A Bag of Fish

Today didn’t start well, as I woke up 45 minutes earlier than my alarm and couldn’t get back to sleep. I kept thinking about all the work (particularly paperwork) that has to get done in the next few weeks. I’m really worried that the faculty head is going to catch all the “mistakes” I have made with my course documents and rake me over the coals. I’m not sure how bad it will be, considering that I do have a few cards in my hands. Quite a few Fulbright program rules have been disregarded (intentionally or unintentionally, I don’t know) by my university, so I always have that to fire back at them if I am confronted. Eh. I suppose it’s not a big deal, but it’s still stressing me out.

The thing that is frustrating is that at the end of the day, my performance won’t be judged by anything I do in the classroom, but how well I prepare my documents. Disheartening. (My mother assures me that this is the reality of teaching everywhere.)

Once my alarm actually went off, I got ready to go to the university for a marathon class session. Because of all the class cancellations and the fact that my students left the university for a month and a half to student-teach, I will be teaching basically double my normal class schedule until school ends in two weeks. So, we’re cramming in classes on Saturdays. I taught my Culture and Civilization group from 9:30 to 3:00 today. I was having flashbacks of AP European History Saturday test prep sessions!

I thought this was going to be awful, but it ended up being okay. Nobody really wants to work on Saturdays, so we had a twenty-minute breakfast break right in the middle of class. I was taken out of class by the department head in a rather official fashion, only to find out that the reason she wanted me to go to the faculty lounge was to drink tea and eat some leftovers from yesterday’s party.

Today my students were surprisingly active (and not too whiny) considering they were sacrificing their weekend to sit in class for nearly six hours! That is the one thing that makes all the ridiculous paperwork worthwhile: my students are entertaining. It’s fun to watch how all the girls interact (almost all of my local students are girls) and to see all of their personality quirks. They’re all very nice girls and it’s energizing to have such interesting students.

We did a crash course in American history from the Civil War to the present. It turned out pretty well, but it’s always hard to remember that people here don’t really learn much about our history, so you really have to start from nothing. I think the biggest hit was when I showed a clip from Glory. Too bad I had no reasonable excuse to watch the whole movie...I could have used a nap.

A bright part of my day was giving one of my students a burned copy of The College Dropout. Just doing my part to spread Kanye to Gagauzia.

As I was about to walk out of the room, I noticed a bag sitting on one of the desks. I decided that I might as well check it out in case it was something important. Imagine my surprise when I saw a large number of fish staring up at me with their dead eyes!

I called down the hall to the last one of my students who luckily hadn’t left yet. I showed her the bag of fish and she made some phone calls and scared up the owner of the fish.

Thank God I decided to look in that bag--the stench on Monday would have made a cat drop dead.

I came home and crashed. I’m currently reading A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle, which is way weirder than I remembered.

I had a strange moment while watching a Russian soap opera tonight. The main character was driving around in a fancy car, and I thought, “How wonderful it would be to own a car!”

Then I realized I do own a car. That was kind of weird.

I’m just trying to get through these next two weeks without going nuts. The problem is that after teaching for nearly 6 hours, I feel like I’ve had a frontal lobotomy. Unfortunately, there’s still many a lesson plan to write and many a test question to think up! At least I’m seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

We are thankful for...

After my sorry performance at Halloween (party cancelled thanks to swine flu), I decided to think of something interesting to do for Thanksgiving. I put up some DIY decorations in the American Center for starters. I realized there was no way to really do a party considering food logistics, so I decided to go to the good old standby: What are you thankful for?

I bought poster board for each class in festive fall colors and at the beginning of my classes I asked everyone to think of what they were thankful for. (This is more challenging to explain than it seems, because Russian really doesn’t have an equivalent expression. You can be thankful to someone, but not really for something.) I wrote “We are thankful for...” in big letters and then I passed around the poster and invited people to write on it. Some of the responses:

“My family”

“My friends”

“My sister twin”

“My baby” (yep, some of my students are moms)

“Having a true American teacher to teach us” (I got a few of this one. I think they are suck-ups, but I secretly enjoy it!)

“The cosmetics of Avon”

“My God”

“Being healthy”

“Bob Marley” (personal favorite)

“My parents”

“My love” (a popular choice with the female students)

“My family and my friends and my boyfriend”

“Leaving Adem forever” (Adem is one of the students in the class...the students kept joking that they would be happy never to see each other again after they graduate this year. This was the class that refused to take anything seriously. They cracked me up.)

