As is beginning to appear usual, I’m radically far behind on updating! Every month I think to myself, “gotta catch up on my blog!” And then things just get too busy, or my internet doesn’t work, or I just forget.
So in another increasingly typical move, I’m going to give the briefest of brief updates, in the hopes that maybe just getting a post up will get me motivated to write more at a (near)future date. I actually have a post in the making (all about the trials and tribulations of teaching), but it needs a little more thought and work before I can post it.
For now, here are the basic details:
- School started again in September. I’m working with new textbooks this year (yay!) thanks to the grant we wrote last year for updated resources and materials. It makes a world of difference to teach with quality, authentic textbooks. Planning and teaching are both so much easier!
- I’m working with 10 groups of students this year — four sub-groups of 1st-year students, 4 sub-groups of 2nd-year students, and 2 sub-groups of 3rd-year students. Unfortunately the schedule didn’t work out to let me work with the 4th-year students…but thankfully some of them still come to English club, so I see them once a week at least. My 1st-year students this year are a really unique group — they’re really enthusiastic and much better organized than my 1st-year students were last year. It’s interesting what a difference there can be from group to group. Overall, I’m really satisfied with my students this year — they’re a lot of fun and I’m enjoying teaching them and working on projects.
- I’m not working on many new projects, as this will be my last school year here, but I am working on accumulating as many professional development lesson plans created by other volunteers in an effort to help others conduct easy teacher-training seminars at their own sites. So far I’ve collected over 70 lessons and soon these will be made available to others. It’s nice to work with kids of course, but the more sustainable change will come from helping teachers become better professionals, so hopefully this project will have a lasting impact in many communities all over Ukraine.
- In other project news, World AIDS Day (December 1st) is coming soon, and I’m hoping to get our HIV/AIDS Educational Campaign project even further off the ground. Camp KLLAS in the summer was our first big educational event, and hopefully in the month of November we will be going into schools all around the community to teach about this serious issue. On November 5th, we’ll have a training of trainers, with the students who’ve already been educated about HIV/AIDS leading the lessons for other students. It’ll be our first training of this kind, so hopefully it’ll be successful! I’ll try to report back soon about this — it’s an important, exciting project!
- In personal news, I’m still running! Not always a lot or very fast, but I still get out about 3 times a week, which is about as much as I can usually manage. My schedule this semester is nice in that I have no classes at all on Mondays, but I pay two-fold starting the very next morning, when every single day that follows starts far too early (I have 8 o’clock classes Tuesday-Friday) and winds up completely exhausting me by the time Wednesday is half over. So thanks to this schedule, it’s about all I can do to drag myself out for three runs a week. Hopefully next semester I’ll be a little less exhausted and can fit in a little more exercise. But for now, I’m just pleased to still be running.
Not much else is new…
For those who aren’t aware, I am officially staying in Ukraine until August of 2012, an extension of 8 months. After that, I’m not really sure where I’ll go or what I’ll do…so I’m doing my best to concentrate on the work I still have here, which is plenty!
Although it’s a bit strange to watch my friends prepare to go back to America (most of them are in countdown mode now, as they’ll begin leaving between mid-November and December), I’m still glad that I’ll be staying. I can’t imagine being ready to leave in three weeks, or even in a month and a half. I want to stay through the school year and leave when Ukraine is most beautiful — the summertime.
It’s starting to get cold here, and as I enter what will be my third winter in Ukraine, I no longer feel freaked out about the snow, the dark, and the bleak months ahead like I did last winter, and I’m no longer quite as amazed or astounded by little things like I used to be, but I’m still regularly enchanted by what I’ve begun to think of as “perfectly Ukraine momements” — the sight of a kerchief-wearing old woman riding down a village road on a rickety old bicycle; a bright purple house standing unique in the midst of it’s dingy brown-gray-white neighbors; cows tied up to graze in a field now ankle-deep with yellow and orange leaves.
That alone is reason enough to stay, in my humble opinion. 
Hope all is well where you are!
