Overnight, the weather has cooled significantly to usher in the fall. So not only are Ralph and Alice happily no longer making appearances, but school is underway. We now have two weeks of teaching under our belts, and overall it’s been a positive experience.
Peter came home after his first day exclaiming, “This is fun!” We both teach in English, the classes last 80 minutes, and the students are polite. We’re not sure how well we’re being understood, but students as well as our co-workers seem happy to have us there.
At Peter’s large university, he is working with first- and second-year students (who are 17 to 19 years old) in their Management and Translation departments. Working from textbooks edited by the department faculty, he teaches in “Entrepreneurship” and “American Studies” courses, rotating through subgroups of the 80-student classes to lecture on the same topics for two weeks at a time. So though he teaches two classes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning, he sees the same students only once every two weeks. As someone who feels it’s important to learn people’s names, he’s struggling with the realization that it may be next to impossible to learn the 150 or so names if he sees them only once a fortnight. And after discussing “Immigration” and “Types of Businesses” six times each in the last two weeks, he’s now able to talk about them in his sleep!
At my much smaller university, I’m teaching two classes, International Marketing to 4th year students and “Ethics and Culture in International Enterprise” to 5th year students. In both cases, the topic was assigned, but the course content and structure were left up to me. I have a couple of textbooks as well as the Internet and the local library to draw from for material. I’ve also used some old Wall Street Journals for articles and case studies. The students have no textbooks, so they copy selections from my books, or else I type up condensed versions of the material. Classes are small at six to eight students. The English level varies, and it’s hard to gauge the best level at which to aim the material, but I’m feeling my way along as best I can.
Peter was pleased to find a nice local gym in which to get back to working out. We had checked out some other “fitness clubs” here but most were small, dingy, below-ground, filled with old equipment, and populated by massive, unfriendly body-builder types. It turns out there’s a new, large, clean place just a couple blocks from our apartment, with good new equipment and helpful staff. It’s just what he was looking for, and he now visits a couple times a week.
Friday, September 14, 2007
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Ralph and Alice Live Here
Extremely hot weather has returned for the moment, and we’ve taken to calling ourselves Ralph and Alice (as in Kramden). You don’t want to picture this, but when we get home to our hot, small, 9th-floor apartment (which we still like very much), we turn on the electric fan, pour a couple of cold beers, and enjoy them in our underwear, because wearing any more than that is just too hot. We’re experiencing tenement living at its finest!
More Cultural Moments
We learned recently that Ukrainians, when saying their email addresses, call the “@” sign “sobachka” which means little dog. We’ve read since (in the Int’l Herald Tribune which we were thrilled to find, along with a current WSJ, in Kiev) that many languages have come up with their own descriptive names for this symbol. In Czech it’s their word for “a herring wrapped around a pickle,” in Hebrew it’s “snail”, in Mandarin it’s “little mouse,” and in Thai it’s “wiggling worm.” Never thought about how someone who doesn’t speak English would have to come up with something to call this funny symbol with no meaning.
Speaking of dogs, there are many apparently feral dogs (and cats) that live on the streets here. What’s noteworthy is how calm and unthreatening they are, even when running in packs. Unlike the Central American experience of our son, whose knee-jerk reaction to seeing a stray dog now is to grab the nearest stick or rock in order to protect himself, these dogs are universally not problematic. Our theory is that they are so well cared for by locals, who seem to really love the dogs, that they’re rarely hungry. Our local host mom is an example. She keeps in her refrigerator a container for bones and other table scraps, which she regularly carries out to the fields near her apartment to give to the dogs. We even heard the mother of a young boy, who had dropped one of the pretzels he was eating at an outdoor play area, tell him to “leave it for the dogs.”
It is not unusual to see Ukrainians working in their gardens, whether at a more private dacha or in an open, more public plot on the outskirts of town, wearing only their undergarments. (Peace Corps volunteers have made jokes about “Speedo gardening”) It’s hot out there, and it’s just more comfortable.
News Flash
We are sad to report that, as of today, the one English-language TV channel we could get here, BBC World News, has just been replaced by…MTV-Ukraine! We could try to be grown up about this and say it will be better for our language study to have no English-language TV, but in fact we're quite disappointed. It's another opportunity for us to say to ourselves, "Remember, we're in the Peace Corps."
More Cultural Moments
We learned recently that Ukrainians, when saying their email addresses, call the “@” sign “sobachka” which means little dog. We’ve read since (in the Int’l Herald Tribune which we were thrilled to find, along with a current WSJ, in Kiev) that many languages have come up with their own descriptive names for this symbol. In Czech it’s their word for “a herring wrapped around a pickle,” in Hebrew it’s “snail”, in Mandarin it’s “little mouse,” and in Thai it’s “wiggling worm.” Never thought about how someone who doesn’t speak English would have to come up with something to call this funny symbol with no meaning.
Speaking of dogs, there are many apparently feral dogs (and cats) that live on the streets here. What’s noteworthy is how calm and unthreatening they are, even when running in packs. Unlike the Central American experience of our son, whose knee-jerk reaction to seeing a stray dog now is to grab the nearest stick or rock in order to protect himself, these dogs are universally not problematic. Our theory is that they are so well cared for by locals, who seem to really love the dogs, that they’re rarely hungry. Our local host mom is an example. She keeps in her refrigerator a container for bones and other table scraps, which she regularly carries out to the fields near her apartment to give to the dogs. We even heard the mother of a young boy, who had dropped one of the pretzels he was eating at an outdoor play area, tell him to “leave it for the dogs.”
It is not unusual to see Ukrainians working in their gardens, whether at a more private dacha or in an open, more public plot on the outskirts of town, wearing only their undergarments. (Peace Corps volunteers have made jokes about “Speedo gardening”) It’s hot out there, and it’s just more comfortable.
News Flash
We are sad to report that, as of today, the one English-language TV channel we could get here, BBC World News, has just been replaced by…MTV-Ukraine! We could try to be grown up about this and say it will be better for our language study to have no English-language TV, but in fact we're quite disappointed. It's another opportunity for us to say to ourselves, "Remember, we're in the Peace Corps."
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