The past month in...Kazakhstan!

When I have time but not internet, I write a lot in a journal. Sometimes for my eyes only, and sometimes with the idea that I’ll get around to typing them out for you guys. In the interest of catching you all up after yet another too-long blogging hiatus, here are a couple of the latter from the past few weeks:

10 XII
Some fam friends just brought over a wild pig they shot and are in the process of butchering it on our kitchen table, and so begins my day. The funny thing is, before they brought the thing into the house, they were careful to all take off their shiny black, pointy-toed shoes without scuffing them, and then made sure to load the meat into the fridge without banging up the newly remodeled kitchen floor. Once again I’m confounded by the developmental order. Katy’s example the other day was classic:

One night there was no electricity, and her family huddled under the light of her flashlight hanging from the ceiling as they divied up pieces of the boiled sheep’s head that was their dinner…and the next day when then power was back on, they microwaved the left-overs for lunch! One particular week, Katy had six sheep heads in 3 days! Everybody: Hats off to Katy. I told her I want to ghost write her blog because her stories are so much cooler than mine.

10 XII
Later that very day…
My host dad is blasting Bryan Adams on Kazakh MTV, which as some of you might have guessed, has TOTALLY made my day. When I got home from work, the wild pig had magically turned into bags and bags of ground pork (yum!). My family was actually complaining that there was too much of it, and was delighted when I mentioned that it would make great spaghetti sauce. I figured they meant the next day because they had already cooked some tasty pelmeni (like tortellini) for dinner that night.

But then they said, “No! You can make it for…second dinner” [this was in Russian] and I say… “Second dinner…tonight?” They have this “duh” look on their faces and explain that obviously second dinner is what you eat if you’re still hungry after first dinner. Great! I was quite proud to manage the Russian for “What a good life it is when there is a second dinner” and prouder to get an impressed, albeit somewhat amused, look of approval from host mom and dad. I hope it made them feel like good hosts. I can’t explain the 180 from my first impression of living here…it would take a whole book to break it all down and figure it all out. Definitely a study on cultural differences, especially between me and my host mom [Note from the current writer- I didn’t really talk about it, but my host mom and I were kind of quiet rivals when I came on the scene]. Holy cow, who would have thought she and I would have such appreciation for each other (,” she said, describing the situation from exactly one point of view and hoping it was a mutual one).



22 XII
Meanwhile, I’m pretty much done with my first official univ teaching experience, and it was pretty awesome. “Practice of Cultural Interaction” will go down in history as a damn good first attempt. [Especially since my only objectives were to: 1. Make a good first impression on the T’s observing me, 2. Get the Ss comfortable talking to me, their T’s and each other, and 3. Figure out “the system” a little bit. Ohhh is there a system.] I’m not sure if anybody really learned anything in terms of vocabulary and grammar and what not, but hey. I taught 9 sections of this class to 9 different groups of students, and all of their usual teachers unanimously agreed that the students talked WAY more than normal. So that’s a big plus as far as I’m concerned. [I arrived mid-semester, so I kind of just took over these sections and their actual teachers observed the lessons] I’m bummed not to teach this subject again next semester, but it’ll be a good opportunity, come to think of it, to work with the T’s who do teach it and actually know what I’m talking about.

A quick “What I learned” from this semester:
-Truly, the better the plan, the better the lesson.
-You really have to modify for skill level [All 9 groups had different levels of English and it’s supposed to just be all content without explicit language instruction]
-Trying to get Ss to answer critical thinking questions is a B*%!#. Sorry grandma.
-Tools should be designed assuming zero common sense.

[Note from the current writer: That last one is not so optimistic, but I can’t count how many times I thought I had made a self explanatory worksheet or quiz, and been met with 10 different ways that students tried to work with it.]


Now back to the present. The entry from the 10th hints at the frustrations of my first few weeks here…there was quite a power struggle between my host mom and I when I arrived. We both acted really unnaturally for some reason- she was really nosey and pushy, and I was really sensitive.

By the way, I suspect that the translation of in this situation was actually Anyway, after a few weeks, I switched over to a much more direct communication style (i.e. “I want to eat now” instead of “When do you think we’ll eat?”, and she relaxed a lot (i.e. NOT telling me how and when to do everything), and we lived in harmony. She’s an administrator in a school in one of the nearby villages, so actually she has given me some really interesting insights into the educational system and the reality of education here. She’s staying in the village for a while right now, and actually I miss our long talks over chai.

The entry about the univ also is a nice sum-up of the semester, I think. I’m really looking forward to next semester- I’m teaching a bunch of sections of “Intercultural Communication” for English Philology majors- could there be a more perfect class for me to teach?! I’m so pumped. And my faculty loves the idea of me finding all kinds of authentic materials and “doing my innovative methods” as they call it. I’m also starting Spanish classes next semester, which is going to be AWESOME, and I’ve been working with a really good Russian tutor who is teaching me a ton. Don’t worry, MIIS, I’m documenting all the interesting language learning experiences, and in fact I have got a pretty solid reputation already of being a linguistics nerd. My colleagues at the univ always roll their eyes (lovingly, I think) whenever I start out, “Actually! In Spanish you can also…” or “Ohhh that’s interesting because in English…”