Palm Sunday is called Willow Sunday in Ukraine, and no one knows why

I'm in Kharkiv...spent the night at Kathryn's and am going to have lunch with Greg. Last night, Kathryn, Janice, and I were at the main square in Kharkiv after Kathryn finished her Windows on America presentation (about ballads!), and we saw Hare Krishnas walking around and chanting, plus a theatrical performance by a travelling troupe that involved people reading newspapers, people walking on stilts, and lots of fire. We didn't understand it...and since they weren't talking, it had nothing to do with the language. We decided they were just trying to be artistic.

It's been a good week...I worked at school or went to meetings in the mornings (I got to spend a lot of time doing Internet research at school!), and in the afternoon, I spring-cleaned (got about half my apartment done as far as going through cupboards and closets, and then got busy...at least what I worked on is clean and all visible areas are good) or hung out with people. Spent a lot of time at the Y's...I've got a story about them, but it hasn't finished happening yet, so it'll wait for a future post.

Oh, and I have the chance to get high-speed Internet in my apartment!!! Assuming, of course, I can get ahold of my landlady (the phone number I have for her is the wrong one, so I'm trying to track her down at her school) and she says it's okay...which, as it won't involve anything more than a tiny hole in the windowframe and I'll be paying it myself, I really hope will be okay. Just think how often I could post! (j/k) But seriously...Skype...AIM...my phone bill might even shrink!

spring has sprung

It's officially spring...I saw my first dandelion yesterday!

It's better for me mentally if I just think of this week as "Teacher Inservice Week" rather than Spring Break, I've decided. I feel less gypped this way. :)

Today we had a three-hour long staff meeting...I think one of the focus issues was teaching across disciplines, which the music teacher and I demonstrated at the close of the meeting by singing "Do Re Mi" in English, which I'd taught him at his request. I gave a short "presentation" on the poetry book my 7th formers had made, which, for being told just before the meeting started that I'd be presenting at some point during it, went pretty well. The book got passed around from teacher to teacher, and I don't know what they thought about it, but they looked at it.

Yesterday was a good day. After having lunch with the Y's after church, Natalia and I went for a Walk (the length is what gives it the capitalization) all over the center of town. It was a gorgeous day out (granted, a little windy), and she told me all sorts of stuff about the history of Balaklia that made me wish my language was better so I could fully appreciate. Then we walked out to her place on the edge of town...we cut across the fields to get there, and it's on this little dirt road with old houses and a well that some of them apparently get drinking wanter from. She said it's a nice neighborhood to live in. We were "just going to have tea", but her mom is a true Ukrainian baba, so that meant a big bowl of borsch, bread, fried eggs, fish, candy, three cups of tea, and I don't remember what else. I felt like it sort of defeated any exercise I got from the walk. :)

I really like hanging out with Natalia...she taught as a volunteer teacher in Germany, so she has some idea what it's like to live away from home. She's also a reader...she told me yesterday that she underlines things in books and hates to lend them out except to people who are as passionate about reading as she is. She likes traveling, is helping her students with an environmental project, and is also appalled at the cheating that is so common among kids (and agrees that it's in part due to a lack of moral values). I just wish that we had more language than my Ukrainian/Russian in common...but I don't speak German!

fast blog

Just a quick post, because I've spent most of my Internet time researching and emailing GVSU's post-bachelor teacher certification program. Yep, planning to make teaching little kids a career. It only took moving halfway around the world to realize it!

My 7th form took a big test on the topic "Sports" yesterday...class average, 61%!!! Yippee! Oleh got a 9 (we do 1-10 here, not A-E, with 10 being the best...well, actually 11 and 12 exist, but not in our English department). I was proud of him, and of several other kids who I've seen improve this year.

Spent today with Vasyl doing site stuff...an NGO in town is getting a PCV this summer, it looks like, so I'll no longer be the only American around. Sounds like it could be fun, and the organization is great. It's a non-profit that works with large families and disabled children. Half wanted to quit my job and go work for them!

spring break can't come fast enough!

It's been a busy, crazy week. I don't really remember Monday, just that I taught and that we had fun at English Club. And read picture books in partners, which is part of my secret plan to increase a love of reading for fun among Ukrainian kids.

