I have a feeling that this may be a reoccurring blog topic because sometimes people say some pretty crazy things to me. They are probably not crazy by their standards, just not things I would expect people to say. Everyone asks me as soon as they meet me if I am married, I guess being twenty-four and uncommitted is making me pretty old (that is suppose to be sarcastic), but that’s not too weird of a question. What is slightly weird is being asked if I have a brother then being asked if he is married, and when I say yes, having a group of girls sigh with disappointment.
Today at the park my groupies told me how my white skin is “awesome.” This is a sentence I never thought I would say, but it’s true. There is a wonderful group of girls who basically try to follow me around and they scream with excitement when I talk to them. They are in the 6th form, kind of like 6th grade I guess, they just don’t call them grades here. Below is a picture of me at the park with my groupies. I don’t think much about the color of my skin and I am in the Caucasus Mountains, which is where the term Caucasian came from. So, the people look pretty white to me, but it was pointed out to me that I am whiter. This is not a surprise. I am used to being the palest one. I just have never been told that as a compliment.
(At the Park with Some "Awesome" Girls)
So, in my classroom setting, English is a second, third, fourth, maybe even fifth langue to some students. Many of the students' intelligence amazes me; they all know at least two alphabets very well. The 7th form class can play and understand Madlips and the 12th form can read and understand Catcher in the Rye. They can read out loud, they can understand what they read, and they can write. But, they can’t talk, or understand that much when being talked to. This is not their fault--they have never had an English teacher that speaks English fluently, or at least not until now.
I am amazed by their intelligence, and fairly certain very few students in the U.S. have that firm of an understanding of a second language, especially in a public school system that can’t afford to turn lights on in the building. Oddly, the teachers here constantly tell me the school is full of lazy students. Today, a teacher even told me the students were stupid—in front of the students. Maybe the teacher did not realize that this is a pretty harsh criticism of her students. Whenever a student’s work is not done well the teacher says, “You are a lazy pupil, shame on you, shame on your family.” I don’t really like this approach to teaching kids; I personally am a fan of positive reinforcement.
One of the techniques that is supposedly left over from soviet style teaching is having the students memorize poems and such, often something they do not understand. This is an example of something students in the 3rd form memorized—before they even know the alphabet:
Hello Master
Hello Pussy, how are you?
I am fine, and you?
I am fine, thanks, goodbye.
Goodbye.
The teacher corrects them if they deviate at all from this, even if what they are saying makes sense. This memorized script has resulted in seven-year-old boys walking up to me in the hall and saying, “Hello, Pussy.” I am not sure how I should react to this, but I just laugh and say hello back to them.
Other direct quotes that I copied down from a Russian, English textbook make me laugh. The Russian school’s English textbooks seem like they were written in the 1960s, even though they are brand new books. Students are called pupils and the main occupations seem to be a driver, pilot, and doctor. The students constantly read, “I am a Soviet.” Other direct quotes give me the impression that the books were written under a government that didn’t like the U.S.
One day I was sitting in a 7th form class and I had to copy down some quotes from the book, because I was simply surprised and amused by them. The unit was on nuclear war, not a topic you would expect to find in a foreign language book for twelve-year-old kids. Here are just a few key sentences that gave me an impression of an Anti-American, Pro-Russian textbook. Keep in mind that, while it is a Russian school, currently Georgia does not have a good relationship with Russia.
The first country to use a nuclear weapon was America in 1945.
No one wins in nuclear war.
I would like to see a nuclear free Europe.
What countries have nuclear weapons?
The only country mentioned in the book as having nuclear weapons was the U.S. This kind of bothered me because I felt that it painted the U.S. in a negative light, but I might have read in to it deeper than the twelve-year-old kids. Another couple of sentence in a row made me kind of laugh at the book. “Moscow has a large population. The population of many Western European countries is growing.” First, it makes it sound like Moscow is in Western Europe, which I don’t think anyone would agree with. Secondly, out of all the places in the world, Western Europe is not exactly known for their population growth.
Despite what I find to be poor textbooks and teachers that might not have the best grasp on the language they are teaching, many of the students do a great job of communicating with me. I have been asked if I smoke and if I drink. I said I don’t smoke and I don’t drink very often or very much. I explained that in the U.S. we have a drinking age of twenty-one and that you can’t buy cigarettes until you are eighteen. This was enough to make some 12th form boys say they didn’t want to come to America. I shouldn’t be surprised that a drinking age is a crazy idea in a country where my eight-year-old host brother out drank me at dinner last night.
The people here are normally so friendly and thus far anything I have read or heard that surprised me I found entertaining. I am looking forward to being surprised a few more times.
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