Practicum Week

You'll remember that when we started the practicum element of our training, I was less than pleased with it. We continued to work with the same group of students every Friday until the week before we visited Sisian. This week, we taught them every day.

There was one minor complication, though. The Ministry of Education (called the National Institute for Education here) decided last minute to change the week of fall vacation. Apparently this happens all the time in Armenia, with school staff learning that morning by listening to the radio whether or not there will be school on a given day. It was originally supposed to be last week (during what the PC staff had scheduled as Clubs Week), but just before we left of our Sisian Visit, the vacation was delayed until this week. Why we didn't just switch clubs week and practicum week, I'll never know, but for whatever reason, we didn't. Thus, last week we were holding clubs during the middle of the school day, and this week we've been having class during the middle of vacation. 

There have been some upsides to this: for examples, I've only had 2 or 3 students show up to each class. On the other hand, there have been some down sides: I haven't had the same students attend 2 classes in a row all week. This means that the lessons I had planned- which built upon each other- weren't every useful at all and had to be reworked so that each lesson is a stand along class.

On top of that, for reasons that are entirely beyond me, we have a final lesson with the students on Monday of next week, which is the first day that all the students  come back from vacation, and Sam and I had the bad luck of having our final observation and evaluation on this day. It means that I'll be observed while teaching a group of students, some of whom have been to some lessons I've given over the past week, and some of whom haven't seen me in a month, and none of whom have a solid baseline of what to expect from me as a teacher. Great. 

Despite the screwed up nature of the schedule, and the ongoing problems I have with the general organization of the project, I am glad to have had this experience. 

For one thing, just having to do the lesson planning and watch it all fall to pieces week after week has given me a much, much greater appreciation of who much work being a teacher is. I grew up with two teachers for parents- I wonder how I never realized how difficult planning and delivering a good lesson is? A part of my mind knows they must have put effort into making sure their lessons were well organized and structured, but it's hard to believe it. They always made it look so effortless. I never saw them struggle to decide what to teach during a class or how to deliver information to the students in a way they'd understand. My parents always seemed to just get up in front of a class and they knew what to do. I don't know why I always just took this part of their job for granted. I won't do it again, that's for certain. 

Another thing that I really appreciated about the practicum week was the chance to et to know the students. This surprised me, because I honestly don't like kids. Really, I don't. I actively dislike spending time with them. They make me uncomfortable. But I did enjoy getting to know these students in a sort of sociopathic kind of way. 

The best way I  can explain it is to use an example from television. The TV show House MD feature a brilliant diagnostic physician who, unlike the doctors around him, doesn't really care about helping people. In the place of altruism, what really motivates this doctor is the process of solving the mystery of an illness. For him, helping the sick person is more of a side effect than and end goal. Similarly, (although I don't claim the skill and talent of the doctor in the TV show) while I never enjoyed the students for their company, the challenge of finding a way to engage each one of them- especially the weather ones who tended to misbehave- had held some appeal for me. Each student who struggles is like a little puzzle, and it's up to me to figure out what's not working and how to fix it. This is a far cry from actually caring about students as persons in their own right, but I gotta get behind this whole teaching gig any way I can right now, so I'll take the House MD-sociopathic route for the moment, since it appears to be the only road open to me right now. 

And to be fair, this approach did lead to some minor victories in the classroom. One kid, who in the US would be diagnosed with ADD/ADHD in a heartbeat, really excelled with I gave him an activity that involved clapping his hands as he spoke, one clap per syllable. It gave him something more active to do during class, and it improved his pronunciation: instead of "plah-uhm", he began to say "plum" with one clap. Instead of "pee-ahr", he began to say "pear", The best part was when he started to employ the clapping technique on his own, without my prompting. I would introduce a new word and he would ask how 'how many claps', or just clap as he repeated the word after me. 

I don't know if I taught him any English in our lessons, but I feel like this, at least, is a tool he can use in the future. Which, in it's own way, is as important. 

Karmir Sar

Mount Ararat may get all the attention, but Karmir Sar is no slouch. Here he is, looking glorious in the glow of sunset, with rain clouds gathering behind him.