“My life”

“My teachers”

“Being born in Turkiye” (A typical sentiment from the Turkish students! I guess the spirit of Kemal Ataturk will live on in my Thanksgiving posters.)

“Form monitor” (I have no idea what the students were trying to write, but this is the translation from the Oxford Russian-English dictionary. I think it’s like a homeroom teacher.)

“Having interesting students to teach” (That was mine!)

There was also one about a Turkish soccer victory that everyone seemed to be very excited about. I was confused, but then figured it had to be some kind of ASU-UA rivalry, the Territorial Cup of Turkey, if you will.

I labelled each one according to group (class groups have a very strong identity here because they have every single class together) and hung the posters up in the back of the classroom. It took a while because I had to scrounge for basic supplies, as usual. Finally, I just went out and bought packing tape. They look pretty cool (pictures will be forthcoming), and I hope having them hanging will encourage students to read them. I liked the project very much because it practiced particular English structures while still capturing the basic idea of the holiday. I also liked the interactive aspect of students reading what other groups wrote. Plus, I just like the idea of hanging up something the students have actually made instead of another doofy America poster.

So I didn’t get any turkey this Thanksgiving (I had meat dumplings and sour cream), but I did get to talk to all the main family members on Skype and commiserated with Derek about being in a foreign country for Thanksgiving. It wasn’t as awesome as seeing friends and family again, but I am thankful for being here nonetheless.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

A Recommendation to the ASU Russian Department

I would like to propose the introduction of a special topics class for the ASU Russian major:

RUS 394: Writing Useless Official Documents

It seems that if you travel to a former Soviet country, the only writing you will ever be expected to do is in the form of pointless “declarations” to various and sundry officials. Regardless of the fact that such declarations signify precisely null, you will be expected to compose them perfectly. Despite the fact that these documents will simply collect dust in a drawer, grammar mistakes are not allowed!

If you ask for assistance, you have a fifty-fifty chance of receiving it. If you actually receive help, there is a 33% chance of it being given snootily, as if anyone with a third grade education should be able to write useless official declarations.

Thus, I suggest a special topics class in the Russian department to solve this problem for young Russian majors venturing into the wild world of post-Soviet bureaucracy.

An Unfortunate Fact

At my university, every class has a register in which teachers record attendance for every single class. I know, very elementary school.

I noticed a few weeks ago that at the beginning of the register is a list with every student's name as well as their ethnic background. Perhaps I should find this upsetting, but mostly I think it is hilarious. "Well, I was going to give you a good grade, but according to the register, you are Bulgarian. Automatic 2 point deduction."

I wonder why this list exists in the first place. I can see why it might be somewhat useful for the university to know the ethnic composition of the school as a whole, but why do I as a professor need to have every student's ethnic background at my fingertips? Hmm.

Ah, Moldova, sometimes I think you have a long way to go.

Eventful Day!

Today I was unexpectedly pulled into an emotional grammar tug-of-war!

I was sitting in the department, wasting time, and in comes one of my colleagues crying. She lets off a string of Russian, of which I understood the words “you,” “ask,” and “may I take a book.” I freaked out for about 5 seconds because I thought she was mad at me for taking one of her books or something and I couldn’t figure out why she was so upset. Once she repeated herself, I realized that she was trying to ask me if she was correct in saying that there is a grammatical difference between “may” and “can.” My colleague marked the sentence the sentence “Can I take the book?” wrong on a student’s test and the student started going off on her in class, saying that she didn’t know English.

I told her that it’s okay in conversational speech, but in terms of grammar it is incorrect to use “can” instead of “may.” We all do it, but technically it’s not right. After she calmed down, I offered to go with her to the class and explain the rule to the student. It seemed like she needed to be backed up by a native speaker because this student wouldn’t let it die. So, we marched together into a class of 30 students staring at us, which was pretty intimidating. I explained to the very irritated girl that gramatically “can” indicates ability to do something, whereas “may” indicates a request for permission. (Somewhat ridiculously, I demonstrated this by running in place to show that physically I “can” run, but that’s not the same as saying that I “may” run.) Well, as we native speakers tend to have the last word on this issue, the girl pretty much had to accept defeat after that and her grade on the test stayed the same.

The whole exchange was pretty interesting to me, although of course rather upsetting. Generally, I think it’s a little silly to teach students to always say “may,” but on a grammar test, I think you have to mark it wrong. There is a particular mistake in Armenian that people always make in speech (using the subjunctive after “to want” instead of the infinitive), but I would never have cursed out my dear Armenian teacher Siranoush for marking that wrong on a test. After all, it is wrong, even if everyone says it. You can use bad grammar all you want in speech, but on a grammar test you have to follow the rules. That’s the point of a grammar test. Following annoying rules.

