Reflecting now on my terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day of several weeks ago, I can now say with certainty that the reason it was so bad was that so many little, seemingly inconsequential things had all piled up and gone various kinds of wrong at the same time. The worst day was definitely the day of the spider bite, but to be perfectly honest, the next couple of days were a little stressful and sad too. I didn’t feel prepared for the semester, I didn’t feel relaxed after the busy summer, I was broke, my leg was still swollen and itchy, and all kinds of things seemed to be breaking or falling apart around me.
Several months before, I’d accidently almost started an electrical fire in my bathroom, so I hadn’t been able to use the outlet in my bathroom for quite a while (my electric tea kettle found a resting place next to my bed. Not optimal.). Then the lock on the door to my room stopped opening from the outside and the handyman, when asked to fix it, just told me I needed to jiggle it back and forth for a while to open it. And indeed that was true…but I wasn’t enjoying jiggling the key in the lock for five to ten minutes every time I wanted to get into my room. Then there’s the matter of the window that had been broken for a while. When trying to get the windows open for the first time this spring, the desk lady who came to help me (they were painted shut) ended up pulling the latch right off the window, so it never locked. This meant that when I finally gave up on jiggling my lock for 10-15 minutes at a time to just get inside and ended up leaving it unlocked, even a stupid thief could have just walked into my room either through the window that didn’t latch or the door itself. It was not the most secure of situations.
Add all this to the various complaints I moaned about in my last entry—the spider bite, the mold, the ants, the mice, and so on—and I think it’s fair to say you have the recipe for at least a mild amount of anxiety and stress.
So although I was extremely relieved to get home after the spider-bite incident, the culmination of all that stress and frustration lingered for a few days. Sometimes when so many things go wrong at once, it’s hard to imagine fixing even a single one of the problems. Where do you start when everything is falling apart and you don’t know the words for half of the problems you’re having? At home it would have been so much easier to address each of those problems as they arose—they wouldn’t have piled up in the first place. Here, though, things had piled up because of my lack of desire to deal with the problems as they happen…and since none of them seemed like that big of a deal, I put off pestering the handyman and decided to just put up with the broken window latch and the stubborn lock. And boiling water in the tea kettle on the floor next to my bed wasn’t that annoying…just a little inconvenient.
Because I hadn’t wanted to deal with each of those problems as they’d occurred, I eventually had so many assorted issues to tackle that I just felt too overwhelmed to begin fixing them. This, in turn, just made me feel incompetent, stressed out, tired, and sad. I wasn’t looking forward to the first day of lessons. I had no idea what I was teaching, what materials I’d need to use, when I’d be teaching, or even which teachers and students I’d be working with. Instead of looking forward to the first day with excitement like so many of my other Peace Corps buddies were (or at least appeared to be, from the looks of their Facebook status updates), I was bracing myself for the semester…resigning myself to the confusion and chaos.
But then the first day of school finally happened. When I walked out of school after my lessons, I had to stop myself from grinning and skipping. The smiles on my students’ faces worked like some kind of magical medicine and completely cleaned my system of the anxiety, stress, and funk that had settled over me the week before.
It took about a week to settle into the semester and although there are certainly still a few things that are a little unclear, I have a much better vision of this school-year. Last semester I always felt a little bit confused and unsure of what would happen the next day or the next week—plans changed all the time, readings changed, different groups had different assignments, and it was all I could do to just make sure I kept on top of things from day to day. I was happy—to be sure, I was happy—but I had a hard time seeing myself in the bigger picture of things. On the worst of days, I felt like “just an English teacher” and on the best of days, I felt like a good English teacher. Now, though, even though not much has changed, I’m starting to see myself as more than that.
Starting this school-year with a better understanding of how the system works here in Ukraine made everything so much easier—with fewer questions to ask, I was able to pay attention to and remember a lot more. Also, I’m working with almost all of the same students that I worked with last year, so I saw a lot of friendly, familiar faces on the first day. And because I’ve already worked with 90% of the students I’ll have this year, I have a pretty good understanding of their level of English, the kind of work they’re used to doing and I already have clear, reasonable expectations for them. All of these things make it easier for me to have clearer expectations for myself.
