Ok, It is Thursday, September 21, 2006; your mission should you choose to accept it is to send me as many slang words and idioms you can think of in the American Language. This message will self-destruct in 90 seconds.
Seriously, I need help gathering up as many slang words and idioms you can think of from the American language as possible. I am being besieged on all sides by people asking me for slang words and I’m not always that good at coming up with them on the spot. So in the spirit of the SETI Project and so many others, I’m farming this out to as many people as possible to try and help me get a good list. I’ll take anything from gangster slang, redneck slang, preppy slang, Goth, etc. You get the idea; send me older items as well. I got asked what a “dude” was the other day. Luckily I even knew the Ukrainian translation for it, so it wasn’t bad, but people want to learn how to speak the “real” English. Be creative and send me as many as you can, although it would be helpful to attach a little note of what you think it means in regular English as well. I will post everything I get at a later date so you can marvel at your work. Feel free to send it to me by email, sms, snail mail or just leave a comment on my blog with your suggestions.

So now that my pitch is over, what else is going on here in the faraway land of Ukraine? It hasn’t been all that long since my last post so I don’t have a whole lot of exciting news to tell anyone, it has been a routine (?) week if such a thing exists so far. My schedule is still sorting itself out as I try to balance different meetings of clubs and other activities. I’d give it a couple more weeks and I’ll have a better idea, of course by that time things will be changing and my schedule will change again. I guess I didn’t sign up for this job to have a regular routine, why should I expect one. But the major things that fell into place were the addition of several more English clubs I’ll be holding in the regional center. On Tuesday I had my first meeting with the younger students, I heard a prediction of 50 students showing up the day before, which left me freaking out, what can I possibly do with that many students. Well, nearly that many students did end up showing up and for a while I just answered questions until I decided to try and get the organized into groups and try some activities. That just turned into a disaster since I was dealing with too broad a range of ages and couldn’t keep that many students in line. So basically I tried to organize chaos for a half-hour until I let them go. I talked with some of the teachers and we set up more groups, adding to my work, but it’s only time, right? It looks like I’ll be there for three days or so and work with four different groups, that double what I’m doing in Dobrotvir right now, but I want to offer myself up to as many students as possible and can adapt these clubs into more fruitful ventures later, I’m hoping by at least directing the older students into projects and more independent thinking. That happened Tuesday and I had to run and jump on a Marshrutka in order to make it on time for my Journalism Club meeting. Thankfully that went better and I’m still sorting out the best way to teach it, but it is more familiar territory to me and I see a lot of different paths I can take with it. Right now I’m focusing on basics and trying to get them in a journalistic mindset. I don’t think any of the students right now truly know how to write in a journalistic style, so I’m looking forward to it. The only tough part is I will struggle a lot to keep up with their writing since I am still learning the language, but hopefully it will help me pick it up quicker too.

So that’s about it, only other thing is I will be away from my site this weekend visiting another volunteer down in the Carpathians. It’ll be good to see him and see some new territory. Expect some photos to be posted when I get back. And don’t forget about the slang, please…