The Last Weeks of Training, and Trainee-ism

Good afternoon, good evening, and good night! After a long delay I am back at it: recording my innermost thoughts for the sake of posterity. It is, today, Wednesday, December 22. Happy Birthday Pat Mulligan, you are one step closer to that big three zero, thirty, for those not mathematically aware. I am in a new town named Zhmerinka in the Vinnystka Oblast of central Ukraine. But, before I write about where I am, let me write about where I've been . . . isn't nostalgia terrific?

Since I left you last a lot has occurred. We will start with my last week in Kaharlyk. This was a whirl-wind week. My group had a meeting with the English teachers of School Number 3 where we had been teaching, the Director (Principal), and local media representatives. We were treated to tea, coffee, buterbrod, which is basically an open-faced sandwich, and delicious tsukerkies, delicious candies usually chocolates which are bountiful in this country. During this meeting, we started by thanking the teachers for allowing us their classrooms, students, and sharing with us their experience in teaching the English. As we all know, or should, teaching a language is a lot more difficult than speaking it. This followed with a poem from the Director. At some point I will send home a translation, and a copy of the article that appeared in the local paper, but for those of you familiar with my native North Kingstown School Department, the Director of our school was very similar to Mr. Merkle at vice-principal at Wickford Middle School. Around the same height, he also had the same very confident, under-control stature that was so intimidating to the 6th, 7th, and 8th grader I was. But, as with Mr. Merkle, the Director was a very kind, helpful, and capable administrator. Assisted by the rhyming case endings of the Ukrainian language, the poem, “Parting,” surprised, and was a very accurate account of the stages of our integration, and our sad parting with Kaharlyk.

This was,luckily, the first time I was able to enjoy a Ukrainian birthday party. My host mother had her birthday, which here in Ukraine is a very big deal. She spen the entire day before preparing fantastic food, chicken cutlets (which are like chicken nuggets, only better) holuptsi, which are rice and meat wrapped in a boiled cabbage leaf, also delicious. Various salads, all heavy with mayo. A million dishes, that there was barely room for our plates, and shot glasses.Of course, it is important to toast, and drink vodka for a birthday. We went around the table giving our toasts. I got to practice in Ukrainian "I wish you a year of happiness, peace, and love." And, even better, the Ukrainians loved our old toast from college "I'm never above you, never below you, but always besides you." My host sister, Valeriya translated this for me, because it was a little more complex than I knew the words for, but they were very impressed. The last thing we did was enjoy the famous Kyivski Tort. This is a very popular cake here in Ukraine. While enjoying the cake and talking, I found out that during Soviet times this cake costs 3.50UAH. it is now a 70 UAH cake (UAH is Hryvnia the Ukrainian currency). But, the point, is that it is basically unaffordable now. And only on the most special occasions do people eat this cake.

This was followed by much studying for our LPI, language proficiency interview. This interview is the culmination of training, and the way our language skills are evaluated. From this interview we are scored on a chart based on our competency. Coming to Ukraine three weeks after the rest of my group, scoring Intermediate Low was not too disappointing for me. Of course I would have preferred to do better, I have nothing but time to improve. This studying took up long expanses of time for the rest of the week, until we finally had our interview on Thursday the 10th. This should have been the end of our work, but on Friday we had to perform a seminar for the English teachers of the Kaharlyk region.

Unbeknownst to us, our seminar for the teachers of the region, became an add-on to a course of study in which young teachers observe lessons of more experienced English teachers in the region. My host-mother, the English Language Methodologist for the region was also in attendance. We first observed a lesson which was, in all actuality, a production to impress the methodologist. The lesson was clearly something that had been practiced for a long time, and only the best and brightest pupils were in this class, making a little more difficult to see how the activities would work for an average class. But, after this lesson we were able to give our seminar. We had expected a big crowd, but we only ended up with 6 young teachers in attendance, it turned out that even the teachers we had worked with at School Number 3 had not known when this final seminar would take place, and it was during the school day so they would not have been able to attend. The seminar was designed to give teachers strategies for teaching without textbooks. This is something that had to be dealt with, here in Ukraine. There is no guarantees that textbooks will arrive on time, or even that an entire class will all have the same textbook. The seminar focused on activities that would help the students with their communication, and be easy to perform with no textbooks. We used activities like “Taboo” and various others. This, too, was a learning experience. We did the seminar completely in English, thinking, that as English teachers the audience would be completely fluent. This, however, was not the case. We should have simplified our language, and spent more time on the activities less time explaining them. Once finished with this seminar we were again treated to tea, buterbrod, tsukerkies, and the like. It was quite a spread, one which I have been given frequently, and enjoyed every time.

Our time in Kaharlyk officially ended, on Monday morning, December 14. First, however we had a little appreciation dinner for our host families. It turned out that the two men in our group proved our domestic streak. We prepared deruny, or potato pancakes, home made apple sauce, and Aidan also prepared a fritatta-like dish, with a bit more bread. It was an enjoyable night. The end of this, our language instructor asked the host-families the funniest thing that happened while we were living with them. My host mother told a story of when she had called me to pick up matches. She asked in English, and of course, I was more than happy to oblige. I forgot that I didn't know the word for matches in Ukrainian. A group-mate remembered, and told me. I asked the lady at the cash desk for matches, sirniky, but she had no clue what I was talking about (I later found out that almost exclusively use the Russian word, speechkey). Being a little nervous, hurried, and embarrassed it was taking so long I started asking for malenkey pozhezha, then pointing at cigarettes. After a while the clerk understood, but she had trouble initially, because I was asking her for a small conflagration, something which made no sense.
This was the end of Kaharlyk, and on Monday morning December 14th , we were picked up by a bus and made our way to Kyiv to our Swearing-In Retreat.

That's what I'm saying!

Pete