Hello Lilli Teacher!

(This is what students call me. In Azerbaijan formal titles use the first name, so an Azeri teacher named Şahla would be Şahla müellimə, or literally, Şahla teacher. Since I’m an English teacher, I make them say it in English!)

Oğuz has three schools, which all have grades 1-11. Two have had a Peace Corps Volunteer before, and I work at the third. School number three is divided into a regular school and a two-year-old lise (lyceum) school for higher-performing students in math, sciences, and humanities in the town. It has 5 English teachers and about 250 students, and is also the school where my host mother works (she is an art and home-ec teacher). Until this week, I spent two weeks just observing classes and teachers in order to choose my schedule, counterparts, and classes; this week, following the New Year’s holiday, I began teaching.

 

I have some pretty extreme mood-swings regarding how I feel about my work here, especially since the last few weeks haven’t lent themselves to productivity. At all. I arrived two weeks before the New Year’s holiday (Azerbaijan’s mid-year winter break), so the schedule was all jacked up with examinations, “open lessons” (classes where any teacher can come observe their coworkers and give criticism/advice/praise) which throw off a whole day, and classes just being filler “control work” (lists of grammar questions assigned and checked orally in a read-and-translate fashion) because they’ve already finished the lessons for the semester.

On top of all this, my main counterpart was out for the entire two weeks doing training with some ministry officials. Regardless, after awkwardly sitting in 5 classes a day for almost three weeks, I now have a mostly finalized schedule of 18-21 hours (depending on which extra classes go to), 3 counterparts, and a pretty good feeling about getting started.

 

Today was my first official day teaching and I was supposed to have three classes, although I found out halfway through the day that the schedule had changed and the 5^th form class I was supposed to teach in the afternoon had been moved to the morning and I had already missed it. Later, halfway through a free period that I was using to plan lessons with a counterpart, we were told that our 5^th period lesson had been moved up because of a teacher being gone and was already half over: so much for the plans we were making. I think the fact that I took all of these things in stride (instead of freaking out) displays how much better I now am at going with the flow and taking things as they come. I like structure, order, and plans…but working for the Azerbaijani school system is slowly breaking me of my dependence on them, haha.

 

Outside of school, I’m currently trying to organize a conversation club for the English teachers at my school, who named this as a priority for themselves. Their levels vary considerably—from fluency to less than my Azerbaijani—but all expressed a desire to have a time to simply practice speaking English with me. I’m working on getting this started next week, and hoping I can use it as a time to share about American culture, ask appreciative quesitons, and learn more about Oğuz and Azerbaijan as well.  Yesterday, my YD site-mate Drew and I met with some of the students who had worked with Charlie, an apparently awesome AZ6 TEFL who worked in Oğuz (I hear about him literally every day), so we’re also trying to get a club ASAP together for these exceptional kids whose English is pretty great. As I get more settled into my school schedule and into Oğuz I want to expand to several levels of conversation clubs and hopefully other types of clubs as well—one of the girls yesterday said she loves to run, which got me dreaming about a girl’s running or fitness club, as women have virutally no resources when it comes to health and athletics.

 

It has started to get quite cold here, so I’m trying to keep myself as busy as possible to beat the winter-slump that haunts PCV’s.