Let’s see, in other news, one of the Moldovan IREX fellows who studied in the U.S. gave us a lecture on assessment. It was interesting, because she was all about multiple choice, matching, and true/false questions instead of essays. At first I was turned off by this, but I saw her logic after a while. First of all, if you are testing a student on their knowledge of a particular subject in English, it does make more sense to use multiple choice tests. Students who don’t write particularly well in English may still know the material after all, and it’s unfair to test them constantly on their writing skills if the test is ostensibly on another topic (for example, psychology).

What I found most interesting was the defensive posture that teachers need to take when writing tests. The IREX fellow kept talking about having questions that you can “prove” are correct. She constantly stressed objective answers over subjective answers. Teachers obviously must not get much support from administration on their grading if CYA is one of the main goals in test-writing.

Finally, I have to say that navigating social rules is more confusing than it seems at first! One of my students told me yesterday that I am in danger of causing scandal by socializing with male students! Apparently, socializing means spending any time outside of class with them whatsoever. I mean, really. On the one hand, I find this quite amusing because I hardly ever do anything scandalous ever. On the other hand, I’m not exactly thrilled to have moved to Junior High Land.

The problem is having various definitions of what it means to “do my job.” As Fulbrighters, we are asked to go out of our way to help people learn English outside of class and generally be nice and helpful. So, it seems silly to only help out other ladies. (“I’d like to help you on the TOEFL, but unfortunately you happen to be of the opposite gender. Better luck next time.”) BUT, if I am causing scandal, that could probably hurt my capacity to do my job. Obviously, it is bad to lose people’s respect. Hrm.

To complicate things, it seems that people have different definitions of what all of these social rules mean. And some people entirely ignore the rules. And, by the way, there are three different ethnic groups here with (presumably) different rules. I think by the end of this whole affair in Moldova I will have an unofficial minor in Moldovan/Gagauzian/Turkish Anthropology.

As you can see, it was a very eventful day. I guess I’m going out to the disco tonight with the other teachers. Today is Students’ Day, and they invited us, I guess. It should be fun getting down with colleagues two or three times my age.

Accomplishments of the Day

1. Teaching a high school student how to say “bum a cigarette.” I should probably have an ethical problem with this.
2. Finishing Chuck Klosterman’s book Killing Yourself to Live. Very excellent.
3. Getting the ball rolling on learning Turkish.
4. Listening to the Seattle live Pearl Jam concert and remembering the amazing bridge to “Betterman” that you can only hear in live versions. If you think you have heard “Betterman” without this bridge...think again.
5. Writing an improved lesson plan for Critical Thinking class tomorrow. Trying to incorporate a listening component...we’ll see how it goes.
6. Having an ethical battle with myself over reading Paul Zindel’s The Pigman or loaning it to a student first. Sorry, Fulbright, but my love of children’s literature is getting in the way of me actually teaching it. (I don't think this can be counted as an accomplishment.)
7. Posting photos of Bucharest on Facebook with descriptive captions.
8. Figuring out how to put Facebook friends on a Limited Profile list...mwahaha!

Virtual Tour of Comrat, Part 3

These are some of the more mundane sights of Comrat...

This is a rather ordinary street in the center of Comrat.

Hey, want to move to Canada? Apparently a lot of people in Moldova do.

One of our two main markets. I bought a gorgeous scarf here this week.

Some Communist Party graffiti. The last president was a Communist, but I think they're losing power. The political situation is weird.

We have a museum, but I haven't been yet. It's on my to-do list.

This is where I buy most of my groceries. It is pretty cool. It only opened up about a year ago. I keep my fingers crossed that it won't close due to the economic crisis.

This is the electric company. These are the people I blame when I have no electricity.

This street is named Gavrilova. See below...

There are several plaques around the city explaining why streets have certain names. I find this cute. I think this person was a World War II soldier. The picture didn't turn out too legible.

Here's a well. People in the villages get basically all their water from wells, but we have indoor plumbing, luckily!

Virtual Tour of Comrat, Part 2

The virtual tour of Comrat continues with playgrounds and memorials...

A cross I found near the cemetery. There are lots of crosses everywhere. I still haven't managed to catch a shot of one the roadside Jesus shrines.

A playground near the World War II monument. This is just a small part of it. It's a pretty cool playground.

