9 September

Well, it is a late Saturday night and I got back a little while ago from a day in Lviv, but I wanted to get some thoughts down for myself and to share before they slip out the back of my head. I was in Lviv because a couple of volunteers had birthdays this weekend or technically Monday for Edwin, but what's the fun of celebrating on a Monday. Other guy was Larry; you can read of his and his wife Karen’s exploits in Ukraine here on their blog. They even have a little bit on the party too.

The first week of school is over and myself along with the rest of the teachers do not have a set schedule yet for teaching. Oh, by the way, that’s normal and no reason to be alarmed. As far as I am concerned, it is just as well with me, I’ll be honest, direct teaching wasn’t really what I was looking for when I signed up for Peace Corps, although I will do involved in it. Thankfully at this site I have a lot of control so far over the topics I’ll be involved in and they are areas that play to my strengths. But first, a quick run-through of the week.

I spent the first part of the week trying to keep a consistent presence in school, while knowing I wouldn’t have a specific schedule, so I organized my journalism room a bit, reorganized it somewhat as well and continued to try and craft friendships with teachers and administrators at the school. I also got to witness some classes and it gave me a chance to see first-hand what I had heard other PCVs say and I had believed them, but got a more visual reference of it. I visited about three different grade levels, what I found was the younger they get, the more fun they are. My favorite was a group of fifth formers (graders) who knew very little English, but were more than eager to try and use the most of what they had. We played a couple killer games of hangman on the board and practiced writing and speaking. What made it so much fun was so many of the students were raising their hands and were eager to get their own two cents in and try to speak English. As what are probably just teenagers, they get less interested as they get older, or at least that is the impression I get. Sixth graders I got spend a class were almost as fun, although the most memorable moment of that was a question they were almost too embarrassed to ask. I’m real good at playing “meet the American” and have fielded just about every question out there they can come up with. The question itself wasn’t new either, but they, she/he, don’t know was a little embarrassed to ask me. I noticed a little scrap of paper floating around the room, and I started asking what it was, they all kind of blushed, pretty quick one the teachers intercepted it and said quite plainly, “you can ask this!” A little girl then stood up (they always stand to speak or ask a question), and asked, “do you have a girlfriend?” It doesn’t seem quite so funny now that I’ve put it down on the page, but you’ll have to take my word on it and know that it was real tough for her to ask it. I’ll just say I sat in on a ninth grade class too and it was somewhat disheartening to watch so many students not care one bit whether they were there or not. They on top of that disrupting the class to the detriment of those who seemed interested in it. After class I had to ask the question why they don’t split classes up more into those who are interested in the language and those who aren’t. The all-knowing authorities, it was told to me, decided that for every smart kid, there should be a slow kid too. The logic is there, somewhere…

To continue with school stories, I’ll regale you with my near-heart attack of the week. To set the scene, I had talked with the school director earlier about the possibility of setting up a student government of some sort. His time is rather limited so he asked for ideas and said we could meet on this past Friday. After presenting what I had, he seemed interested and then hooked me up with an Assistant Director responsible for extra-curricular activities. We talked for a little while, and originally we were going to set a second meeting for Monday, except then my coordinator showed up who wanted to help and another school staffer who it sounds like she had wanted to do something like this for a couple years and had reams of information that may be useful. So what was supposed to be a meeting on Monday turned into, lets propose the idea of running for school president to the ninth through eleventh forms on Monday morning first thing. My fear is we are going from idea to lets do something now way too fast, so let’s hope it works out. I would prefer to have a better idea of how we want to start this and plan a few steps ahead. It feels like we have a skeleton of an idea right now, but we’re running with that expecting to flesh it out later. Wish us luck!

The last little anecdote I can share is my Thursday English Club meeting for grades sixth to eighth. From the beginning I have had more students show up for it than the older students club I run as well, but this past Thursday was day unto itself. I had a friend who I had met at a camp this summer come out to help. She wanted to and had been to one previous meeting before. But to all of our surprise, we had 23 students show up for this meeting, a lot of them had been previously, but there were a lot of new ones too. It seemed like a lot to me. The club started out with having all the students writing questions that they new, then playing a game, it’ll be easier to just put a link to it rather than try and explain it here. But I’ll just say that it went over real well and everyone left happy. Gave me a nice boost into the end of the week.