English Club Week

Upon returning to PST  from our visit to Sisian, we found that there was to be a change in the normal schedule to which e had grown accustomed. We would continue to go to Armenian language lessons every morning, but instead of the TEFL tech training sessions in the afternoons, we would collaborate with the English teachers at our village schools to host a 4 English Club sessions with their students. 

In Shahumyan, this meant working with two English teachers and a group of about 40 students- half from the 8th  grade and half from the 5th grade. The first day we were  back in Shahumyan we met with the English teachers to plan the four clubs sessions.

Sam and I ended up working with the older students' teacher, and if I'm being honest, it wasn't as easy as I might have hoped. The teacher was pretty set on a few ideas and activities for which she was already prepared. Plans outside these ideas and activities were met with strong resistance. But most of the ideas were (to our minds) very traditional classroom activities that were neither very engaging for the students nor very fun for them. Given that these four sessions were supposed to be an after-school club activity, not another class, and that we were only going to work with the students for a grand total of 4 hours stretched out over the course of a week, we thought that the best thing to do with our time was to try to make it fun and give the students a positive associate to English learning- that is, not doing more read-and-translate activities like the ones they do during the school day. 

We ended up compromising: we would structure the club week around the four seasons like our local collaborator wanted, and we would start each session with a more traditional written activity before transitioning into (what we considered) the more active, engaging, fun, activities we wanted to do. 

The first club session was Autumn themed. I actually had to call out sick from this day because I had a cold, but Sam reports that it went fairly well. We started by talking with the students about Autumn and Halloween. We talked about Jack-o-Lanterns, and in doing so we discussed the names for parts of the face, and the words for various shapes. Then our counterpart led the students in a Halloween themed crossword puzzle. I can't speak about it first hand since I was home in bed, but from the accounts of the other volunteers who were there, it sounded as if the students had already done this activity and were remembering the "correct answers" rather than authentically engaging with the English language. 

This wouldn't be terribly unusual- and not even considered duplicitous here as it would be in the States. A significant amount of education here involves memorizing the correct answers to a particular set of questions and reciting them back to a teacher at a later time. Given this, having students memorize the  correct answers to a crossword puzzle is just how you get them to learn the material. 

After the crossword puzzle, we moved onto the more active portion of the session: the students had been instructed by their teacher to bring pumpkins and knives to the first session, and a pair of scissors to the second session. Unfortunately, the message must have gotten confused somewhere along the lines, since most of them brought scissors to the first session. But six students had brought pumpkins and knives, so we broke into teams and carved some pumpkins. (Note: pumpkins in Armenia are very different from pumpkins in the US. I hope they're tasty, because they're not particularly well suited to carving). The day finished with each team explaining what face-parts they had carved into their pumpkins, and what shapes they had used to represent each of the face-parts,

The second club session was Winter themed. We started the session by having the students brainstorm "winter words": snow, ice, cold wind, jackets, mittens scarfs, etc. After the brainstorm, we presented the students wit ha mad-lib style poem, and worked together to fill in the blanks in the poem with words from our brainstorm. Then we gave the students some time to write their own poems- either completely original works, or following the mad-lib framework we provided. Finally, students were given a second piece of paper and instructed how to fold and cut it into a snowflake. Then we used some of our Peace Corps issued dental floss to tie the snowflakes onto the bottom of their winter poems, so that each student had a small project to bring home with them at the end of the day. 

The following day, Spring, we started with a really good listening activity of which I was actually quite proud, considering that I helped to come up with it about 15 minutes before we actually started the session. Sam had written a 3 paragraph text about "the environment" and the importance of not littering. I took a look at it and selected 3-5 words from each paragraph. We started by pre-teaching these 3-5 words as vocabulary, then I told to students to listen for these vocab words, and every time I used one, they had to stand up from their seats and sit back down again as fast as they could. They loved it. Each wanted to be the first out of their seat, so they were literally jumping from their chairs as I read the passage. We went through all three paragraphs, asked a few listening comprehension questions, then moved onto the main activity for the day: trash pickup. Working with the younger students, the kids broke into teams and in an Earthday-style scavenger hunt, they went around the school grounds picking up the littered papers and candy wrappers from the ground. They team with the most trash in their bag would win a prize we told them (I don't think we ever delivered...)

