Back in Dnipro

After a week of training over in Donetsk I have finally returned to Dnipro and on Monday I shall start teaching my new classes for this year.

It should be an interesting year with a lot of new groups mainly focusing on the lower levels and kids. I also have agreed to do two international house courses of business English and 1-2-1. Although i am sure these will help me develop as a teacher, as of yet I have no business or 1-2-1 classes!

Another change will be the new shift system. This year instead of starting almost everyday in the morning and finishing in the evening everyday I will instead only have afternoon and evening classes. This should allow for regular planning in the mornings and also a regular period where I can contact back home. This is also due to the fact that the change in timetable means lessons will no longer end so late A very welcome change!

It looks like I shall be doing some more filming with English club tv but the details still need to be arranged with them and I want to make sure that teaching is still my number one priority rather than childhood tv star dreams.

Other than that it is all very safe and familiar here. There have been some bits of good and bad news with some teachers having changed positions/cities but they all seam to be steps forward for them and so I am glad, even if it does mean the end of Spanish lessons and salsa partners!

I promise that the next post won't just be a general update and I'll press on with setting up a tefl blog in the mean time please feel free to suggest a name for the new blog bellow. Best suggestion will be rewarded with credit in the blog title and much love.

Visitors from Donestk

During the last weekend we were lucky enough to have some of the teachers from IH Donestk come to visit us in Dnipro [unfortunately one teacher wasn't well enough to come]. It had been a few weeks since we had trekked across  Donestk for the Ukraine Workshop and with the impending departure of one of the secretaries that some of the teachers at Donestk knew they decided to visit say their goodbyes and take part in the Pub Quiz that the Dnipro team was organising. 

The Quiz in the end turned out to be made up of more teacher than students. However the addition of English Club TV and several of the locals turned the quiz into an exciting event for all involved. The eventual winners of the quiz were the "Human Penguin hunters"...an interesting choice of team name which gained it's meaning from the costume that our American teacher decided to wear that day. 

Hopefully we will host another Quiz soon with more students attending this time. 

We of course indulged in other activities but I think that this information should stay between the different teachers. 

A General update 30/09/2010

Well it's been a while since I last blogged and for good reason, the work days have definitely become more hectic and require much more forward planning. Most days I now have a morning lesson and then evening/afternoon lessons and as such have very little time to plan lessons during the day (meaning that Friday and a bit of Saturday are becoming necessary lesson planning time). When the lack of internet at the flat is factored in then the hour between lessons on Thursday morning and regular Sunday mid afternoon trip  the coffee shop are the only chance I can get. The plus side is that I am definitely getting quicker at planning lesson and some of my recent assessments have brought up some very good feedback. I have a good level of being fun but firm with teenagers (I introduced them to Bombay bicycle club yesterday) and my ability to adapt at a moments notice was again brought up when I forgot a listening exercise for a business lesson.

We have managed to discover a very local and very realistic English паб that actually has darts, table football, shows football on the tv and does and English breakfast and fish and chips. although I am yet to sample these culinary delights I am hoping they will both be culinary and delightful. We first visited it on Friday when one of the other teachers and I went to watch the basketball with a couple of my pre-int students (one of whom worked at the basketball arena) Dniproazot played pretty well, however Kyiv were just a much better team.

During the rest of the weekend the other international teachers spent time introducing our newest member (neil) to Dnipro including going to the air rifle range where I managed to get the highest score (somehow) and sampling the wonders that are sharoma (a sort of kebab with chips inside that is worryingly addictive). On Monday evening I invited several of the other teachers around and we all had a very large risotto (though not quite large enough for the number of teachers that were present unfortunately). This was my attempt at bringing and element of "the well" to Dnipro and was gratefully received even if it wasn't exactly the same.

the only other news since Monday is that I have successfully managed to send a video message back to someone in England (took ages to shrink the video down to a suitable size) and I have also received my first item of post from the uk (thank you Zoe Allen). now I must dash for my next lesson.

This is Agent Wilson signing off.

