Teaching: 3 weeks in

Three weeks have passed since the start of the school year and I am optimistic, especially considering the disappointing fizzle that ended the last year. My first semester of teaching was rough: I found myself an underprepared teacher in an underfunded school with mostly uninterested students. The year couldn't end soon enough and I was completely burnt out by the time summer vacation began. But I've had a restful summer (touring Europe did a lot to take my mind off teaching), and some changes have been made at school that should help me have a more successful year.

First, we have trimmed the fat from some of my larger classes (not literally; my students are actually rather skinny). It makes my job easier when the kids in my classes are genuinely interested in learning English. I don't have to babysit as much. Right now I have one 7th, one 8th, two 9th, two 10th, and two 11th grade classes, and I will soon add one or two 6th grade sections. I have each class twice a week, except one of my 11th grade classes which meets three times. This is Masha's (host sister) class and it's one of my more fun classes. At this point I am teaching 17 hours a week, which is plenty.

I've also become much more comfortable teaching. The training we received during the first three months in country was great, but going from zero to teacher in three months is just not realistic. I've had a chance to think about what I was doing right and what I was doing wrong last semester, and make some changes in my teaching style that seem to be paying off. My main problem was with classroom management. Namely I'm a softie, especially in contrast with the yelling-based tactics of their Ukrainian teachers. Once my kids learned this fact, class got a little nuts. But this year I laid out my rules on day one, learned some new choke-holds, and have been dishing out the pain. Also last year I was speaking a lot of Ukrainian when I saw the kids weren't understanding me, but this year I have an "English only" rule so the kids have to work for it, which is really the reason I'm here.

Most importantly, this year we will be trading our old deplorable Ukrainian textbooks for new books from a British firm. This is part of a grant I wrote with my coordinator for an English language resource center that will also include storybooks, reference books, films, etc. We should be getting the books sometime this week. I've basically just been buying time in class until then, not wanting to start in on the old texts, which has been an interesting exercise. The grant was painful to write but I was one of the only volunteers to have a grant accepted for our first eligible term, and now it's being passed around among our group as a model for those writing similar grants this term.