Three things I would get fired for in the UK...

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It’s been a fairly quiet week all round, with little interaction with the ‘outside’ world. I have no classes on Monday but I ask Eka if I can go into school anyway – I want to spend a good few hours on the internet. Eka and Maia have been told they need to write a syllabus, but they’ve been given absolutely no guidance as to how to write it or what to include so I want to do some research. I’m also planning on trawling the internet, shamelessly stealing ideas for games to play with Gio and Mari to help them with their English. Eka, like myself, has no lessons on Monday but Maia has to go into school to drop off her little girls so Eka says she will meet me there. I arrive at about 10am and the first thing I learn is that the internet isn’t working. Although this is hardly uncommon, it did throw a small spanner in the works. No matter, I say, I will just go into Zugdidi and use an internet café. Not so fast. First I must sit and talk with Maia about my weekend. This is hardly arduous but I have got quite a lot to get through so I’m anxious to be on my way. After about 10 – 15 minutes of chatting I once again stand up and say I should be going. No chance, first I must go and drink coffee. So we move to the kitchen where coffee is brewed and cakes are produced. And then I spy one of those large plastic beer bottles on the side and make the mistake of asking, ‘Is that beer? At school?!’ Turns out it’s not beer. It’s home-made wine. So I am made to drink a couple of glasses of this before I am finally permitted to leave. Well, I wouldn’t want to offend anybody. I arrive in Zugdidi and manage to successfully collect my boots from the cobblers. Then there’s something else I need to take care of. We still haven’t received the teachers’ books that accompany the course books the students are working from, which makes it extremely difficult, although obviously not impossible, to teach from them. So I decide to go into our regional centre and ‘have a word.’ Although the girl I speak to is so lovely and apologetic that all I can really bring myself to do is ask where they are and when we might receive them. I am told we just have to wait. I then spend a blissful couple of hours in an internet café, catching up on emails and doing my research. It’s strange how quickly you become accustomed to not having the internet at your fingertips but, even so, it’s the first time I’ve had uninterrupted access to a half decent connection since I arrived so I make the most of it. Interestingly there’s an email from the TLG Team asking us to let them know if we have not yet received the teachers’ books. The email is marked ‘Urgent’ and gives volunteers a window of exactly four hours to respond. So I throw a small fit via email. I write back informing them that, as far as I know, nobody has received the books and, on a side note, question the logic of sending an urgent email with a four hour deadline to respond to a bunch of people who firstly, do not have access to the internet and secondly, will be in school for the entirety of that four hour period. Funnily enough they never reply. I find a café with a balcony and settle in with a cup of tea to make some phone calls. I still don’t really like making lengthy calls at home so I decide to make the most of it, only this Georgian guy keeps coming up and trying to talk to me, while I’m on the phone. I manage to catch up with some of the other volunteers and share stories from the weekend before giving up and leaving. Now, I know there’s a marshrutka at 3pm, which has come and gone, and I know there’s one at 6pm. It didn’t occur to me for a second that there wasn’t one in between. When I get to the bus station it’s about 4.15pm. I really can’t be bothered to walk back into town and I hate sitting around doing nothing so I decide that this will be a good time to find out if it’s possible to walk back to my village. I estimate it will take a little over two hours so I will get back at the same time as the last marshrutka anyway. The one major flaw in my plan is that, because I was at school earlier, I’m wearing heels. After the first 15 minutes I realise that, as far as ideas go, this one is pretty fucking shit, and after 45 minutes I want to curl up and die. The problem is that, once you go a little way out of town, all the taxis dry up. The only ones coming out of town already have passengers. So I keep on walking and walking, getting more and more irritable. In the end Eka calls me to find out where I am so I give up and flag down a taxi heading back into town. Bastard still tries to charge me 20 Lari even though I’ve walked about a third of the way. I was having none of it. He obviously sensed I was in no mood to be trifled with and dropped his price to 15 Lari. Still an outrage but I was too footsore to argue. When I got home I found out three things – firstly that the books had arrived. In theory this is good news but now I feel like a total twat for going into the centre and ‘shouting’. Secondly, the centre called my director to tell her I’d been into see them (?!). And thirdly my director had seen me stumbling along the side of the road between Zugdidi and Koki and called Eka to tell her where I was. So now I can add my director to the list of Georgian people who think I’m insane and/or stupid. Eka and I are excited about the new books and spend an hour or so pouring over them. The teachers’ books are fantastic. At the risk of sounding lazy, they effectively obliterate the need for any lesson planning as everything is laid out for you. However, we soon realise that quite a few materials are missing, including the stage one books which are used by grades one, two and three. Still, you can’t have everything. After dinner Gala pulls out his homemade vodka. Now, anyone who’s had cha cha knows how bad that is. This stuff is worse. Eka tells me it’s made from pears. As far as I can tell the process involves putting pure alcohol into bottles and dissolving pears in it. It’s 70 – 80%. Even Gala looks like he’s going to cry after his first shot. We stop at three. Eka and Levani refuse to drink at all. I call Levani a gogo but something tells me he’ll be the one laughing in the morning.
