Practice school

Now we enter the time of practice school.  This is my first real experience teaching children and I must say that I had a rocky start.  I know that I was not really prepared to take on the molding of young children's minds but I may just have a good start when practice school is over.  I have been lucky to be able to work with a Moldovan teacher who helps me through the thorny bits of dealing with a large group of 10 year olds.  Practice school, for those who don't know, is where we, the volunteers, practice teaching Moldovan children.  These are children who volunteer (or their parents volunteer them) to come to like what would be considered an English summer camp for about 7 days.  I am working with the 5th form, which is full of students around 10 yeards old.  And I must say that my students are great.  Some of them are so eager to learn.  But they are also exhausting, they are a group of 10 year olds.  

Mostly what I have to say at this point is that I am a little tired, we go, go, go, go.  It is great but exhausting.  But as someone reminded me, "You didn't sign up to rest!  You signed up to work!"  Of course this person was making fun of me, but the statement rings true.  

On another note the weather has sort of mellowed out.  I think most days it is around 85 degrees not 95 or I have seriously begun to adjust to the weather.  I am going to say that it is more likely that it has just cooled off.  

I hope everyone is doing well and I will try to have some interesting things to say in my next post.

Practice School here I come!

So, as the time goes by we learn a little bit more Russian every day, and then of course we forget it the instant we want to use it.  However this is the last week of full Russian lessons (meaning around 4 hours a day) that we will have for PST.  Next week we start Practice school and that means that we will have around 2 hours of Russian a day.  I will miss it so.  And I truly mean that because it has been so helpful and useful.  I have probably said it every blog but I really do learn a word that I can use every day.  Hopefully when I get to site I will start remembering and then using all this knowledge.

Practice school, I have heard, is a time when we have no free time.  But all the volunteers that have talked to us have said that Practice school was one of the best things for getting them ready to actually teach, especially since many people do not come with a lot of teaching experiences.  I am sort of looking forward to and dreading the whole experience but I know that it will be worth it.  I hope you are all thinking the same thing for me, so that it will definately come true.  :)

Thats it for now.  Not very exciting news but I hope it will sustain you until my next post. 

Sweet, sweet internet

Hello everybody!!  I just wanted to say that I am truly enjoying my time on the internet right now.  I have answered many an email and now I am keeping on track with my blogging schedule.  I am also enjoying being cool indoors because outside it is close to 90 degrees F, which wouldn't be so bad if it were not also very humid.  As you can imagine, coming from Fairbanks I have little experience with extending periods of humidity and wish that it would just away.  We will have a rainstorm and I think "oh good, it will cool off now", no, it just continues to be HOT and HUMID.  Not my favorite combination.  But such is life.  On the plus side my family here has a rainwater shower outside so I get to take a cool, refreshing shower at the end of the day.  How I love thee outdoor shower.  It is really the little things that make life enjoyable.  

Every week leads us closer to the end of PST or in the case of the English education volunteers, practice school.  In practice school we get to test our mettle and knowledge gained from all of the PST in teaching.  On the plus side it ends with what we would call a field day for the students who participated and gave over their young minds to our care.  My group is planning to have some good old fashioned field day activities such as an egg walk, a three-legged race, and who knows what else.  Fun stuff to be sure.  It might be sad but we are looking forward to that day a little more than practice school.  But that is mostly because we know that the field day will be the end of practice school and very close to our swearing in day.  That coveted day where we officially become volunteers and end the exhausting yet exhilarating time of PST.

Even though we, as a group, have been fairly busy I have still had the opportunity to go to events with my host family and experience some Moldovan hospitality.  I have eaten and drank maybe more that I really wanted to but it was all delicious and in the spirit of being a good guest.  They make some great things here like stuffed peppers, compote (like juice with the fruit left in it), meat in general.  Then there is all the fresh fruits and veggies.  I get to eat a tomato and a cucumber on a daily basis.  Right now there a plums, peaches, and apricots in season.  I have to say I did not realize the breadth of the different types of plums, peaches and apricots in the world.  I have had small yellow plums and a wide variety of apricots all delicious.  We definitely miss out by only having a supermarket variety.

    

In Comrat

This weekend I am at my future site of Comrat. It is about the size of Fairbanks but with a lot more fruit, veggies, shops, and fields. Plus a whole lot less winter. I am staying with the family that will be my host family when I come to live in Comrat after PST. Today I got to meet with the director (what we would call a principal), the vice-director, and a French teacher who speaks excelent English. She also teaches a couple of the lower form English classes. She is the one who took me around the city and showed me where to find everything I might need or want. This is also the first time I have been completely surrounded by Russian. In the town where I am living for PST it is mostly Romanian speakers, which I kind of like because it gives me an opportunity to pick up on some Romanian. But for overall exposure to Russian it has been a little hard. This trip has also given me a really good view of all the language skills I really need to work on before I am done with PST. It is becoming apparentent that motion verbs (there is more than one verb for to go) are really important and deserve a large amount of my attention.
At any rate I am really looking forward to coming back to Comrat in the fall. I am also really looking forward to having a fall. :) (those of you from AK know what I am talking about) I also got a little view of the school where I will be teaching and an idea of how many students. Since the bulk of students are in Russian schools our school has very few students. In terms of class size that means I am going to have small classes. I feel like that is going to be wonderful. Of course it is just speculation right now.
Everyone I have met has been absolutely wonderful. My host family here has been interested in AK and my Comrat host mom and I spent close to an hour and a half looking up things about AK and pictures and such on the internet. I managed to forget all my interesting AK things back in Ialoveni.
I also wanted to mention that right now the sunflower fields are blooming. Imagine if you can acres of sunflowers all in bloom. That is what I drove through for a large part of the day yesterday. Beautiful! If i was looking for a more beautiful country I don't think I could have found it.

4 weeks down!

Hi everyone,

I know that I said I would keep up with this whole blog thing, I did have the best of intention but lack of time and sometimes access to internet has restricted that.  Since I have a free moment I will try to catch up on everything.  I have been in Moldova 4 weeks now (if we count this week) and it has both flown by and crawled by.  We have language classes 6 days a week for half  the day and technical sessions-or classes on how to teach in Moldova-for 3-5 days a week.  So you can imagine that we have been  kept busy, busy, busy.  I also do a lot with my host family.  They love to have friends and family over and go visit friends and family.  It has been great for me because I get to meet a lot of new people.  Generally that is hard for me so I really lucked out.  

I have told a lot of people but not all that I am learning Russian.  I will be going to a site with a lot of Russian speakers, for example a town or region where there is a ethnic Russian settlement, so the PC said "Let her learn Russian!"  It will be really good for latter on because I will still have plenty of chances to learn Romanian and this way I start with the language that is "harder" to learn first.  I get to find out where my site will be really soon, so I can start making my 2 years plans. 

In addition to all the learning and studying we have excursions to learn about Moldovan culture and they also feed us.  So far we have had team building and a cultural day.  It is fun because all the volunteers come together for these days were usually we are broken up by program.  

Well, this isn't a terribly long blog but I will say that I live in a very nice house, with a very nice family, and I have a flushing toilet for all those who are wondering what my life has been like so far.  :)

Till next post!