Finally, we reached the end of our club week and conducted our Summer themed session. It was to be and action-oriented, game-filled day. We started by asking students to brainstorm action words that they do doing the summer: run, jump, smile, laugh, swim, etc. Using these words we then played a few games including charades and a fun relay race where each member of a team was given an action word and then had to run to the board where had had hug a variety of action-pictures. They player had to slap the picture matching his or her word, then run back and slap the hand of his or her team mate, who received the next word and the process was repeated until all members of the team had played. 

After this, because they weather was nice, we brought them all outside and played a game of Sharks and Minnows- which, if you haven't played it before, is like an odd combination of tag and Red Rover, Red Rover. When a minnow student was caught by a shark, she or he had to say and act out 3 action words in English in order to be let go, otherwise they became a shark. The kids were still playing when we left- which was 30 minutes past the scheduled end of the club session. We didn't stop them to get a picture because they were having such a good time. 

All in all, I think that clubs week went pretty well. I don't know how much English the students learned, but they seemed to have a good time. And we got a chance to work with a local counterpart for the first time. I'm a little upset with myself that we didn't really involve our counterpart very much-it seems like a wasted opportunity. Working with a counterpart is pretty much all we'll be doing for two years, and as this was our only chance to practice while training, I should have taken better advantage of it. Perhaps the Peace Corps could do more to facilitate this in the future- like introducing us to our counterparts more than a weekend before the clubs start, so that we have more time to schedule meetings together to plan. I gave this as feedback to the trainers, but I doubt that it will be acted upon... unfortunately, PC doesn't seem very open to the idea of changing its training techniques. 

Ararat at Sunset

The Day We Spooked a Gomesh

Today was not a total victory. Walking home from class, we happened upon a baby gomesh chained to a post on the side of the road. Large bovine animals are habitually left in this manner, to graze the area within their chain's radius, so it wasn't really all that unusual- but it was a baby, and it was a gomesh, so we stopped to take a photo:

About have a second after this photo was taken, the baby gomesh spooked and ran- bolted- away from us. When he reached the end of his chain, he didn't even slow. The chain snapped with a metallic tsing and the baby gomesh just kept on running. 

He ended up in the middle of the one paved street in town, and we had no real way to undo the damage we had done. Without know who the baby gomesh belonged to- or how to contact them and explain the situation even if we did- we had to leave the poor thing right there in the middle of the town's main road. 

The one thing that the gomesh had going in it's favor is that a gomesh- even a baby gomesh- is large enough that if you hit it with your vehicle, it will eff up your car really badly. Several cars swerved around him as he wandered down main street in Shahumyan. The drivers here are used to large animals in the road, this wasn't really unusual for them. For his part, the gomesh seemed much less concerned by the cars around him than he had been by our presence a few moments before. 

We ended up just leaving him there. When we got home, we told our family (making ample use of pantomime) what had happened, but they seemed entirely unconcerned. "The little gomesh knows where he lives" Grampa George told us. I wasn't thrilled about leaving things like they were, but as no one else seemed to want to do anything about it, I didn't have much of a choice. To be fair, it seemed like it all worked out in the end: at least, we certainly didn't hear anything else about it from our family. 

Wherever you are baby gomesh, sorry for scaring you.

First Marchutney Ride

Obligatory selfie taken yesterday on our first experience of Armenian public transportation: a marshutney (aka a van, minibus, or route-taxi, depending on your preferred terminology) from Sisian back to Shahumyan. 

Out and About in Sisian

Today we are on our way back to Shahumyan from Sisian. It was really exciting to see the new city we'll be living in for the next two years, but I have to admit, I'm happy to be heading back to familiar ground all the same. Hanging out around Sisian made me realize just how comfortable I've become with the routine of life back in our Shahumyan cluster, and how much I'll miss the friends I've made there over the past few months. 

