Halloween

Last week was a very busy week for Caleb and me. We both got involved in our schools’ Halloween parties. The week before on Friday, one of my CPs said “Let’s have a Halloween party!!!” Unfortunately, she was the most excited about it and she was sick all last week. She couldn’t help plan it or do anything at all.

Me as a ghost and some of the decorations

So my other CPs did a lot to throw this party together. It took place on Thursday evening. The students helped decorate. We had minimal decorations due to lack of funds and availability of Halloweeny stuff. White toilet paper can go a long way though. We used it to turn the gym door into a mummy and some of the teachers wrapped up a volleyball and hung it from one of the basketball hoops as a scary ghost head thing. It was creative. We drew Halloween pictures on cups and dispersed them through the gym. We also had some things that Caleb brought from his school, like little paper ghosts and a skeleton he drew and named Gentleman Bones. Gentleman Bones is now hanging in our apartment.

Gentleman Bones

Throughout the week, students were told to prepare a Halloween poster, a pumpkin, and costumes. There would be competitions among each class for the first two and an individual costume contest.

2nd place poster winner

The party was scheduled to begin at 7. The students didn’t make their entrance until about 8:30. I was slightly annoyed by this, but I spent this extra time wisely, haunting the school’s hallways making eerie ghost sounds in my costume. I scared some kids. It was great.

We started the party with some music and dancing, and then we watched Michael Jackson’s Thriller music video. After that, I taught a dance to those who were interested based off of Thriller. I think they enjoyed it. Then more dancing. And a tongue twister competition. “Creepy crawler critters crawl through creepy crawly craters.” Two students from each class participated. Some of them were really good at it.

Students in their costumes

After that, we did a relay race between classes. There were 5 students from each class. The first did a sack race from one point to another. The second student had to run circles around a basketball – 15 times. This wasn’t my idea. The students said 15. After they did their circles, they had to shoot the basketball. This took a long time, but it was hilarious. Some kids just fell over. Some kids hurled the ball in the complete opposite direction as it should have gone. Once they finally made the basket, the next student had to blow up a balloon. Then the last two students had to run from one end of the gym to the other with the balloon in between them, without touching it with their hands. Then they had to pop it between them once they crossed the finish line. This was quite entertaining to watch, especially since I wasn’t involved at all. Up ‘til this point, I had taught a dance and conducted and judged a tongue twister competition. It was nice to just watch.

Watermelon Jack-o-Lantern

After this there was more dancing, and my CPs and I decided how to judge the costume, pumpkin, and poster contest. We worked it out and presented the awards. I didn’t judge the pumpkin contest, so I don’t know who won, but there were only two entries. One was a pumpkin, but the other was a carved watermelon. I hope that one won. Like Gentleman Bones, those two items stayed in our apartment until after Halloween.

The costume contest winners

After a bit more dancing, the kids all departed. It didn’t take long to clean up, and we were walking out at around 10. It was a long day. That was Thursday the 29^th.

Students dancing

Saturday on Halloween, Caleb, Kyra (another PCV in our city), and I decided to go for a hike across the steppe to a nearby mountain. The majority of our walk was across flat land. We were very chirpy on the way to the mountain. We left around 9:30 and got to the mountain around 12:30. It didn’t take long at all to get to the top. It wasn’t that big. We ate lunch and hung out at the top taking pictures for about an hour and then started heading back home. Walking back was okay at first, but then we started to feel it. The last hour or two was pretty torturous. Caleb estimates we walked about 12 miles total. We got back home at 5ish, and we were so happy to sit down.

Thriller pose on top of the mountain

That evening we, along with Ian (another PCV in Khentii) went out to eat and came back home to watch some scary short films and a thriller movie.

And that was pretty much our Halloween. I decorated our apartment a little bit, turning our mosquito net into a giant spider web in the living room, and we put up trash bag spider webs on the walls, toilet paper streamers in the entryway and into the kitchen, and of course our carved pumpkin, watermelon, and Gentleman Bones.

It was a pretty good holiday altogether. We have now been in Mongolian for a full 5 months. It’s hard to believe. Happy November everyone!

~Sally

It’s Cold Outside (Part 1) 10/26/15

Today, October 26, the wind has been blowing down from Siberia bringing some of the lowest temperatures we have seen in Mongolia yet. The high for today is 37 degrees. When I walked to school, the weather channel website said it was 25 degrees with 18 mile per hour northern winds that brought the temperature to about 11 degrees. The wind seems to be a determining factor for the temperature. Wind chills make a pleasantly chilly day, bitterly cold.

As the weather gets colder, I have been adding more clothing to cut back the chill on my walk to school. Today I wore low grade long underwear leggings for the first time. I also wore corduroy pants, wool socks, hiking boots, an undershirt, a long-sleeved cotton shirt, a long sleeve dress shirt, a tie, a scarf around my face (thank you Miss Kim), a sock hat, and my Duluth trading company fleece jacket. The jacket and corduroy/long underwear combo was vital for cutting out the wind chill.

Yet, in the grand scheme of things, it is not yet that cold in Mongolia. The season is young and just cooling down. However, today is unique because I can safely say that the wind chill is colder than some of the colder days of a normal year in Birmingham. About once a winter, Birmingham will see temperatures at or around zero degrees Fahrenheit, but it is rare and even rarer for such a severe wind chill to affect our southern climate. In the last four years, I have often gone hiking throughout the year with my good friend Tyler. In January on Vulcan Trail overlooking the city with the wind sweeping over the curve of Red Mountain, Tyler and I would occasionally experience weather as cold as I have just experienced today at the end of October.

