October 2007
We had a crash course in all things Ukrainian during those first three months. We learned how to teach in Ukrainian classrooms and had four hours a day of language classes.
Our training teacher taught the English class and we observed her. I felt like an exotic bird. Before class, the children giggled and clustered around the desks on the other side of the room. They stared at us and whispered like we were a particularly interesting exhibit at the museum. Most of these children had never seen Americans before and they acted the way I might if Brad Pitt or Ewan McGregor stopped by to hang out.
“Who will have the nerve?” I wondered, amused. Finally a student ventured forth from the pack. “How old are you?” she blurted at us. We answered and she went to report back to her group.
During a break, Antonella and I walked across the street to get a snack from a yellow kiosk. It was the closest available food and a hot spot for the students to buy snacks.
We waited patiently for our turn while children around us pushed in and placed orders. It was a free for all and we would have been standing there into next year if we hadn’t started thinking like Ukrainians. “You just have to get in there,” I muttered to my friend. “You’re going to be next. Go, go, go!” And I pushed her forward. We learned that lines, or queues, are not widely used in Ukraine.
The village school used a series of old, pictureless textbooks by a Ukrainian author who had purportedly been to England and had a well-rounded grasp of English and American cultures.
The map of North America at the front of the book was a basic outline and placed “Washington” somewhere below Lake Erie, and Niagara Falls across the arm of the U.S. under New York. It took some doing to convince the students that there was a Washington D.C. and a state of Washington, and that they were in two separate locations.
The books’ technique for teaching English was to memorize and recite vocabulary words and paragraphs of text. Often for homework, the students were told to retell a text. This meant the kids memorized the paragraph and recited it in class.
It was rare that more than three or four students actually completed the assignment. Most of the students would stand up, stutter through a few words, and then sit down after the teacher wrote down their low mark (grade).
We wrote lesson plans and used the tools we’d been taught in our technical training sessions to teach the children. The first day that we were to teach, Michelle was the only one who taught. She had a third period class and the rest of us were supposed to teach fourth period lessons. However, all classes after third period were canceled because the students helped clean the school. I had stayed up late planning a lesson that never happened and I was upset at Ukrainian last minute schedules.
We asked Michelle how she did as the first veteran among us and she only muttered, "I don't want to talk about it."
My first official day of teaching went well. The seventh form students ate up what I said and thought I was pretty awesome. I taught food vocabulary. I taught the words for "breakfast," "lunch" and "dinner" and cut out pictures of food from magazines. In the United States, we have a different idea of food. We eat definite things for different meals. Eggs, pancakes, juice and fruit are for breakfast. Sandwiches are for lunch. And hot things like meat and potatoes are for dinner (that is, depending on where you live in the states). In Ukraine, they eat everything for all meals. Borshch is the only thing that is considered a lunch or dinner item.
Sestra asked me if I would come to her class some time to teach. She was in ninth form and I didn’t have her class as one of the ones I was scheduled to teach. She arranged with her teacher a time for me to come.
When I arrived at the class after my Ukrainian language class, the teacher told me I had the students for the whole hour and she'd be in the Teachers’ Lounge.
I had to extend the 20-minute presentation I had prepared to 50 minutes by going slowly and then thinking madly for other things to say. I asked them everything they knew about American and pointed to popular states on the map. After class, the students told me to come back and teach English every lesson.
The toilets at the school were in back. They were small round holes cut into the ground inside four stalls. The female pupils waited outside for their turn because there were no doors on the stalls.
***
On Saturdays, we met with another American cohort in a nearby town. It was 30 minutes away by bus. The first week while waiting for the bus, Michelle walked over to a kiosk to get a bottle of water. A few minutes later, she returned empty-handed.
“I failed,” she said, downcast. “How?” I asked. “I have no idea,” she said. “I asked for Voda (water) and she said ‘nee’ and I said ‘tak’ and she said ‘nee’ so I said, ‘fine’ and left.” (She had probably asked for vodka because the words are almost the same).
When the small bus came and the door opened, it was packed and I had to stand next to the driver.
The driver stopped to let someone off and two more people got in. Then it stopped again and three more people got in. Then it stopped and the driver argued with the waiting people, obviously letting them know we were full. That didn’t stop two more insistent people from shoving their way on. I found myself sitting backwards on the dashboard almost on top of the driver, hunched over with my hand on the driver’s shoulder so I wouldn’t fall into the sardine-in-a-can passengers.
Michelle muttered when we got off, “The man behind me got to third base.”
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