My life in a nutshell

Usually I make a comment here about how fast time is going, and how i can't believe it, it's flow by so quickly. But I won’t this time around. Time is time and it always moves in a linear direction because that is its nature. So obviously right now I am at 2 weeks left to go in my training because time has drug me here. But still…I have two weeks left of my training.

Next week we will hold our seminar with our English teachers at school #3. 

Topic: How to effectively teach culture through English. Have I left grad school? No, apparently not. But it will feel good to finally have that out of the way because then we will have our language test soon following before being whisked away to meet our regional managers for our new sites (YEEEEE!) 

Here’s a quick recap of my life to fill the gap I have left you in:

Food:

Always, always food. 

Vereneky. Simple, delicious

Cheese vereneky 

I did some gardening.

Shovel in hand, hole was dug!

We made a good team!

I are strong!

See! Show that corn who be boss!

Chickens were rather happy about our upheaval of the yard.  

There was a birthday! 

Surprise Katie! 

Now is not the time for a quarter life crisis. 

So happy with her Frisbee and cards!

"Dane Harozhenya" in Ukrainian

There was English week at school number 3 that included some "wonderful English lessons" (literally, the English teachers called our tech coordinator and asked her to ask us to create "wonderful" English lessons for English week). We decided to teach the youngin's about holidays in America. We did this with 4th, 5th, and 8th graders. We all had a station where we conducted a mini lesson on the holiday of our choosing--mine was Thanksgiving--and then we rotated until all the kids had been at each station. I decided it would be fun to show them how to make hand turkeys.

I should never be in charge of fun. 

I never want to see another hand turkey or talk about Thanksgiving ever again. I see hand turkeys in my dreams now. Likewise if I hear "jingle bells" or "Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer" one more time I might scream.  

The kids were cute though, however exhausting. I have a new appreciation for elementary school teachers now. Keeping those children's attention for 7 whole minutes was torture.

I may look calm and collected but on the inside i'm like:
"dear god there's so many of them. And they're all looking at me"

"Stay calm. I'm pretty sure they can sense fear." 

"They seem to be responding well. Keep it up." 

"Oh god, they're starting to loose interest, what do I do? Don't panic!
What did I get myself into...just keep talking, this will all be over soon"

 They all successfully drew a hand turkey though!

Whitney on St. Paddy's day

Robertiv on Valentine's day

Katie with the fourth of July

And Jake with Christmas carols. Or rather, with Jingle Bells, over and over and over and over....

"Jingle hell, Jingle hell, when can I go home"

Before our lesson though, these adorable little hellians put on a play for us. In English. About some animals that lived in a house and then a fox comes along and they sing a song about not wanting the fox in the house and then it was over. 

Gotta tell you. I about lost it when the kid with the bird declared proudly
"I am a cock!"
Really, Jamie? You're terrified of children yet your maturity level is here? For shame. 

Here's a taste of what traversed. Did you know that there were more verses to that song?

I also had my last class I had to teach here in Kozelets. It was a little bitter sweet but also it's nice to think that I don't have to do anymore lesson plans for a while haha.

I don't have any pictures from this class but I can tell about it. I taught my 9th graders that I wanted so desperately to like me and the English language by the end of this and well, I think I at least got them a little interested in me at the least but they probably feel the same indifference towards English as they did when I first came into their lives. 

The topic was "protecting our environment" (which I learned that I have been spelling "environment" wrong for YEARS"). It's a tough subject with difficult vocabulary but they have been going at it for a couple weeks and I taught them a couple lesson in the topic so I figured we wouldn't have much trouble. I created some materials that featured Portland and our green-ness, naturally. I had lots of activities that went over really well, they all seemed to be responding to them and things were happening. 

And then, I look up from helping a group out with putting sentence strips in the right order to see Valentina, their Ukrainian teacher, holding one kid by the ear while yelling at another. 

I don't know what happened to cause her to react so, and I probably don't want to know. Whatever it was though, ended quickly, with little disruption for the rest of the class. However, one of these clowns did have to stand at the back of the classroom for the remainder of the lesson. 

Whatever though, I thought the class went over rather smoothly with about 65% student participation and by-gone-it, those kids were able to tell me what it meant to be green by the end of the lesson so, well done!

-Jamie 

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