Yesterday I taught all day, then went to a poetry reading at the college with my friend Natalia, who was organizing the event. Two women from Balaklia who are published poets came and talked about their work, some secondary school students stumbled through recitations of these women's poems, and some college students read their own work (or in one case, sang!). Afterwards, the kids came up to me and chatted a little...I was the first American they've met, so they wanted to see if we could understand each other. Then Natalia and I went out for tea, and on the way home got into a very cool conversation about how we're both waiting until marriage to have sex based on our religious beliefs (she's Orthodox, and one of the few Orthodox believers I know who a) takes it seriously and b) is under 60).

Twenty minutes or so after I got home (long enough to change into pajamas and start an episode of LOST...I wasn't so impressed with Season 2 at first, but it's growing on me), my doorbell rang. It was Olga, the computer teacher my age at school who almost never says anything to me with a guy about our age. It turns out that his name is Maksym, he knows Nathan, another PCV in Kharkiv, and he's looking for someone to help him with preparing for a test in English (international certificate-type test, not school). I explained that I'm not interested in giving individual lessons on a regular basis, as I don't have time, and his response was, more or less, "I'm sorry if I'm rude, but you only teach at school, you said. How do you not have enough time?"

Has he any idea what it's like to live in a small town in a foreign country? Probably not.

So we're going to meet every two or three weeks, it looks like. It sounds like he's got some incentive and a reason to want to improve his English, which is different than all the parents I meet who want me to tutor their 11-year olds. I did the math...if I was here simply as a native speaker teaching English in private lessons, not as a PCV, and gave 4 hour-long lessons a day, five days a week, and charged 15 hryvnias ($3) per lesson, I'd make more than enough money to live on. Interesting realization.

Today, I taught my lessons plus Olha Ivanivna's, since she was at a conference. After school, I met with the lady poets again at the library, because they wanted to present me with copies of their books. We had a nice chat, and the one invited me to come visit her apartment and see slides of when she lived in the part of Russia over by Alaska. Then I typed up my 7th form test for tomorrow morning (at the library), made copies, and came here. Rita was supposed to come over tonight to practice English, but she canceled due to busyness with work.

Tomorrow I teach and come home and clean my kitchen (or maybe that's tonight) for when Maksym comes over tomorrow for our first English meeting. And he wants to know where my time goes...

Maybe that's the topic for our first conversation!

~*~

Oh, and a belated update on my sleepover at the Y's...lots of fun! We played Uno and did vocab flash cards; I taught Oleh and Vitaly the Initial Game with Bible characters (give the initials and people ask yes/no questions to determine the person); Liza, Snizhanna and I braided each other's hair while sitting on my bed at 7:30 am.

the Ents go marching one by one

I made what my cookbook calls "Salmon Cream Sauce" last night. I think I'll rename it "Milk-Based Soup with Salmon Bits" and it would be a lot more accurate. Somehow it never thickened.

I also made a chocolate-chip torte, which was made more difficult by having to chop dates, chocolate bars, and walnuts by hand, as I have neither chocolate chips nor a nut grinder. It turned out okay, I think...I'll find out tonight at the Y's. I'm spending the night there tonight...Valera had asked if I was going to spend the night again next New Year's Eve, and it didn't seem necessary to wait that long (plus I won't be here). So it's sort of a belated birthday celebration.

I'm worried about Valera. He's falling behind in English (I think he has some learning difficulties), and he keeps saying , "I don't care if I get bad grades." I know it's hard for him, and he doesn't do well with Scream and Translate teaching. I understand that he has trouble learning...I just hate to see him developing a "who cares" attitude about it. I see enough of those in the older forms.

Ran into my friend Natalia after school today, who I hadn't seen since before Christmas. She invited me to come to a performance (?) of Balaklia's writers on Tuesday at the college where she works. Of course, I'm also supposed to read a poem in English (whether or not one I've written I couldn't tell). Should be fun.

I've been watching The Lord of the Rings this week. It's scarier than I remember. Also scary but in a different way is how much of the book dialogue is lodged in my brain...as I see a scene approaching, the book dialogue plays through my head. A mis-spent childhood, I suppose... :)

I never thought I'd see the day...

I've been waiting for this day all year...the 7th form average on their spelling tests was 51%!!! (We've generally been at the 30-40% mark.) Over half the kids got 5/10 right or better. And, I gave them an assignment yesterday to write a poem about their favorite sport (based on the wh-questions and working from a model I gave them), and half the class did it. One boy even wrote about snowboarding rather than the sports we've been studying...yay for creativity! I'm so proud of my kids!

