Happy Birthday to me!

Well, I'm 23 now...actually, because of the time zone thing, I don't officially turn 23 until 8 pm tonight, Ukraine time. The celebrations started at 8am with me getting a text message from my Ukrainian tutor wishing me a good birthday, as well as health, wealth, love, etc. When I stopped by the post office before school, I found a package from Liz, complete with a new book. :) All my classes at school sang "Happy Birthday" to me in English, and on break, all of the teachers gathered in the staff room for tea and cake. They gave me carnations and a set of cups and saucers, so I'll be able to have guests when I get my own apartment (this item is also a prayer request, as it's sounding as if apartments may be a bit tricky to come by...). Tomorrow, I'm going out to a cafe with what I privately think of as the Ukrainian version of the Red Hat Club, several middle-aged women who seem to be the people I know best here. And on Saturday, I'm hanging out with some PCV friends in Kharkiv.

Other exciting news of the day: it looks like Tif isn't going back to the US after all, but instead will be returning to her site in a couple of weeks, complete with back brace! Yay!

Yesterday was Internat'l Women's Day...sort of like Mother's Day in the US, but for all women (which I like, as I am no one's mother). Marina gave me a chocolate bar and I made her pizza from scratch. On Sunday we're going to have a pizza-making lesson, since she liked it.

Educational-ish thoughts: how do you make students learn a foreign language who have no real motivation for needing to know it nor any great love of learning for learning's sake? This situation describes many of my older students, who aren't planning on careers connected with English and are used to sort of drifting through lessons. Combine this with an educational system that doesn't focus on creativity as much as rote memorization, and teaching communicative English is tricky. Something I've been pondering lately...