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.