On Tuesday I have my first classes. Eka consults me as much as possible and tries to include me in the lesson. Maia sits me down behind the desk and my only involvement is when she asks me to read a passage from the book. We have the CDs now but no CD player so I have said that I will buy one for school. Actually I said this last weekend and obviously didn’t even look for one because we ended up in Mestia so I really do have to find one this weekend. I already get the feeling that I’m going to find Maia’s lessons very frustrating. She’s such a sweet lady but her pronunciation is terrible. At one point I asked if I could drill some words with the kids to check their pronunciation and she just said ‘They know how to say it’ and I’m thinking, ‘Well clearly they don’t because they’re pronouncing the word ‘hot’ as ‘hort’’. To be perfectly honest I kind of wish she would just leave and let me teach. But I knew that this was an aspect of the programme I was going to find frustrating. I only have a few weeks of teaching experience but one of the things I loved about it was the autonomy in the classroom. Basically, I’m a control freak and I don’t like not being in charge! When drinking coffee in the kitchen after class somebody puts a bottle of clear liquid on the table and I make the mistake of asking, ‘Is that water?’ It’s vodka. When will I learn to keep my mouth shut? Also, on a side note, everybody smokes in the school – in the teachers’ room, in the computer room, in the kitchen, although they do tend to look slightly sheepish about it while they’re doing it. When I get home from school Nino is there with Eka and Gala and we sit chatting for a while. Then, as I’m sitting in my chair reading, Eka comes and tells me that they all have to go out and I’m in charge of the kids. To this day I have no idea where they all went or why. All the adults piled into the car and drove off and I am left alone with Gio, Mari and Nino’s son. Never mind, I read and they play and everyone’s happy. At one point Mari and her cousin are playing rather boisterously in the living room. Actually perhaps wrestling would be a better word. I get my phrase book and look up the Georgian word for ‘careful’, quickly realise there’s no way I’ll be able to pronounce it and leave them to it. The adults return about two hours later, laden with shopping but no explanation. Another mystery doomed never to be solved.
School continues to be frustrating. For the most part I enjoy my lessons with Eka and we actually have a lot of fun. The little first graders are managing to melt even my stone heart and Eka lets me play games with them (‘stand up if you’re wearing red!’) On the other hand Maia’s lessons fill me with dread. In the sixth grade there are maybe three or four kids who are at the level we’re trying to teach and the others have no idea and are more or less ignored. Worse, there’s a boy in the fourth grade who clearly has severe learning difficulties and shouldn’t even be in this school, let alone that class. He can’t speak and, whilst Maia gives him exercises to do while the rest of the children engage in class exercises, he clearly needs special attention. I recall doing one activity from the book where the children were required to complete a series of sentences using ‘was’ or ‘were’ where appropriate. Not a single member of the class got a single answer right. Maia went through every question correcting the class and then said to me, ‘Shall we move on?’ Well how about we try to make them actually understand first? It took me all of 45 seconds, using the blackboard, to illustrate to them the different circumstances under which we use ‘was’ and ‘were’. But this is the problem. Students get questions wrong, and the teacher corrects them and moves on. There’s no pair work, no peer correction, no self-correction. Worse yet, there’s no actual teaching of the concepts. How can you give a child an exercise and expect them to be able to answer questions using ‘was’ and ‘were’ when you haven’t actually explained to them the use in the English language of ‘was’ and ‘were’. They’re not psychic. Anyway, that’s that little rant over. I guess I will just have to try to work with them to make things better. That’s what we’re here for, after all. After school I spend the early evening teaching Mari and Gio. I love that they clearly enjoy my lessons (if you can call them that) and we’re at the stage where they’re actually asking to learn English. I teach them more body parts and then play the face race (where you assign each part of the face to a number and then they roll a dice, draw that part of the face and race to see who can finish their face first). I try to turn each of their lessons into some sort of competition for them. After dinner the home-made vodka rears its ugly head again. Luckily we finish the bottle so I may have a reprieve for a while. Although having said that there’s probably stacks of the stuff out in the shed. I spend the evening sitting around in the kitchen chatting with Eka, Gala and Levani. That makes it sound like I can speak really good Georgian or they can all speak English! For the most part they chat in Georgian and sometimes Eka and I have a conversation or Eka translates for the others or we mime. They are always interested to hear about how things in my country compare with theirs. We discuss salaries and how much things cost. I say that London is very expensive and we discuss rent and energy prices. Eka says that she earns only $200 a month and Levani reaches up and turns off the overhead light so we’re sitting in darkness. Gotta love their sense of humour.
On Thursdays I have no lessons til around 11am but I still go in first thing. I spend my time reading and writing, trying to improve my Georgian or using the internet (when it’s working). The school is absolutely freezing. It somehow manages to retain the cold. Even when it’s cold outside it somehow manages to be colder in the school. After class Eka tells me there’s a parents’ meeting. I kind of thought this would be like it is in the UK – an event for the whole school where all the parents would come in and speak to each of their children’s teachers about their progress. No, it’s exclusively something for the English department, for Eka and Maia to tell them all about the new English course. Or, more accurately, an opportunity for all the parents to stare at me. Ok, maybe I’m being paranoid, but I couldn’t understand a word they were saying so if that’s what I say it was about you’ll just have to take my word for it. Afterwards Gio picks us up in the car; he can barely see over the dashboard, bless him. In the evening Eka and I plan our lessons for the following day and have a look at the DVD that accompanies the course book. One of the songs is going to be stuck in my head all weekend. The DVDs are hilarious because they show children that are so obviously English, learning English. After dinner we try some of Gala’s new homemade wine but he says it isn’t ready yet. At the moment it’s sweet but quite weak. Give it a couple of weeks and it’ll be ready to drink. That morning before we went to school Eka had made bread and put it in the oven. All the guys had to do was take it out again. Both fell asleep and forgot about it so there’s a lot of good natured arguing about who burned the bread. Eka and I tut about how useless men are. Sometimes I think it must be nice for her to have another woman around the place – particularly one she can talk to without anyone else understanding! She’s even started letting me wash up sometimes. You have no idea how happy this makes me.

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