Monument to fallen soldiers of World War II. Everyone who gets married has their picture taken by this monument. People from this part of the world take World War II pretty seriously. Like much of Moldova, the town was under Romanian fascist control during the war, so the street near this monument is called "The Street of Liberators."

Plaque on the monument with names of fallen soldiers. I'm not sure if the names are soldiers from Comrat or people who died defending the city.

Another plaque. People mostly lay artificial bouquets so they last longer.

No town or village in the former USSR is complete without a World War II monument. Almost every village you drive through has two major constructions: a huge sign with the name of the city, and a big monument to WWII. I'm trying to remember where Mesa's World War II monument is located. I know in one of the parks downtown there is a monument to the British soldiers who trained in Arizona during the war. There must be a formal World War II monument...somewhere. (I know there is definitely a monument to the pioneers in Pioneer Park.)

Virtual Tour of Comrat, Part 1

After several weeks of highs in the 40s, we in Comrat have received an unexpected reprieve from winter! Magically, the temperature has soared to a peak of 70 degrees, and I have been grabbing at these last straws of fall the best I can. I've spent a few hours the last few days wandering around Comrat, listening to "This American Life" (ironic, I know), and taking pictures.

So, without further ado, I present a virtual tour of Comrat. Unfortunately, it's somewhat limited by the fact that I feel awkward about taking pictures of people's houses, cemetaries, and other personal places. Hopefully, these picture will give you a better understanding of our fair town!

This is Comrat's city hall. I know my dad will be happy to see that I have taken a picture of it. Everyone at work last week was cursing the mayor's office last week because they started heating this building before the kindergartens. Yeah...some people have no shame.

This dog was very vigorously rolling in the grass. We have a lot of stray dogs here in Comrat. You have to develop stray-dog-blindness in order to not sort of freak out when they are swarming around you. Makes you appreciate Bob Barker. "Don't forget to spay and neuter your pets!

I really like this basketball court. I should see if I can get one of the Peace Corps Volunteers to play some hoops with me.

Memorial to soldiers from Comrat who died in the Afghan War of the 1980s. I find the expression on the soldiers face quite poignant. It always has a lot of flowers.

Comrat's House of Culture. The sign says "Welcome" in three languages: Gagauz, Moldovan (Romanian), and Russian. I guess it used to be a movie theater, but now they just hold concerts and big presentations there occasionally. I think there was a bodybuilding contest there last week.

Here's our lovely statue of Lenin walking boldly into the future, located on Lenin Street. I'm not sure why they decided to keep this statue of him around, but people here seem to view it with some amusement. However, there are still flowers regularly placed on the base of the statue.

This is the Turkish library, named after Ataturk, located directly opposite Lenin. This is part of the Turkish government's charm offensive toward Gagauzia (the Gagauz people speak a language quite similar to Turkish). I'm not sure that Turkish foreign policy is really effective here; most people seem to be fairly indifferent toward Turkey.

Next to Lenin is the lycée/lyceum/whatever you want to call it. I think it's the most prestigious school in the area. This is where I take Russian lessons. The little kids running around when school lets out are pretty cute.

I think I've already posted a picture or two of this church, but it's worth putting up another one. The Gagauz are Orthodox, so this is an Orthodox Church. I haven't actually been inside yet.

I've got way more pictures to post from my walks around Comrat, so keep an eye out for Part 2.

Swine Flu

Apparently, the flu epidemic warranted closing all the schools in Moldova for the next week, giving me a whole week off! I am planning on going to a random place in Romania.

Seriously, I wish they'd just be honest and say, "We're not closing the schools because of swine flu. We're closing the schools because we're too cheap to heat them." I guess in theory this makes sense. If you're not going to heat kindergarten classrooms, at least don't make kids go there and then get sick from constantly fighting the cold.

People here seem to be concerned about swine flu. I am also concerned about swine flu, but my response is to wash my hands more often, not close all of the schools. I feel like all these international organizations think they are doing something by putting up H1N1 posters. Why don't you buy our department a bottle of hand sanitizer? 1) We have no running water in our department so you can't wash your hands the normal way. 2) Washing your hands is a better way of protecting yourself than simply not going to work. 3) Hand sanitizer is totally unknown here so you would be introducing a nice, useful product that could compensate for poor utilities. Sigh.

Well, I can't really complain too much, because it did get me a week without work. How I will finish teaching all the hours I'm required to teach, I have no idea, but I'm getting ready for Romania!

In other random news, my homestay mom and I hosted a Peace Corps Volunteer who got stuck in Comrat when the last bus out of town was full. The expatriot connection network strikes again!