Induction week at International House DNK officially started on Wednesday the 25th of August by which point I had managed to have a proper nights sleep and felt much more awake than the pervious day. We began with some drinks and getting to know you exercises, including one over Skype with the other school in Donetsk, although this didn’t quite run according to plan (we left the Donestk school waiting for 30 minutes before the skype link was up and running. Then due to the web cams location being away from the microphone, it was not possible to ask questions to people from the other school.) It was still a very useful way to meet all the other teachers and at least gain some basic knowledge about them.
After this we began the more serious work going over the basic approaches to delivering different types of lessons, what resources the school has, the changes that are occurring within the structure of the school this year and of course some more getting to know you games. During this period I discovered that actually IH DNK use different terminology and possibly even approach to teaching a language lesson that I had been taught during my CELTA. On the one hand this could be only a difference of semantics, yet it does seam possible to end up ordering a lesson in a completely different way to that which I am use to, and even possible miss out stages that I would consider very important. My hope is that if there is a genuine difference then I can take the best from both approaches rather than the worse!
The other new teachers and I also started our Beginner Russian classes. John (one of the other new teachers) and I had a clear advantage having used some of the Michel Thomas foundation Russian course before we came and Having a basic knowledge of Cyrillic really helped to know what some of the words were. The classes have so far dealt with such advance language as how to greet some one in formal and informal situations. So far my favourite phrase that I have learnt is to say “pleased to meet you” which is privetna paznacomitsa”.
I have also delivered my first lesson in the Ukraine! Don’t get too excited though, this lesson was a 20 minute introductory class that we give during the “open houses” where prospective students visit and we try to convince them to sign up. I had signed up to give the trial lesson for the Young learners who can be any age from 5-9, unfortunately for me no one from that age group turned up on my day. This resulted in me delivering the lesson to two of the native Ukrainian teachers who did their best impressions of very young pupils.
On Saturday after the signing of contracts (well that’s my next 10 months accounted for) and another open house I went into town with john to explore and get more familiar with the location of everything. During which time we managed to stumble across a McDonald’s! Not having an oven and having had a week of food where the closest item I ate to English food was Italian I really appreciated having a Burger and fries at approximately half the cost from an English McDonald’s.
Also on Saturday evening I went out with 3 of the other teachers for a meal and a few drinks. This included sampling the local Ukrainian vodka and the local beer as well as the not so local TGI Fridays food. We almost went to the UK themed Pub called “Big Ben” but alas this was not open.
During the evening we discussed some of the pervious teachers and their motivations for coming out to the Ukraine. Some of the reasons seamed fairly standard, experiencing a totally different culture, low cost of living, wanting to improve their Russian etc. And some were a lot more interesting, Such as those who came to find wives (yes, that’s right more than one, in fact many it would seam), the man who came over to work whilst he sorted out his mail order brides visa (yup a real mail order bride), or the Jehovah’s whiteness who came over to go around preaching every evening and teach in the morning…that was until he knocked on the door of one of the students houses and after a few angry phone calls (“is this really what you are up to! Trying to convert my children…etc”) He became and Ex-teacher at the school.
The last story I found quite interesting, not least due to the very strong opinions of the other teachers about J.W’s and religion in general, but mainly due to the fact that a teachers actions outside the school could cause to his dismissal. If he hadn’t of knocked on any students doors then no one would have complained and him using his spare time really shouldn’t be the school’s business, they don’t own him whilst he is out of school. But due to the coincidence (though it would have had to happen at some point) that he knocked on a students door meant that all of a sudden a conflict of interest occurred.
As a religious person myself I have more obvious reasons to be concerned about stories like this, I don’t believe that I should have to not talk about my faith to anyone including pupils if it arose in discussion or another event lead to it arising. However I do understand that pupils do not pay to be preached at but to have lessons in English, and it could certainly appear as though the school might be using deception to preach to people considering the above event, as such perhaps the only option to prove that this isn’t true would be for the teacher to leave the school. [just for the record I have no plans to go round to peoples houses, knock on their doors and certainly no plans to start preaching about only 144,000 going to heaven, that you need to be in the top 144,000 holy points to actually get into heaven and that God’s actually name is Jehovah, a name that was created much after Hebrew times combining two Jewish names for God that no one knew how to pronounce (oh and that Jesus was just a good guy)].
I still have another couple of days of the induction week before teaching gets fully underway during which time I shall hopefully make use of skype and the internet connection at the school (one of the major downsides of my apartment not having internet) before diving into the deep end of full time teaching.
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