Hello from Ruisi! I am going to write a little bit about what it is like at my school here, and then maybe later this week a bit about living with our host family.
I have two co - teachers, one male and one female. I think that he is the only male teacher at the school, but I am not totally sure. With him I teach 1st to 3rd, and with her 4th to 6th. I really enjoy teaching with both of them. She really has an iron grip on the classrooms, and the students are very well behaved. She is very open to having me in the classroom with her, and we work very well together. She loves it when I make suggestions, and likes it when we try new teaching methods. She often asks me to correct her pronunciation if she makes an error. He is also fun to work with, but I find it a bit frustrating that when one student does something wrong he gets totally sidetracked correcting/yelling at them and the rest of the class just bounces around and gets totally distracted. He is also very open to having me in the classroom, and takes my suggestions well. Both of them bang on the desk to gets students attention when they are being noisy, which I don’t really like. They both use the textbook very heavily, and I am trying as much as I can to do activities that are not right from the book.
The principal is often in the teachers lounge, working, having a cup of coffee, chatting with the teachers. She is very friendly and often asks how things are going for me. She doesn’t speak any English. She gave me a gift of a few notebooks, some blank paper, post-its, and tape (etc) on the first day, and happily put the NYC statue of liberty keychain I brought her on to her keychain with a smile.
The students were, on the first day, very shy. This was a total illusion. Georgian children are very vocal, and no matter what you do they all want to answer every you ask a question. If someone stumbles or pauses a little bit, the other students voice the answer for them immediately. I am given pens/pencil/erasers as gifts everyday, even drawings and stickers. Every student I pass says “hello!!”, and they like to follow me around the school and peep into my classes to see what is going on. Many students get up out of their chairs, bop each other on the heads, or are just always moving. This is easier to deal with when there are two of us in the classroom, but it seems to kind of be the nature of almost all of the students.
Whenever I walk down the halls there are choruses of “Hello!”,”Hello, Sara!”, or Hello, Mas!” (Mas is the shortened form of the word for teacher in Georgian). The older students too know my name, and sometimes it is hard to move in the hallways because every student wants to come up to me and say Hello!
The teachers lounge has turned out to be pretty amazing. Every time I walk in, everyone says hello and motions for me to come and sit by the stove. I was given a bottle of mineral water and three chocolates today as well as a cooked potato with salt (yum). The ladies are all older, except for my co-teacher who is 26. Other than my two co-teachers, there are two who know a few basic phrases in English (mother, father, water, tomorrow, please, etc) and no one else knows much more than Hello/Goodbye. They all are eager to communicate, and one has started calling me her daughter. The first two days I was at school, I was offered chacha before 11am (chacha is homemade Georgian moonshine). It seems like every time I go into the teachers lounge they are chatting and eating something, which some of is given to me even when I say no thank you.
The school looks a bit run down, and there are random tiles missing in the floor etc. There is a staircase for teachers on one side, and one for students on the other. There is a squat toilet outside, one for teachers and one for students. The classrooms all have more than enough desks for all the students, and a blackboard of some kind (some of them are lacquered wood, which works fine). Each teacher brings their own chalk, and doesn’t use the blackboard very often that I have seen. There are some books in the teachers lounge, but other than that none in the classrooms except the textbooks each child owns. Each room has a wood burning stove, but it doesn’t really heat the room on cold days. Three days this week we had short classes because it was too cold to stay in school all day long for the students. I always keep my coat on when at school.
Funny things people at school have said to me, so far:
“You are so beautiful, everyone wants to kiss you”
“Hello!” (As I am walking out the door)
“She said to me in Georgian, ‘How is it that you are so skinny?’” (Coteacher translating other teacher)
“She said to me in Georgian, ‘We will weigh you now and then when you leave Georgia‘” (Coteacher translating principal)
“Your hair, your eyes, your lips! Beautiful!”
“This is…. pauper? Pooper?” (Had to keep a straight face as I explained it was ‘paper’)
