And I'm Done
For all intensive purposes, at the time of this posting my time as a TEFL teacher in Peace Corps Moldova is done. Yes, I won't leave this country until August 1st and won't arrive back in America until August 21st (I bought the tickets last weekend), and while we still have technically five more weeks of lessons, I'm counting myself as done. Allow me to explain.
Technically my vacation started yesterday at 11:15 in the morning when I left school – I'll write about my plans in a second – and after our vacation we have four short weeks of school. However, we have no lessons on Monday and Friday of the first week (Monday for Easter of the Dead, Friday for Victory Day), and the week after I'll have Thursday and Friday off for a Peace Corps conference. Then there's only two weeks but the last week doesn't count because grades are due a week before the final day of classes, making the final five days in school an exercise in creatively killing time. Therefore, we have only one real full week of lessons where we are supposed to pass along a semblance of education to our students.
How will I pass the time? For starters, I'm giving tests to four of my six classes, doing a review of all information given since our last vacation a long seven weeks ago. As for the rest of the year, my kids are getting one large assignment that will be due sometime during the last two weeks in May in which they will have to use all of the grammar we've learned this year: I tell them the grammar, the times it need to be used, and how many points they will receive for each usage. The topic is simple – they have to write about themselves. That's it. I've told them that they can give me only two rough drafts to check over and that I'll be more than happy to do so when requested. I'll only check their work twice because if I did it any other way I would get the question, “How do you say this?”, at least 100 times from everyone; to nip that I've had to make a few changes.
And those changes mark the beginning of the end of my two years in my school.
Notes:
- Outside of the classroom there is one problem that I've made my personal crusade during my second year. It's cellphones.
During my first year I didn't have any problem with cellphones because there was no real coverage in my village and as a result, it didn't make any sense for families and students to spend money on purchases that were obsolete for all intensive purposes. About this time last year, however, a new European company called Orange bought out one of the service providers here and made an effort to expand coverage – it wasn't long until they put up a tower in the village next to mine (I can tell you the exact date, May 2nd, when coverage finally arrived).
With this expansion of phones has come an equally large dislike of them by me. Fortunately for me and unfortunately for my kids, I've had to implement and enforce a 'no cellphone' in my classroom. The second one foot crosses my threshold I don't want to hear as much as a peep from any phone in the room, even through headphones. I tell them that what they want to do in the hallway is their own business but once they cross past the door they are in my territory and I can ask for what I want.
I finally totally obliterated the problem last month when on Tuesday I, already in a fired-up mood, took a phone that the kid had decided to play music through, in the middle of a lesson. I promptly deleted all the sounds. Ten minutes later another phone went off the girl holding just grinned. All her sounds were gone twenty seconds later.
Needless to say, it was the last time I've had a problem.
- I'm (and have been) looking forward to this next vacation with such excitement that I can't even begin do describe it. I'm heading down to a girl's village in the south on Saturday where I'll spend the Easter holiday on Sunday – it's the same village I've been to twice already and have always had a great time. Then on Tuesday there's a group of us heading to a town called Vadul lui Voda, located about ten miles from Chisinau and the place that is most popular within country for Moldovans to travel to and a great place to relax (the best way to describe it would be to compare it to Breezy Point in Brainerd. For anyone outside of Minnesota reading this, that will make no sense. But that's the best comparison I can come up with). We'll be there for a few days too.
That's it. That's the plan. A whole lot of nothing, which is exactly what I want.
- One thing I've become increasingly cognizant of during my almost two years here is the weather. It may seem like a thing that is totally obvious but until you live in an environment like this, where the quality of life of everyone greatly depends on what comes (and doesn't come) from the sky, it really changes your awareness.
If you'll remember, last year we suffered through the worst drought seen in this country in over sixty years. We had three days of rain from the middle of May through the first of August, causing the costs of food to skyrocket and, in some cases, wells to dry up. The ramifications of this were felt in everyday life and by every person here; the most basic example is that most people were forced into a situation in which they had to dump a lot of the animals they normally keep because, with a lack of corn that didn't grow, they had nothing with which to feed the livestock. It may seem like something not too significant but in an agrarian society like the one in which I live, it's a massive blow because those animals need to be replaced with money that is hard enough to come by as it is.
Thankfully, the weather this year has been a totally different story – it's the perfect spring. It rains usually two days a week, then there's enough time for the soil to dry out. Just when it starts to get a little too dry . . . the rain comes. It's the ideal combo. And it's the perfect opposite to what we went through last year.
- I'll end this by simply stating that one aspect of life that I've become totally accustomed in my village that will be hard to leave will be the absolute silence that is everywhere – it has to be experienced to be believed. Sometimes, if I sleep in in the morning, I just stay in bed until I hear a sound – any sound. It's almost always a few minutes.
And on my daily walks to and from school there are two sounds that are constant: the songs of birds and frogs. It's a combination I think I'll never encounter again, especially at the volume and frequency with which I bump into them here.
Technically my vacation started yesterday at 11:15 in the morning when I left school – I'll write about my plans in a second – and after our vacation we have four short weeks of school. However, we have no lessons on Monday and Friday of the first week (Monday for Easter of the Dead, Friday for Victory Day), and the week after I'll have Thursday and Friday off for a Peace Corps conference. Then there's only two weeks but the last week doesn't count because grades are due a week before the final day of classes, making the final five days in school an exercise in creatively killing time. Therefore, we have only one real full week of lessons where we are supposed to pass along a semblance of education to our students.