So, while I ponder these thoughts, I'm just going to share a few photos from the past couple of days in Sisian.

This is the photo of the road my school is on- although my school is at the very far end of the street. It has a little stream that runs along its length, so that when you walk it, you're accompanied by a pleasant burbling brook sound. 

This is the neighborhood around my school... lots of old stone buildings with back gardens. Very pleasant. 

And this is a picture of town square. Right now, it feels very New England-y with all the leaves changing color. Shahumyan and the surrounding towns don't really have any trees in them (there are trees outside, in orchards, but not really lining the streets at all), It felt really nice to  be in a place where there are trees on either side of the road. 

Our future home...

Immediately after our counterpart conferences, we traveled with our counterparts to visit our permanent site in Sisian. We arrived in the late afternoon and were driven directly to our next host family's house. There we were shown the room in which we'll stay this winter. The three children of the family had prepared a special welcome sign for us.  

It's awesome. We love it. They are pretty great kids too- they spent the whole evening showing off each other's accomplishments. It was really touching how proud they were of each other. 

Our room itself was super comfortable, and very pretty.

The best part about it is that outside that huge window is a little balcony over looking the family's orchard/garden. It's a beautiful view. I'm looking forward to living here.

Counterpart Conferences

This weekend we met the women with whom we will be working most closely for the next two years. We spent the weekend in a hotel conference room, getting to know our counterparts and attending PC TEFL training sessions with them. It was interesting to see the wide range of backgrounds our counterparts represented. Some trainees have been paired with college professors who have trained in The US or the UK. Some of the English teachers from the smaller villages speak little more English than the students in our practicum classes back in Artashat. 

Sam and I were fortunate in that both of our counterparts spoke very good English. We had been worried that, since our Armenian is still very basic, we wouldn't be able to communicate clearly with our new coworkers. And as this partnership is the basis upon which any progress is to be made within the classrooms at our schools, communication between members is important. 

I will be working in an elementary school with two counterparts, but only one was able to come to the conference. Her name is Armine, and I couldn't have hoped for a nicer counterpart. She has worked with a Peace Corps Volunteer in the past, and that experience was positive enough that she applied to have a second volunteer assigned to her school. 

Meeting Armine was a huge relief. She was cheerful, energetic, and most of all, very open to ideas about adapting her teaching practices to embrace more interactive classroom styles. The older volunteers who have been doing this for a year tell us that the most difficult thing about working in the schools is convincing counterparts to try something new- but Armine is already there. This makes me feel really good about working together, and makes me very hopeful that we'll have a productive partnership. 

It also makes me feel a lot more comfortable admitting my own limited experience to her. Knowing that she feels like it's okay to tell me that she wants to change things about her teaching practices makes me feel like it's okay to let her know that I don't know everything either. This is something I'll have to keep in mind as I continue to work in Armenia: the best way to make sure that some one is comfortable enough to admit that they don't know it all, is to start by admitting it about yourself. 

Evening in Shahumyan

Just a few photos taken while strolling around Shahumyan this evening...

Making Tolma

Today brings the second installment of our ongoing series: Cooking In Armenia. Today's our host sister's birthday, so our host mom was busy all day making an enormous feast to celebrate the day. We got to help her make the tolma. Tolma is a traditional Armenian dish in which spiced ground beef, rice & onions are wrapped in blanched cabbage and grape leaves, then simmered on the stove for long periods of time. 

The hardest part is figuring out how to make best use of the irregularly shaped cabbage leaves, and then actually accomplishing the cute-mini-burrito-style wraps. 

All wrapped up, they look like little spring rolls. We eventually filled to whole pot. The plate at the bottom is to keep the bottom-most layer of tolma from burning and sticking to the bottom of the pots.

