Perpetual Change

Day in School

Here are a few highlights from my site visit - the place where I will live for the next two years (and everyone is welcome to visit).

The town is beautiful; it's a bit cushier than I was expecting. And the next town over, is a resort destination famous throughout Ukraine with miles of parkland, special healing waters, and a movie theater. Very exciting stuff.

The school I am teaching at is like a magnet school for the 16 schools in the town. The school system here is a bit different; they finish high school at 16, and then go on for 5 or more years of university. A student can choose to go to two special schools, one for liberal arts called Gymnasium (which is where I will be) and one for sciences called Lyceum. They really don’t get you anything more, except harder work and better prep, much like our magnet schools. At mine, all the students have to wear coats for uniforms. The coats of each class are different (though there aren't too many possibilities); the students vote on which color when they first enter school. The students then go out and buy coats that color that they like, and the school can’t enforce this, so some students just don’t wear them because they don’t want. Though generally it is a prestigious thing to wear them because only the students at the Lyceum and the Gymnasium can.

Grade levels are usually about 6 classes of 9-12 students, and substitute teachers don't exist. So, if a teacher is absent (which isn’t uncommon, even for things such as planting potatoes), one teacher will take her class and the other for that period. It works very well; on the worse day the classes are about 25; it also makes it easy to do special sessions for all the students in one grade, but the teachers have to always stick very close to the same curriculum, and always be ready for twice as many students as normal.

Although, the schools are public, they have Christian icons in most classrooms, particularly in Western Ukraine, which is additionally interesting, because there is no state religion. At my school, there is a stained glass window of the Virgin near which all the students pray together in the morning. They pray the Our Father (which one of the English teachers also does in English at the beginning of her classes). It was awesome to hear. Often while traveling, I have wished I had a small tape recorder, that I could record distinctive sounds that I associate with places, just like recording pictures. Sounds like the hippos swimming in the Berlin zoo, or surf on the rocky shores of Nice, or the creak of my door in Florence. I would add the students praying to this list.

Their penmanship is amazing, in both English and Ukrainian.

While I was observing classes, I would sit in the back, and students would often try to steal a glance to see what I was doing, or how I might react to someone speaking. Almost constantly someone was peaking over a shoulder. In a few classes, where I was the subject, they got to ask all their questions... and there were many. Most were run-of-the-mill, but here are some of the most interesting: Do you do drugs, what are your impressions (of what I asked), what clothes do you like, what country is best, do you have a girlfriend, are you married, do you have kids, do students smoke in class, what are you afraid of, what literature do you like, what did you know of Ukraine before you came, have you heard of the Orange Revolution? Anything was apparently fair game.

Finally, I think I mentioned before, they have a very different concept of cheating. Tests are communal, as is homework. This is accepted and expected. Communal learning is seen as that, learning, not cheating. The culture can be very collectivist. Further, if a student is struggling orally and the teacher says, “Please help him,” it actually means ‘please do it for him.’ Where in US schools, the original student would still be ultimately responsible for the final answer; here, that student is totally relinquished of the ability to answer. A lot of pressure towards precision and memorization is prided in the educational system. Errors are little tolerated.

PS. Here is an anecdote. They LOVE funny anecdotes here, they are always telling them to each other, and there are whole periodicals devoted to them. This all happened while I was on my site visit, and then on the way back we stopped in L'viv. I went into a little cafe that looked like it sold stuff to people walking on the street (not an uncommon arrangement), and this was further reinforced when all I saw on the menu was hot dogs and ice cream. I ordered my ice cream at the counter and waited so I thought they knew it was to go, but they put it in an ice cream glass. So I communicated that I wanted it to go, but they transferred it to a plastic cup and left in the small metal spoon (which also aren't rare). Confused, I asked again, and in more gestures than words, I understood that I could have it. I walked to my friends by the door, and we all agreed that I must have misunderstood, so I went back to ask once more, but sure enough they gave me the spoon. So now I have a perfect size yogurt or ice cream spoon that fits in my pocket for where ever I go. I doubt that was as funny as when it happened.

posted by jjs @ 5:49 AM