June

I spent June teaching 2 summer English classes. I didn’t know I was going to do this, but it was suggested to me by my counterpart after school ended. We agreed to meet and talk one day about maybe organizing a class. I couldn’t reach my counterpart, so I came to school at 10:30 to try to find her. When I walked into the teachers’ room, another teacher told me that kids were waiting for me and I had a lesson at 10 o’clock. I figured I must be misunderstanding her because my Mongolian’s not so great (read: pathetic). I pointed to the clock and said, “It’s 10:30.” If I had a lesson at 10, wouldn’t someone have informed me? She just stared at me like I was very, very stupid (I get a lot of that, actually). My CP came in a few minutes later and told me that she was sitting upstairs with 40 students who were waiting for me to teach a lesson. After a full school year, this does not surprise or upset me too much, but it’s still a little aggravating. Finally, we agreed that I would teach 2 classes, one for 4-5th grades and one for 7th-10th, for one month.
I had a really good time teaching it, actually. Even though no one else was at school, so in general it took about 20 minutes per class to find someone to unlock the door and let us in. I decided to make it speaking focused, since that’s the main skill I can offer that their regular teachers can’t. My CP insisted that everything had to be “very interesting, very funny,” so we played games, learned pop songs, and watched movies. (She also told me I had to make many materials for them- vocab. lists, information packets, etc. I asked if I could use a printer. “No.” Could I use a copier? “No.”) You’d be surprised how many good vocabulary words and idioms you can get from pop songs. And movies can be a really constructive activity if you stop it after each scene, make the students explain what just happened, describe the characters, predict what they think will happen next, etc. (One of the movies I showed was Harry Potter, which means they now know important words like “unicorn,” “wizard,” and “Gryffindor.” I swear I taught them useful things, too.)
All the other teachers went on vacation, so I was on my own with this class, but I liked it because it meant I could do whatever I wanted. Also, the kids really had to use their English speaking skills because there wasn’t anyone around to help translate for them. We used the English Resource Room, which was much too small, but it was cozy and I could show movies on a computer screen. The heat doesn’t work in that room, so I figure I’ll use it in the summer while I can. The fact that no one else was around also meant that I could bring my kitten, which the kids LOVED. Overall, I was surprised by how much the kids liked the class. After all, they were coming voluntarily during their vacation. After the first lesson, one little girl helping me clean up told me “Today is very happy. Thank you, teacher.”
In the last week of lessons, kids started disappearing. Most of my students seem to either go to a camp/class thing in UB (math training, swimming lessons, etc.) or to live with their herder grandparents for the summer. On the last day of class, the remaining few made me a poster with thank-you notes written in English and had me take pictures with them. I like teaching teenagers, too, but I LOVE the 10-year-olds. They are so sweet and they think learning new things is really, really exciting.
Besides teaching these classes, I haven’t been doing too much. My best 8th-grade student (she’s pretty much fluent in English for no other reason but that she studies A LOT), invited me to her house to meet her family. After the customary eating and looking at photo albums, we spent 3 hours looking at pictures of her favorite Korean boy band and debating who was the cutest (with the makeup and the outfits, they actually all looked exactly the same to me, but that’s probably because I’m old). So 14-year-old girls are the same all over the world.
Speaking of which, I saw a family that I’m friends with here in Arv for the first time in a month, and the daughter, who is 14, had lost quite a bit of weight (she wasn’t overweight to begin with). She told me that she had gone to a “beauty training” led by a former Miss Universe contestant one weekend, where they learned how to walk on a catwalk, put on makeup, etc. She said she really liked it, but it was embarrassing because the clothes they gave the girls to model were too small for her. She wanted to go to the summer beauty camp, so she decided she needed to lose weight so she could model the pretty clothes. Her mom bragged to me, “She hardly eats anything, and she always exercises in the evening! This beauty school is so good for her self-esteem. I wish I could lose weight like her.” It really broke my heart, because I remember being that age and not eating because I was convinced that I was a big fat fatty. So…14-year-old girls are the same all over the world, I guess.
On a lighter note, the weather is lovely (well, it rains for a few hours every day, but when it’s not raining, it’s gorgeous). I can’t believe I’m still in the same country. I don’t know how I’ll face another winter, though. It’s July 3rd and I’m already dreading it! At least last year I didn’t know what I was getting into. Now I know what to expect. And last winter didn’t make me any less wimpy about being cold. The weather was so nice yesterday that we took our Australian and Mongolian friends out by the river to eat American food and celebrate Independence Day with us (…a little early). It was really fun, especially since these days the sun doesn’t set until about 10pm, so there was no hurry.
Last weekend, the Australians took us to visit some herder friends of theirs who own a bunch of yaks. We stayed in a tent and there was a huge thunderstorm that night, so it wasn’t super comfortable, but it was still a lot of fun. We helped milk the yaks (I discovered I’m pretty much useless at it, so “farmer” is not on my list of potential occupations), and rode horses. It was a blast! I can definitely see the appeal of being a herder in the beautiful Mongolian countryside…in the summer.
That about sums up June, I think. July will be pretty boring, but I’m gonna work at a summer camp for a week. I’ve never been a “camp” person, so….that should be interesting.

What was left of my 26-student 4th and 5th-grade class on the last day:



One of my students with the poster they made me:



Yaks:


Playing frisbee with the herder kids:



Horseback riding in the steppe: