What on Earth am I doing in Ukraine these days?

Alright alright. A lot of this information just went out in the family and friends newsletter. However! I’ve been reading through posts from last year, so it does include updates on projects that began ages ago.

I wrote a post similar to this one a few months back, explaining what it is exactly that I do with the Peace Corps. This is a bit of an update to that post. I just went back to read what was going on last year and realized how long it can take sometimes to get things done, and how projects have changed or all together failed during my time here. The majority, however, are still going in one way or another and that’s what is most important. So here we go – the latest of my ideas:

Homework Lottery
Book Challenge
Update on Resource Center and an aside about my friend Lena
Pen Pals and World Wise Schools
Peace Corps Partnership Grant

Homework Lottery
This is an idea that I got from a teacher back in Okemos, Michigan. I volunteered in her ESL classroom for a year before coming to Peace Corps. Essentially, when pupils do their homework – they get to put their name in the lottery box. Then, every lesson they have with me, I choose the two students with the best behavior and participation and they get to put their names in the box again. Every two weeks, I’ll draw two names and give small prizes. My parents have sent me lots of stickers, candy, and silly bands that I intend on using as prizes.

It might seem silly to reward pupils simply for doing their homework. However, the idea of rewarding good habits isn’t really a widespread one. More often than not, I hear students get scolded harshly for doing something wrong, the best student is praised, and everyone else is ignored. There are so many eager kids who are excited to come to lessons and try their hardest, but because they really are just bad at English – they get yelled at for not understanding. I’m lucky to have small classes where I can give more individual attention than normal, but it isn’t enough. By the time they hit 10th grade, the eager kiddies in my 5th form will become the sullen teenagers who don’t care. They aren’t necessarily bad at English, but because they aren’t the best, their efforts were often ignored. After years of that, I’d probably be pretty pissy, too.

So, the homework lottery. Effort, behavior, and participation are rewarded and everyone has a fair chance to feel good about themselves. This week I made 3 boxes out of cardboard, taped them together, covered them with paper, decorated them, and explained the rules to the kids.
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Book Challenge
This is something that is definitely in the baby stages. In the past 2 years, I’ve been requesting that people send me children’s books (This request is still standing! If you have children’s books you don’t want, we will gladly take them off your hands. Or you can donate through the International Book Project – see the link in the column to your right). We’ve collected somewhere around 200 books that are now in the school library. The kids love them. They are very excited to check them out and read them, but I’m not sure how much they understand.

I want to provide incentive for not just reading, but understanding and learning from the book. I’ve been talking with the librarian, who is very excited by that idea. I have my ideas, and she has hers, and likely I’m going to be the one to bend. I’d like a project where the kids could get points by reading books and showing what they learned from them. Each book would be worth so many points, and you could get to different levels by getting so many points.

To me it sounds awesome, but it would be a lot of work for an English teacher when I’m gone. The pay isn’t really a livable wage, so most teachers have to have private lessons for their students after school hours. I doubt that my project could be continued easily without me here because it would take up serious after school time. The librarian suggested [told me] that we should have much more simple book reports. Then we could take photos of the kids with the books, they could display their photos and written book reports in the library and the hall, and have them present the books to their classes. It isn’t what I wanted – but it’s sustainable. The librarian is interested and I think that it wouldn’t create much more work for the teachers.
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Update on Resource Center and an aside about my friend Lena
Some of you might remember how last year I was ‘given’ a room at the school to turn into an English classroom and eventually a Resource Center. I did the best I could, with a lot of help. My mom sent me tons of posters and pictures to hang in the room. My stepdad, Terry, got his coworkers to donate even more kids books to fill up the shelves in the English room. My counterpart, Lena, and I shared the room. We made sure it wasn’t vandalized and kept it clean. There are two big sets of bookshelves in the room. One set holds a bunch of children’s books. The other holds teachers resources – American literature and reading books, dictionaries, teaching manuals – and class supplies like markers, crayons, pencils. The kids and teachers check out books all the time and I’ve noticed lots of teachers coming to pick up supplies for coloring during their classes.

Now that she’s out on maternity leave (for 3 years), I figured it would be my task alone to manage the room and its contents. However, the school hired another young teacher and gave her the room. I am still a little bitter and territorial. I keep trying to look at it this way – this young, motivated teacher has just been given a room to complete. She’s painting the desks this month, she washed the curtains I was too lazy to wash, and she brought in even more materials to hang on the walls. She loves learning and teaching English and although I’ve been ousted, it is for the better.