However, my bubble was burst just a bit when I told their homeroom teacher. She showed no interest in all my kids who usually do poorly and are now starting to improve, but complained that I gave a low mark (7/10) to Dasha, who I'll admit is smart but doesn't study her vocabulary words and has a bit of an attitude. "You can put what you want in your own grade book," she told me, "but in the official grade book Dasha has to have good marks. She's [the Ukrainian equivalent of an honor roll student]." This drives me up the wall. First, the Ukrainian school mindset that certain students are "smart" and others are "dumb"...and that this doesn't change from 5th to 11th form. If you've been labeled mediocre, you'll always be mediocre, which makes the slower kids stop trying, basically. Secondly, this wasn't a subjective grade. Dasha only spelled 7 words out of 10 right. It had nothing to do with what I think of Dasha or any attitude she might have had. It was simply how many she got right.

Oleh, by the way, got 10/10. He'd gotten 11/10 last time (thanks to the bonus word), and Nelya had wondered if he was cheating, so I moved him to a different seat and kept a close eye on him. He didn't do worse, but the kid who usually sits next to him did. :) Viktor and Nadia have gotten a tutor to help the kids out with English, and the results are showing. I just hope it will show up in their semester grades (which I don't give).

~*~

My birthday presents from friends here have included: a blue plush unidentifiable stuffed animal that plays a Russian pop song when you push its stomach from Julia, the girl I tutor; a picture of an outdoor scene with a Bible verse on it in Russian from Andrey and Ira; and a mug with apples on it and a light-up glitzy fake rose from the Y kids, which was in a Barbie gift bag (I detect Vlada's hand in this). It's nice to have friends. And the picture and the mug are very nice...I guess I'm not culturally acclimated enough yet to truly appreciate the other gifts like they deserve.

pictures!!!

Me in the office in my new sweater and the scarf Jason sent me.

The brave little Christmas tree that could. Isn't it cute?

My neighbor girls, Lena and Katya, who come over to play Uno and eat cookies. Also cute.

"scream and translate"...now I have a phrase for it!

After the no-shower disappointment, I had breakfast at a little coffee shop down the street from the PC office and then went to the Young Learners manual meeting (YLMM?). Tetiana gave me a chocolate bar as a birthday present, and she'd brought us pastries from the coffee shop where I'd eaten breakfast. If I'd only known, I could have saved myself a few hryvnia. :)

The meeting was good...there were 3 teacher trainers and only two primary teachers, which I think is a skewed dynamic, so we're talking about trying to get some more PCVs who actually teach in on the project. But we decided to make our manual based on the National Curriculum objectives, rather than on any one particular textbook series, especially as we'd like to steer classes away from bookwork and more towards communicative activities.

When I was describing my 4th form on Monday, one of the girls was like, "Oh, the teacher was using the 'Scream and translate' method," which made me laugh. I didn't realize that there was an "official" term for it...SaT. :)

The meeting got out a little after noon, and I wandered around Kyiv during the afternoon. I went to Globus, the big underground mall, and felt very ovewhelmed, very unfashionable, very overweight, and very poor after looking at the clothes. Bah. I then wandered over past the cathedrals down Andriivsky Street, planning to go to the Mikhail Bulgakov museum, but apparently it wasn't open for visitors because it was already full with a group from Moscow. Or something like that. So I came back to the office to discover that we had no electricity and hence no Internet. Hung out in a comfy chair for a bit, and then Shannon, another PCV, and Pasha, her boyfriend (who's Ukrainian), and I walked down to McDonalds for ice cream, and when we came back, the power was back on. So now I can waste time on the computer!

happy birthday to me!

It's my birthday. One year less than a quarter-century, which, when put that way, sounds rather old. My biggest disappointment so far today (at 7:30 am) is that the shower at the PC office, where I am for a meeting, doesn't work, so I don't get to give myself a hot shower as a birthday present. It's sad when I consider this a "present".

Wednesday was "Meet and Greet" in Kharkiv, where the oblast PCVs and Vasyl (our manager) went out to lunch at a Very Nice Restaurant that Peace Corps reimbursed us for. I had a salmon fillet and wild rice. Very good. Then we had a very quick meeting at a park for the "business" section of the day. Lots of people wished me happy early birthday, Greg gave me flowers (he'd originally given them to Julianne as a Women's Day gift, since she was the first girl he saw, but when he found out it was my birthday on Friday, he took them back from her and gave them to me!), and Mike and I are planning to meet up for breakfast on Saturday.

