Practice Makes Perfect

This week and the following two will be perhaps the most demanding that we, as trainees, will undergo. The reason: practice school.

Kids from the village have been rounded up so we, the trainees, have an opportunity to step into a real school environment and present our very own lesson plans to students. The Peace Corps has set us up with ‘partner teachers,’ teachers of English from throughout Moldova who have decades of experience. They sit in the back of the class while we teach and they observe us, giving us feedback. They also help us with lesson-plans and with techniques for teaching new information to students.

We teach two 45 minutes lessons every day with a fifteen minute break in-between - this week through Tuesday of next week I will teach to 6th graders, and following a ‘break’ next Wednesday, I will begin seven days of teaching to 10th graders. Doesn’t sound too bad, right?
Well, we also have two hours of Russian class Monday through Friday and 4.5 hours every Saturday morning. Basically, between 8:15 in the morning and 9:15 at night (Monday through Friday), I have maybe two free hours that aren’t devoted to preparing to teach, teaching, Russian class, reviewing the day’s taught lesson with my partner teacher, preparing lesson plans for the next day’s lesson, preparing activities for the next day’s lesson (the last two of which are amazingly time-consuming because, without a printer for a computer, everything must be written out by hand), and Russian studies. It’s not easy, to say the least.

And the best part: we have one day, Wednesday the 26th, when we don’t have to teach. Of course, on that day we have a second language assessment (highly stressful) and five hours of meetings.

Lucky us.

Although there is a silver lining; after Practice School we have only one and a half more weeks until we get sworn in as volunteers, and that week consists mainly of language training to prepare us for the final, important test on August 14th The light is already at the end of the tunnel.

Notes:
- Us trainees were quick to complain about the amount of rain we were getting early in the summer and our sprits had picked up lately by the lack of precipitation. However, I’ve learned from my farming host family that we really need rain. In fact, the situation was almost dire last week until we had a big storm. Now, while things aren’t great, they’re better. Before the shower, if I traveled any day they would ask me when I got home if it rained where I was. If it rained where I was not and not in my village, they would all get exacerbated.

- The high temperature last Sunday was fifty-five degrees. Fun, huh? And of course, it was the day my friend and his family and I decided to go out for a barbeque party down at the lake. Needless to say, we stayed only for a few hours.

- The level of English spoken amongst our students is, to say the least, shockingly low. They are in sixth grade, supposedly with three years of English with them, and they literally don’t know what ‘bad’ means or how to respond to ‘how are you?" My partner, with eighteen years of experience, also can’t believe just how little they know. But my partner teacher and I agree that the kids have one advantage, something every teacher really appreciates: they are amazingly enthusiastic. Although they don’t know much, it is clear in their eyes that they really want to learn, an emotion that makes them joy’s to teach.