It also helps tremendously that my students here are so much more eager and excited to learn than any of my college students back in America were. Maybe it’s the age difference. My students, 15-18 years old, are still young enough to get excited about having an American teacher who plays games with them. Or maybe it’s because I approach teaching differently here, since I do use a lot of games and activities to teach and back in America it was mostly just discussion, but when I walk into a room here to teach a lesson, my students smile and get visibly excited. Sometimes, when they ask if I’m teaching them on a particular day, they actually clap a little when they find out I’ll be working with them! I run the real risk of letting this go to my head!
It makes me wonder just how different my teaching will be if I go back to America and end up teaching English again. I mean, obviously I can’t use all these games that I use now back in America…my full-grown American college students probably wouldn’t enjoy playing matching picture games and Bingo…but I think there’s something to the idea of doing different activities in order to help the students learn actively, sometimes without even realizing it. Regardless, it’s nice to have energetic, excited students. The smiles on their faces when I walk into the room and say something lame and hardly funny just make it all so worthwhile.
Last year, at some point, I just gave up at some point on giving homework…the system here can be so confusing! This year, though, I’m resolved to keep better track of my students’ work. Since I’m not a Ukrainian teacher and I only teach half of each full lesson (the lessons are always set up in pairs, so the students have two forty-minute lessons back to back with a five minute break and I teach one of those 40 minute lessons), I can’t really give them their official grades. And the teachers have these journals that they write the grades in after every class…the students get a sort of general grade for their performance in class and then I guess they also get grades for homework and tests, but I have no idea how those are factored into the grading system (nobody bothers to explain this to me). Since the other teachers that are actually responsible for the students are always in the classroom, usually they just give the grades at the end of the lesson. But last year I had a few problems with students slacking or not taking my lessons as seriously because they knew they weren’t really getting grades from me. So I’ve got a system and I’m slowly working out the kinks in it. Nobody’s given me an official roster (not even sure if they have them…although I’m sure somebody does), so I’ve had to ask each class for the names of all the students in it, and then I write them out in my own journal so that I can keep track of their grades myself and then show them to the official teacher. I’m not sure that it really matters at all, but I can at least use it as a threatening/tracking device. 
So all of this makes me feel so much more organized and in control of things…and having the semester syllabi makes such a huge difference! I feel like I now understand the system and process here well enough to know what to expect and to have some sort of vision for the rest of my service here in Ukraine.
I had the first meeting of my English club last week and we’ll meet again this week. I love the kids that come to my English club. They’re the most excited, energetic students of all and they’re just so fantastic! I really want to try to have them do a few different community projects this year, so this week I’m going to talk to them about all our different options. I’ve gotten involved in Peace Corps Ukraine’s Environmental Working Group, and so I’m hoping to tackle a few environmental issues with my group (maybe some clean-up projects, maybe try to get a grip on what the deal is with recycling in my community…it’s so confusing! I won’t even try to explain it here, but just know that it is nothing like the system in America…it’s a for-profit industry!) and I’m also working with the other volunteers in my oblast to create healthy-lifestyles focused English club lessons that culminate in a camp that’ll hopefully take place next summer to teach kids all about different healthy-lifestyles issues (general health, HIV/AIDS—Ukraine has the highest rate of HIV/AIDS infection in Europe, highest among young adults—sports, healthy diets, etc.).
Those are just a few of my current projects. I’m also working on creating a small conversation club/class for a few interested students and I really want to create a community English club for adults interested in practicing and learning English. It’s a lot, and there are a lot of other things I’d like to accomplish during this coming school-year, so we’ll see how this all turns out.
Ultimately, though, it’s really great to be back. Turns out I missed this. When I left school after my first lessons, restraining myself from skipping and smiling, I couldn’t help but wonder why I ever doubted whether or not I like teaching. I was baffled by my own pessimism from the day before. Of course I love teaching! I was made for this. I just somehow forgot that in the haze of spider-bite-things-falling-apart stress that took over my mind for a few days. It’s good to be back—both at school and at home in my own mind again.
(P.S. After a few weeks of hassling the handyman, I finally got a new lock installed in the door, a new latch for my broken window, and a new outlet to replace the fried one in the bathroom! Take that, burglars and electrical fires!)