~Caleb 

My Job

I realize that since I’ve started my actual work, I haven’t really written about it. So here you go. Sorry this got a little long. Skip the first part about scheduling if you wanna. I don't really have pictures of me teaching, because I'm teaching during those times. :) I will work on this. 

My work week has been in the neighborhood of 32 hours, pretty consistently. It may be a little more starting this week due to clubs finally happening.

My school’s schedule is pretty typical for a Mongolian complex school, I think. A complex school is a school that has all grades, 1^st-12^th. The day is divided into two sections. High school students, grades 9-12, have classes in the morning, from 8am to 1:15pm. Middle school students, grades 5-8, have classes in the afternoons/evenings, from 1:30pm – 6:45pm. I don’t work with elementary students, so I’m not sure when they have classes.

There are seven blocks of time in the morning, and seven blocks of time in the evening. Each block is 40 minutes long. So there are 14 class periods in a day.

I have three Mongolian counterparts (CPs). I teach one English class with each of them. On Mondays, I co-teach 9^th grade for two class periods (2 “hours” as the teachers call them, even though the “hour” is only 40 minutes) and again on Thursday for one hour. Both days this class starts at 9:30am, which is the earliest class I have during the week.

On Wednesdays, I co-teach 2 “hours” of 5^th grade, and again on Friday for one hour. Also on Wednesdays, I co-teach 2 hours of 8^th grade from 5:20-6:45, and again on Thursdays for one hour starting at 6pm.

I also teach English to my CPs three hours a week. And there is a separate class for my CPs who will be participating in the teachers’ Olympics competition in the spring, also three hours a week.

This week, we are also finally starting with the clubs at my school. Once a week, I will co-teach an English class for teachers and school workers that want to learn English. We had the first class on Monday, and although only 3 teachers showed up, I think they all really enjoyed it. It wouldn’t hurt my feelings if the class stayed that small.

I will co-teach an English speaking club for middle school students Wednesdays at 12 and for high school students Thursday afternoons. The middle school club will be one hour, but the high school club will be split into two groups I think, 9-10^th and 11-12^th.

Altogether, I have 19 hours of teaching every week. Outside of that, I meet with each of my CPs individually to lesson plan about 2-3 hours each, and I lesson plan by myself for the English classes I teach to my CPs. I have also been typing up all the lesson plans on my computer for all the classes I co-teach, and occasionally, I have to prepare materials for classes, but my CPs usually take care of this.

In a broader view, my Mondays are pretty nice, only one “real” class with 9^th grade. Tuesdays, I have NO real classes. On Tuesdays, I have my CPs come to my apartment to lesson plan and have CP English and Olympics classes. Since I don’t have an office and the one small teachers’ room is often crowded and noisy, it’s nice to have a day where my CPs aren’t distracted. Wednesdays are my hump days, for sure. 5^th and 8^th grade, 2 hours each, and I don’t get home until 7. Thursday is like a bookend day. 9^th in the morning, 8^th at the very end, not too much going on in the middle. And Fridays are pretty good, just 5^th grade and CP classes. No lesson planning or late nights.

Classes themselves have been going pretty well. The 5^th graders are all so excited about learning English, and they always seem to make me feel like a rock star. It’s easy to have fun teaching them. 8^th graders are my least favorite, just because they can get unruly in a matter of seconds. This is also just me trying to work out classroom management skills, and my CP for this class can’t communicate on the spot with me very well. 9^th graders are great. Some of them are reluctant to participate, but if I keep pushing those students, they will eventually work with me. The majority of the class seems really into English.

One thing that makes it difficult to teach here is the lack of materials and resources. Every school is different here in those terms, but I really feel it at my school. In my 8^th and 9^th grade classes, they only have 5 or 6 books for the whole class. They share maybe 5 or 6 students to one book.

My access to a printer is not ideal. I haven’t had to print anything personally, which is nice. My CPs always print any materials we need for class, but my school charges 100 Tugriks for each piece of paper you print. This converts to about 5 cents, but this can really add up when you’re printing things for every student, especially on a PC budget.

Speaking of which, I know you are dying to hear about class size. I don’t know what the average Mongolian class size is, but I can tell you about my school. My 5^th grade class has 24 students, my 8^th grade has maybe 26, and my 9^th grade class has about 22. In my school, there are probably about 25-80 students in each grade. They are divided into different homerooms. For example, I teach the 8^th B class. There is also an 8^th A class that I don’t teach.

I am starting to feel pretty settled in with my job. The two main challenges for me have been scheduling and communicating. Communication is always going to be a challenge, I think, but the more I work with my CPs, the better we get with communicating with each other. Scheduling is just hard. It’s the clash of Mongolian and American ideas about time and priorities. I have a schedule worked out for my week of classes, CP classes, and times to lesson plan. I kid you not when I say there hasn’t been one week when something hasn’t been moved, changed, or canceled.

That being said, the more I’m here, the more I get used to it. Teaching is getting easier for me, even though it’s hard for me to label myself as a teacher. It’s not a bad job, and I appreciate all the teachers and professors I ever had classes with so much more because of this experience, but as a career, I don’t think it’s for me.

But I digress. We’ve been at our site for 2 months now, and time is not slowing down. Work is steady and good, and I feel needed. It’s nice and I’m happy!

~Sally