Howdy ho. How's life back home? Life in Mongolia has been a mix of nice and frustrating. Nice at home. Frustrating at work. Though the latter is getting better. The Gordian knot that is the September schedule is slowly giving way to the... well, the slightly less Gordian knot that is the rest of the year's schedule. I'll finally begin team-teaching tomorrow, inshallah. Secondary projects have been slowly taking form as well. ACCESS got off to a shaky start last week, and we also taught our first TOEFL course to teachers from all around Choibalsan. I get to work on that with Kaede and Zoloo, and I can see it turning into my favorite project this year. Kaede got the ball rolling on the Creative Writing Olympics, and quite well too. We've already found an M22 willing to take over next year. Last Monday we headed downtown to see off our sitemate Deb, a VSO volunteer who is now on a three-week horse trek to UB to raise awareness for the problems disabled children face in Mongolia. It's an incredible project, and I'm proud to be helping out with the blog while she's en route. You can see it here. The week before that we took a ride out to Diviz to check in and see how we can keep helping out this year. While we were there, I snapped the picture below of Tsogtsolmaa, one of the unofficial community leaders using the well Marg and Bob helped them build.
This next week will also see the first class of the non-English teachers' English course which Kaede and I are teaching at my school. Apparently, Khan-Uul was selected as Dornod's guinea pig in attaining the "Cambridge Standard," as everyone's calling it. I have yet to see any official document explaining what exactly the Cambridge Standard is, but, from what I've gathered, it's an international standard which, if reached, yields its school equal footing on the world academic stage. That is, a student who graduates from a school that has met the Cambridge Standard has, for all intents and purposes, received the same level of education he would have received in a developed nation. This program has just been introduced to Mongolia, so the Ministry of Education has chosen one school in every aimag to blaze the trail. One of the requirements is that all fifth and tenth grade classes have to be taught entirely in English. That's where I come in. I'm now expected to get all of those teachers to a level where they're competent enough to teach their subject in English. By next year. Even if they weren't working at least forty hours a week and were devoting all of their time to studying the language, this would be a stretch. But of course, they're all expected to maintain their normal schedule and only take two classes a week. And on top of that, most of them don't speak a word of English to begin with. Some of them can't even read the Roman alphabet. Thankfully, Kaede has volunteered to help me out, since she isn't getting a ton of work at her school, and she thinks this program sounds interesting, unattainable though it may be, especially in the given time frame. The most ridiculous part has to be that, even if we somehow managed to teach these teachers enough English, the overwhelming majority of their students, tenth and fifth graders alike, would be completely lost in a class taught entirely in English. Nevertheless, everyone's super excited about it, and they all seem quite surprised that I find it to be such an incredible task.
Sorry for the rant. A nice counterpoint to the craziness of work is the pleasantness of home. Kaede and I, thanks to the advice of some famous food critic on a podcast of NPR's Fresh Air, have begun planning out the week's meals and taking turns cooking, which has only made our delicious home life all the more delicious. Besides cooking, we watch lots of movies and plan lots of lessons and make lots of chit chat. It's a lot nicer than last year, when almost all of our interaction was via a crappy internet connection. All those fun activities aside, it's just nice to have someone to come home to, someone who always looks nice and gives me hugs and kisses and asks me how my day is. And it really is amazing to have her helping me with all these projects. She's a much better, more motivated volunteer than I am, and by golly it spurs me on!
Oh, it was also Zoloo's birthday a few weeks ago! Happy birthday! Here's a pic of her and Krista looking silly playing the air accordion (at my behest).
Hope the foliage is nice wherever you are. It's pretty here, but it ain't Maine.
This next week will also see the first class of the non-English teachers' English course which Kaede and I are teaching at my school. Apparently, Khan-Uul was selected as Dornod's guinea pig in attaining the "Cambridge Standard," as everyone's calling it. I have yet to see any official document explaining what exactly the Cambridge Standard is, but, from what I've gathered, it's an international standard which, if reached, yields its school equal footing on the world academic stage. That is, a student who graduates from a school that has met the Cambridge Standard has, for all intents and purposes, received the same level of education he would have received in a developed nation. This program has just been introduced to Mongolia, so the Ministry of Education has chosen one school in every aimag to blaze the trail. One of the requirements is that all fifth and tenth grade classes have to be taught entirely in English. That's where I come in. I'm now expected to get all of those teachers to a level where they're competent enough to teach their subject in English. By next year. Even if they weren't working at least forty hours a week and were devoting all of their time to studying the language, this would be a stretch. But of course, they're all expected to maintain their normal schedule and only take two classes a week. And on top of that, most of them don't speak a word of English to begin with. Some of them can't even read the Roman alphabet. Thankfully, Kaede has volunteered to help me out, since she isn't getting a ton of work at her school, and she thinks this program sounds interesting, unattainable though it may be, especially in the given time frame. The most ridiculous part has to be that, even if we somehow managed to teach these teachers enough English, the overwhelming majority of their students, tenth and fifth graders alike, would be completely lost in a class taught entirely in English. Nevertheless, everyone's super excited about it, and they all seem quite surprised that I find it to be such an incredible task.
Sorry for the rant. A nice counterpoint to the craziness of work is the pleasantness of home. Kaede and I, thanks to the advice of some famous food critic on a podcast of NPR's Fresh Air, have begun planning out the week's meals and taking turns cooking, which has only made our delicious home life all the more delicious. Besides cooking, we watch lots of movies and plan lots of lessons and make lots of chit chat. It's a lot nicer than last year, when almost all of our interaction was via a crappy internet connection. All those fun activities aside, it's just nice to have someone to come home to, someone who always looks nice and gives me hugs and kisses and asks me how my day is. And it really is amazing to have her helping me with all these projects. She's a much better, more motivated volunteer than I am, and by golly it spurs me on!
Oh, it was also Zoloo's birthday a few weeks ago! Happy birthday! Here's a pic of her and Krista looking silly playing the air accordion (at my behest).
Hope the foliage is nice wherever you are. It's pretty here, but it ain't Maine.
