting and a little terrifying at the same time. This coming Tuesday will be my site placement interview where they will ask me what I am looking for in a site, what I can personally offer for a site, and my needs and wants for a living situation. Of course, after the interview they’re not going to tell us where we’re placed until about a week before we leave but that’s bureaucracy for you. I know they have their reasons why and for the most part they are good reasons (they have to visit each potential site to make sure there is adequate housing for us and that everything is ready to go and if everything does not meet Peace Corps standards then they have to scramble to find a different site for us. Makes sense not to tell us right away just in case they have to change our site at the last minute) but still, I wanna know noooooooooooow. It’s a bit terrifying though because once we do move to our site then we are all on our own. No language teacher, no cluster-mates, no host family (at least, not the one we’ve gotten to know these last couple months).  Just a person called our “counter-part” who may or may not have worked with Peace Corps before as well as a barrage of new people who we are expected to connect with and form a community that we can call our own. Yikes. Good thing I have two years to figure this out haha.  

This last week we had PST (pre-service training) University which marked our half-way point through training and involved a butt-ton of seminars on how to be a successful volunteer/teacher. It was nice to see all the rest of the people from group 46 and equally nice to hear that no one from my group has ET’ed (early termination). We are all still going strong which is encouraging.

I also found out that there is a possibility for me to get placed in a college or university, despite being trained at the secondary level (huge relief). I spoke with some of the higher up administrative people who are in charge of placement, inquiring after why I was not placed with the other PCMI (Peace Corps Masters International) who are also MA TESOL and are being trained to teach university level students. I explained (politely I hope) that I (after going to one of the university level training seminars) got super excited about what they are going to be doing and that I am trained to work with university level students (especially doing teacher training) and if there was a possibility to switch. The response was something along the lines of there were more people with master degrees/in the PCMI program than there were spots at the university level so they picked at random  as to who got placed where in our group. This is fair enough but I still pushed a little to see if I could at least get placed at a pedagogical college (where students go to be trained in teaching) and was given the affirmative that it was possible and that they were “on my side” in this matter. I am so not excited about teaching children for two years straight but if I must I will make the best out of it, no doubt. I was advised to mention in my site placement interview my training and how I would enjoy working with teacher training/university students. Please keep your fingers crossed for me! There is also a possibility to be sent to the TESOL conference in Ukraine and possibly present as well! That would totally make up for not being in Portland this year for the international TESOL conference. 

Nothing really exciting happened at PST other than that. They did show a rather interesting and sobering movie about the Soviet Union. It’s called "From East to West" and I highly recommend it. It’s about this couple who move back to Russia (then the Soviet Union) after WWII from France and their struggle on getting the hell back out once they realize their mistake. It takes place in Ukraine but the dialogue is mostly in French/Russian.

There was also a talk on Ukrainian politics that was equally interesting although I had a difficult time paying attention (nothing to do with the speaker, everything to do with my attention span). Pretty much I learned that the President of Ukraine and Putin are best pals and that virtually everyone in the government here are best pals looking out for each other but really the President has all the power. They should be announcing here soon whether or not the agreement with the EU will be signed (which Putin obviously opposes). Apparently the president doesn’t even speak Ukrainian which is awful/awkward. There was also talk of the political prisoner ( I forget her name) who, because she was thrown in jail for political reasons, the EU is demanding her release before they allow the agreement. Of course though, the government is like “we’ll release her only if she stays out of politics for the rest of her life”. She’s part of the “pro-Ukraine, pro-west” movement which is the opposite of the current government, hence the struggle. She seems to be popular with the public though so if/when they release her she’ll probably have a lot of support in whatever she does.

I don’t have any pictures from the event because nothing was really picture worthy. A lot of people from other clusters went out and drank but me and my cluster-mates stayed in and had our own party in the hotel (because we’re Kozi like that, haha. Get it? Kozi? Because we’re from KOZElets? NVM).

We start teaching again this week, after having two weeks off. I have an interesting topic to go over with my 9^th formers. At least, it’s interesting to me. All about the environment and yes, I am totally roping Portland into my lesson J. However, whether or not the students will be interested/want to participate in what I have planned is another matter altogether. You see, this is my problem. I  plan these (what I think) are awesome lessons and then my students are either lost because they don’t understand (because they don’t study) or because they don’t care because they’re teenagers (most likely a bit of both). Thus my reasons why I want to teach university. At least then I would be able to get more of a reaction from students, if only a little bit more of a reaction.  

Oh! I did make banana bread with my host mom though! 

She tried to make a cake the other day and it failed because she forgot to put in baking soda so I promised her I would make a good one for her haha

Banana cream sauce FTW

-Jamie