Almost November

by Scott

I woke up yesterday to snow and a 17 degree outside temperature. Wow, is it already almost November? Thankfully the radiators in our little apartment keep the temperature inside at a cozy 76 degrees...so far. Let's hope they are as effective when winter really gets started.

Things are still going well. Although we are losing steam on our map (project fatigue), things are wrapping up. Really all we have left to do is label the individual countries. We're still not quite sure how we're going to do that though.


This picture is for Justin's mom. Apparently he's not very good at getting pictures to her and all the ones I have been taking of him only show the back of his head.


Our Teacher's Workshop is going strong into its fourth week. We got the local Education Center on board and we will now hold our classes in their conference room. The head of the English department is even going to help us by inviting more teachers -- she might even ask the individual school directors to make attendance mandatory for the next 4 weeks. So far our attendance has hovered around 10 or so, and our goal is to get the class up to 30 teachers.

I've also had my hands full with English club. I actually have about four of them and they are sort of driving me crazy. Pretty much every afternoon forty kids show up in my classroom to "learn English." However, when I try to teach them English, most of them just stare blankly at me. I have discovered what they really want is to play games and watch movies, which is fine. Next semester I am going to shake things up a bit by forming two different clubs. One will just be about games and movies (and open to everyone) and the other will be an advanced English club that interested students must apply to get into. Hopefully that will make my job a little easier.

My favorite class to teach, however, is the one Justin and I lead together at Laura's old school on Friday afternoons. There are a handful of students with amazing English skills. They were all really close with Laura -- maybe a little too close, however, because they all picked up on her slang. Their usual greeting is "What's up, homeboy?" and to say goodbye it's "See ya later, alligator!" They are a wonderful group of girls and it is really nice to teach advanced English, especially after spending the whole week just trying to drill in the basics. For example, we spent yesterday afternoon discussing such random things as what it means to be a "diva," whether someone is a "night person" or "morning person," and we finished the class off by telling ghost stories. It was awesome.

Halloween is just around the corner, along with the rest of the holiday season. This is the toughest time for me to be away from home. I can't help but think about all the festivities that we are missing out on, all the family time, and, of course, all those Starbucks pumpkin spice lattes! Thankfully, we do have a couple of great sitemates, so we do have a small Peace Corps family here in Olgii to keep us company and to celebrate with -- and to share care package goodies with. Just this morning we had a brunch with pancakes, scrambled eggs, and hashbrowns.

Here's some more pictures of things that I have been up to. The other day I was talking about Halloween and I asked some students to draw me the scariest pictures they could think of and I would use them to decorate the class.

This picture did actually scare me. I showed it to Justin and he just shook his head and said, "Man, cable television is everywhere!"

These are just some more of the decorations I've pulled together for my school's English cabinet.

These are pictures of a game we played in English club called "Monster Maker." The kids split up into groups and they had to join together to make monsters with a certain number of arms and legs.