I spent Wednesday night at Kathryn's apartment in Kharkiv. Kathryn's an older PCV who works at a university in Kharkiv, and this was the first chance we've really had to hang out. We spent yesterday wandering around the center of Kharkiv, figuring out the schedules for the opera, philharmonic, and organ concerts and making plans to become cultured individuals. Then we went out to lunch at Adriano's, my favorite restaurant in Kharkiv, wandered around a bit more, and then Kathryn treated me to tea and cake at a coffee shop (yes, Jason, it's the one we went to). We then finished up Women's Day by shopping, and I found a very nice dark brown sweater with a cowl neck for 70 hryvias.

(It matches my scarf that Jason sent me for Valentine's Day very nicely. I also found boots I like that are on sale that go with it all, which I'm considering buying when I go back to Kharkiv on Saturday. This might turn into a pretty expensive V-Day gift. :) Just kidding.)

On the train, I shared a compartment with a guy who was half Ukrainian and half Greek. He had served in the Greek army and currently does manual labor in England, where he was headed. (I've known several young guys who do this--work in England for a year or two and earn more money with farm or factory jobs there than they can with white-collar jobs here.) We talked for about four hours about culture, the need to know languages, the strengths and weaknesses of Ukraine, and how travel makes us better-educated people. It was an awesome conversation.

british monarchs in verse

Saturday school was non-eventful...I couldn't tell if the kids who didn't come didn't come because of the flu or because they were skipping.

The highlights of yesterday afternoon were having a good long visit with Nadia (who nursed all 10 kids and herself through the flu!) and beating Vitaly and Oleh at chess. Nice to know I can still play.

Today was one of those days that just seemed disorganized. Nelya blamed the 4th form for not doing homework I didn't assign, which confused them to no end. I ended up with the 8th form, which I usually don't teach on Mondays, so I threw together an English history lesson last minute without having a book and did a fair amount of yelling, as they were just wild and out of control. But then I had my English club and 10 little girls made cards for International Women's Day on March 8, complete with stickers, glitter glue (a big hit), and a message in English. And that was fun.

Poem of the day, learned at some point in my childhood, and taught to the 8th form this afternoon:

King Henry the Eighth
To six spouses was wedded--
One died, one survived,
Two divorced, two beheaded.

It's amazing, the random things I pass on to my kids.

Saturday school

Tomorrow is Saturday. We have school tomorrow.

This is one of those Ukrainian things I don't understand. Because next Thursday is International Women's Day, we don't have school on Thursday. Just this week, the administration decided that we wouldn't have school next Friday either, and so on Wednesday, told us that we have school this Saturday.

I'm not sure which is weirder, school on Saturday or the fact that the decision was made last-minute. In the US, we get a little calendar at the beginning of the year with all the days off we'll have, and bad weather is the only thing that changes this.

Odd.

~*~

So I have a boyfriend who can stop a lesson dead in its tracks. My 10th form has been after me for a while to bring in a picture of Jason, and I'd finally remembered today. I told them that at the end of the lesson I'd show it to them, assuming that there would be questions and not wanting to break up the lesson, and we'd have a good finish to the class.

Well, our schedule got changed around today, so Nelya was with the 8th form while I was with the 10th form, and the kids didn't want to work. So they closed their books, refused to do anything (except for Oleksi, my good boy), and demanded to see the picture. Not feeling inclined to let 15-year-olds run my life or my lessons, I said, "Not until the end of the lesson. Please open your books and do exercise 5." They said no, and argued that if I would just show them the picture, they'd be good and go back to work. I know these kids. Highly unlikely. So then they blamed me for wasting time. I waited. Finally, they got back to work, and at the end of the lesson, we had "show-and-tell"--Maryna, my biggest pest, was quite taken with Jason, and people had good questions about how long I was in Ukraine, did I know other Americans here, etc.

~*~

Funny moment: Andrey, my oh-so-worried-about-everything 4th former, when the other kids were being bad, stood up and told them that they were being disobedient, that I was a good teacher, and that they should listen to me. You gotta love a kid like that, even when he asks you multiple times if you'll be in class today and what the homework was.