The plate is necessary because all the pots and pans here are of thin aluminum, very prone to hotspots. The cookware is just generally less high-tech than in the States- most notably (to me) the pan handles. I'm used to at least semi insulated pan handles back home, so I didn't think twice about grabbing the handle to a pan on the stove to move it to a more convenient position. Turns out that was a mistake, and I've got a mild burn on my hand in the shape of the pan handle to prove it. 

But apart from that minor mishap, the day went really well. The tolma (and the rest of the food) was delicious, and we had a really good time celebrating the day with our host sister. 

Grape Fields

In search of some much needed alone time together, Sam and I took a walk through the grape fields outside Shahumyan today. It started out as a nice little walk together. 

The weather was beautiful, and this was the first time that we had really gotten away from town since we had arrived in Shahumyan. This may not seem like a big deal to you, but to us it was huge. You see, Armenia doesn't have any sort of general municipal waste management system, so people just burn their trash. What that means that is that air in town is always filled with smoke, usually with a strong odor of burning plastic. So in addition to being pretty, this was the first time we were breathing some really clean air in a month. 

We even saw some of the lizards that live here. (Before today, I hadn't realized that there were lizards here.) They look a little bit like young iguanas. If you look at the photo below very carefully you can see one in the middle of the photo on top of the brush pile. He's a little hard to spot, but it was the best photo I could get- despite the cooler weather these days, they're still really fast! 

We were having a really nice time, walking and chatting. We strolled through the fields for about an hour, and then decided that we should probably head back. 

And that's when we realized that we were lost. Immediately after this first epiphany, we also realized that walking through grape fields isn't like walking through other fields. When you walk through normal fields and you get lost, you can just say "that's alright, home is in this direction, so instead of walking along the sides of the fields, we'll just cut across the fields in the right direction until we get back to the road". When you're walking through grape fields however, there are essentially hundreds of 4 to 5 foot tall walls in between you and where you want to go. We weren't seriously concerned: every 20 minutes or so we would cross paths with families who were harvesting their grapes. Every one of them invited us to sit and eat grapes with them- we were confident that if we asked for their help, any one of them would immediately load us into their car and drive us right to our house. But it was a nice day, and we had plenty of daylight left, so we just kept on walking. 

Eventually, we stumbled upon a small orchard in the middle of all the grape fields- where we saw the most adorable herd of calves. Of course, being completely unable to resist the cuteness of immature animals, we decided to check it out. 

Upon further inspection, we found that one of the smallest animals in the pen wasn't even a cow- it was a baby gomesh! The baby gomesh and the youngest calf seemed to be buddies. At least, they hung out in the orchard together. It was adorable. 

We kept on walking for another two or three hours after we found the calves and the baby gomesh. We saw another orchard, and this one had some bee hives in it. 

Finally, we made it out of the grape fields. With Mt. Ararat on one side and Karmir Sar on the other, we we had a pretty good idea of where we were going and started to head home. 

The short walk turned out to take us the better part of 4 hours, but apart from sore feet, we emerged from the grape fields unscathed. I don't know that I'd have the energy for that kind of walk every day, but it was a really nice break from town life for an afternoon. 

Horovats

Today we had our first taste of Armenian Barbecue, which people here call Horovats. This translates fairly well: verb used for this particular method of cooking is "horovel", or literally, "to barbecue". The adjectival form of this verb is "horovats", which translated into "barbecued". Thus "horovats" as a noun is "barbecued (food)". I know, describing the grammatical etymology of the name of the food isn't nearly as interesting as describing the food itself, but there's a reason I'm focusing on grammar. 

The truth is I don't like horovats. It's terrible, but there it is. We sat down to the table, and a chunk of meat the size of a large grapefruit was plopped in front of me. It had veins of fat and gristle running through it. There were no utensils. We eat horovats with our hands, they said. I looked at the smiling faces of our hosts, eager to share this piece of their culture with us. I knew what I must do.

I had to Daenerys Stormborn it up and eat that horse heart (it was actually just pork meat). I worked my jaw until it was sore getting through that chunk of meat. Sam helped with my portion. But in the end, we got through it and emerged victorious. 

We went home, and I immediately took some prophylactic peptobismol.