How will I pass the time? For starters, I'm giving tests to four of my six classes, doing a review of all information given since our last vacation a long seven weeks ago. As for the rest of the year, my kids are getting one large assignment that will be due sometime during the last two weeks in May in which they will have to use all of the grammar we've learned this year: I tell them the grammar, the times it need to be used, and how many points they will receive for each usage. The topic is simple – they have to write about themselves. That's it. I've told them that they can give me only two rough drafts to check over and that I'll be more than happy to do so when requested. I'll only check their work twice because if I did it any other way I would get the question, “How do you say this?”, at least 100 times from everyone; to nip that I've had to make a few changes.
And those changes mark the beginning of the end of my two years in my school.
Notes:
- Outside of the classroom there is one problem that I've made my personal crusade during my second year. It's cellphones.
During my first year I didn't have any problem with cellphones because there was no real coverage in my village and as a result, it didn't make any sense for families and students to spend money on purchases that were obsolete for all intensive purposes. About this time last year, however, a new European company called Orange bought out one of the service providers here and made an effort to expand coverage – it wasn't long until they put up a tower in the village next to mine (I can tell you the exact date, May 2nd, when coverage finally arrived).
With this expansion of phones has come an equally large dislike of them by me. Fortunately for me and unfortunately for my kids, I've had to implement and enforce a 'no cellphone' in my classroom. The second one foot crosses my threshold I don't want to hear as much as a peep from any phone in the room, even through headphones. I tell them that what they want to do in the hallway is their own business but once they cross past the door they are in my territory and I can ask for what I want.
I finally totally obliterated the problem last month when on Tuesday I, already in a fired-up mood, took a phone that the kid had decided to play music through, in the middle of a lesson. I promptly deleted all the sounds. Ten minutes later another phone went off the girl holding just grinned. All her sounds were gone twenty seconds later.
Needless to say, it was the last time I've had a problem.
- I'm (and have been) looking forward to this next vacation with such excitement that I can't even begin do describe it. I'm heading down to a girl's village in the south on Saturday where I'll spend the Easter holiday on Sunday – it's the same village I've been to twice already and have always had a great time. Then on Tuesday there's a group of us heading to a town called Vadul lui Voda, located about ten miles from Chisinau and the place that is most popular within country for Moldovans to travel to and a great place to relax (the best way to describe it would be to compare it to Breezy Point in Brainerd. For anyone outside of Minnesota reading this, that will make no sense. But that's the best comparison I can come up with). We'll be there for a few days too.
That's it. That's the plan. A whole lot of nothing, which is exactly what I want.
- One thing I've become increasingly cognizant of during my almost two years here is the weather. It may seem like a thing that is totally obvious but until you live in an environment like this, where the quality of life of everyone greatly depends on what comes (and doesn't come) from the sky, it really changes your awareness.
If you'll remember, last year we suffered through the worst drought seen in this country in over sixty years. We had three days of rain from the middle of May through the first of August, causing the costs of food to skyrocket and, in some cases, wells to dry up. The ramifications of this were felt in everyday life and by every person here; the most basic example is that most people were forced into a situation in which they had to dump a lot of the animals they normally keep because, with a lack of corn that didn't grow, they had nothing with which to feed the livestock. It may seem like something not too significant but in an agrarian society like the one in which I live, it's a massive blow because those animals need to be replaced with money that is hard enough to come by as it is.
Thankfully, the weather this year has been a totally different story – it's the perfect spring. It rains usually two days a week, then there's enough time for the soil to dry out. Just when it starts to get a little too dry . . . the rain comes. It's the ideal combo. And it's the perfect opposite to what we went through last year.
- I'll end this by simply stating that one aspect of life that I've become totally accustomed in my village that will be hard to leave will be the absolute silence that is everywhere – it has to be experienced to be believed. Sometimes, if I sleep in in the morning, I just stay in bed until I hear a sound – any sound. It's almost always a few minutes.
And on my daily walks to and from school there are two sounds that are constant: the songs of birds and frogs. It's a combination I think I'll never encounter again, especially at the volume and frequency with which I bump into them here.
posted by Andy Buchanan at 3:13 AM
2 Comments:
Andy,
I applaud your Draconian approach to cell phones and as soon as I am named Dictator it will be one of the top ten things I will tackle, number one still being getting a chauffer.
It's hard to believe another school year has passed, can you imagine what Spring would be like if teaching was your career and you were staring down 25+ years of seeing the students come & go. In late April it must be hard to concentrate on teaching knowing it will soon stop for a few months and a new set of faces will be in your room in the Fall. And the realization that there isn't much else you can do with the human material that just left, the "painting" is finished.
Surprising about the lateness of Easter, it must be that the Orthodox dates are quite different.
Yikes I miss the silence ! I dare not take a day off 'cause with the endless road construction all you hear is a low roar of traffic now mixed with "beep - beep - beep" as trucks back up. The latest twist is that a new bus route was established with the bus parked behind North from 7:00 - 9:30 p.m., add its engine noise to the torture !
Dad
The perfect mix of rain/sun, huh? Up north we are getting more rain then sun. Enough, in fact, to convince my host mom that we are going to have "another drought" -- you know "The kind where you get too much rain."... Congrats on being done! Weird feeling.
Sharon
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