Not having Lena here at work with me has been really strange. I didn’t realize what a force of positive energy she was until she was no longer at lessons. I know that children are a blessing, and I am genuinely very happy for Lena and Slavik, but there is a little evil part of me that is super-duper jealous of that baby because it is going to get all of her time. (I’m a terrible jealous person. I am aware of this.) So work is different without her. Usually, when I have an idea on something, I mention it to Lena and she’s immediately on the phone rounding up the other English teachers and she’s already 10 steps ahead of me. I guess being able to do projects without her will just have to be thought of as a challenge. One more thing to learn to cope with – hopefully I’ll manage successfully.
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Pen Pals and World Wise Schools
The exchanges and connection through WWS is actually something I’ve been doing for a while. Last year, my 7th graders exchanged letters with a group of students in Dalton, Ohio. It was really fun for the kids, but it was difficult to maintain and we decided not to continue. This summer I contacted the two high schools that I attended and the Russian teacher I had back when I was in elementary school (at Horizons) and asked to write to their pupils. If I couldn’t work out pen pals, at least I would be able to share my experience in Ukraine with a bunch of American students (Goal 3 of the Peace Corps!).

Well, this past week, the French teacher approached me. (A side note, this woman is probably my favorite teacher in the whole school. She’s so professional; she just exudes this aura that makes you want to stand up straighter and be someone who she can respect. Everyone in school likes her and she gets stuff done. She’s strict with the kids and yet they adore her. She loves her job. She is the teacher I want to be.) She had been talking to the director and decided that it is ‘high time’ for us to make good connections with some schools in the states. Basically, she wants schools to be in contact with each other in order for friendship and brotherhood to develop between the children, since they are our future. This woman is a Peace Corps Volunteer’s dream come true. The one downside: She doesn’t speak English. Oh well, I’ll get lots of Russian practice in.

This week I sent out emails asking each of the schools that I communicate with. I wanted to find out whether in the future they would be interested in moving past single letters and emails into something bigger – Skype chats, video blogs, pen pals, teacher collaborations. It sounds like so much, but I think it is possible – we’ll start small and diligently move forward. Ideally, we’d get the little ones sending Christmas and New Years cards as a class to each other. The 6th form will be the youngest for pen pals, and I’m willing to do that this year. We will have to find teachers who are will to proofread letters for 7 and 8 forms, and then 6 once I leave.

As for the older students, we will offer pen pals but thought that they could be in charge of more technical tasks. They could take videos interviewing other students or showing what their school or city is like, and use a blog or Youtube to show it to the other schools. If possible our teachers hope to have Q and A sessions via Skype, for both students and teachers. They really want to talk to teachers in the states and find out what it’s like to be a teacher there.
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Peace Corps Partnership Grant
This might seem a familiar topic, if you are an avid reader of mine with a good memory. I tried to start this last year. It completely fell apart in front of my face. The biggest reason, I believe, was that I didn’t know how to stick up for myself. Ukraine is very grounded in the ideas of a social hierarchy and a chain of command. Things hadn’t really been going my way for a while, and I was too timid to stick up for myself and say anything. Information was getting lost in the channels.

Finally, last May, after a rough spring, I went to the director and told her what I wanted to do for the next year. She said to me “Okay, fine. I am aware of what you’re doing – usually Lena comes and tells me.” I told her that I’m glad Lena is relaying that information, but that I would be coming to her with it as well. I needed her support directly. I needed her to gather the teachers for me and to show that she supports my projects.

Fast forward a few months, and I walk a bit taller in my school. I’m not afraid of doing anything wrong – I know that the director supports me because I asked her to. I wish I had been brave enough to do that earlier.

Anyway, this time around, I am writing a grant applying for money to buy English textbooks for each of the classes, teacher manuals, and a few other English learning resources for the teachers. As I explained last year, the books that are available to Ukrainian public schools are terrible. Sometimes classes aren’t even lucky enough to have one per pupil. If they do have a book, it doesn’t help them much anyway – the books are full of mistakes. It’s as though no one proofread them. There is little logical flow to the book, and it is hard to tell what information is connected with what.

Because of this, a lot of Ukrainian schools try to get the parents to buy British or American textbooks for the students to use each year. However, the books are really expensive for Ukrainians – we’re talking $12-16 for the student’s book and workbook. (I make less than $175 dollars a month as a teacher. I don’t have an apartment, bills, and other mouths to feed and I struggle with that amount.) Plus, the parents contribute to the school repair fund to help fix the roof and windows and everything else in the school. It is truly difficult for parents to find that money every year.But, we need textbooks. The teachers don’t have resources to teach the class. Most teachers are using their own money to make materials for classes since there just isn’t anything at the school useful to learn with.

So, I am writing a grant to help out my school. The way it works is that right now, I am writing loads of pages about how much books will help our school and how we will progress with them. This week, we’ll work on the budget – how many books will we order, which books specifically, etc. Hopefully by the end of this month, the application will be approved and go online to the Peace Corps website. From there, I call and email everyone I can think of in the states – friends, family, local companies, Returned Peace Corps organizations – and ask them to donate online to our grant.

Ideally, we will get our grant funded and the books bought by the end of the school year! The textbooks would provide the teachers with an solid foundation on which to build an excellent curriculum. The extra resources would give them the opportunity to be more creative in the classroom and grow as educators. These women have taught and shared with me so much, if something I can do will make their lives, as well as the students’, just a tiny bit better and easier – I want to do it.
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