Some pictures from outdoor Salsa next to the Dnipro

As promised I actually took some pictures from the outdoors salsa that goes on next to the Dnipro river in Dnipropetrovsk. Unfortunately I believe this is the last for the some time (I can't be certain as my Russian still isn't great) as the weather has definitely started to drop. It was a great way to go out with a live band and all the local salsa clubs there (there was definitely a noticeable increase in standard)

Globa Park

Next to my house is the truly impressive Globa Park. Coming from the UK and being use to parks being wide open spaces where one could play football, walk a dog in the wide open expanse and, a few years ago now mind, play on the swings and slides (or for some teenager swig cheap cider on said swings and slides). Here in the Ukraine the most obvious difference is the amount of tress that take up space across the whole of the park,  they are everywhere and are only broken by the river, paths and occasional cafe's and hot dog stands.

In addition to this there are also a variety of weight training equipment and gymnastic materials ranging from pull up bars up to machines that use your own weight as the resistance for using your arms of legs. There is also the highly impressive children's concert centre located next to the lake in the middle of the park. It is a very impressive building which hosts performances each weekend. Finally, perhaps the strangest item in the park is the railway that runs round the perimeter of the park. It doesn't connect to any other train service and seams to be primarily aimed at young children. It is very strange to see it at weekends running round and blowing it's whistle to move people out of the way.

I will post some more photo's of other elements of the park when I can.

They might not do Mexican food but they do Salsa!

Not knowing many people out here in the Ukraine and there being a lack of the typical ways to meet people that I have been use to from growing up in England can make weekends occasionally repetitive and boring, leading to the anticipation of returning to work and having lessons to teach being greater than it might otherwise be. However this weekend was different as for the first time in my life, I donned a nice shirt (that has occurred plenty of times before), headed to the riverside, and (after beating my British reserve into submission) did some salsa dancing for the first time. 

When I was first invited I knew that it would take me a while to actually dance but that once I started I would really enjoy it. The fact that the whole affair began with an outdoor session really did not help things. However within an hour the sun had set, the street lights dimly lit the area and most of the passers by no longer stopped and stared but hurried by to get to whatever destination they were scurrying along to.

By the time I had been taught the basics (moving forward and backwards in time to the music) the actually dance classes were ready to begin and we had moved inside to a local bowling alley that also happened to have a sizeable dancing area next to it. At this point I was ready to start learning the part that I was most looking forward to, being able to spin my partner round and even attempting a spin myself. 

There was an element of year 6 disco during the periods when it was up to the guys to go up to one of the, many, women in the room and ask them to dance. If I had been fluent in  Russian and an experienced salsa dancer then I wouldn't have felt too comfortable with this, but after bucking up some pride (and being warned of the consequences of not dancing with someone by the time by fellow teacher John returned from...well the john) I had asked a fairly proficient English speaker to dance and she had helpfully guided my steps.

The absolute highlight of the evening was the instructor teaching people to do the samba. I decided not to take part as trying to understand Russian instructions and not being able to see what was going on was hard enough and I greatly appreciated this decision after witnessing the truly amazing nature of the dance (from a distance)! This obviously would not have been so had I taken part (maybe I will one day when I can understand a bit more russian...and actually dance a bit too)

The whole affair cost 40 UAH which is somewhere between £3-4 and lasted 3 hours. The outside dancing was completely free and went on for a couple of hours before hand and takes place every Sunday evening. In fact me and John are going along to it tonight and plan to then watch the fireworks that are occurring afterwards as part of the Dnipro day celebrations. I will try and get some picture and post them up. 

The first bite of winter

This morning winter fired its first warning shots across my bows when I woke up and faced the early morning tram journey with the cold weather having it's first bite. It is incredible how quickly the weather has gone from being so hot that sleeping was an issue, to waking up and feeling that it is just a bit too cold to get out of bed, in only a few weeks. It certainly shows signs of what is to come in the ensuing winter months.

Having spoken to one of the Ukrainian people here I have, however, been informed that there is actually a relatively short period when there is snow here in Dnipro and so my hope of enjoying a long snowey winter may have to wait for a bit longer. On the plus side I am practically guaranteed some snow this winter!

I had another Russian lesson this morning where we covered the alphabet. All 33 letters! there are so many different variants around our E and O sounds (where as in English we have several A sounds and our wonderful diphones). At times It was quite challenging (this being despite my attempts over the last year or so to use cyrillic in my day to day life and adjust to it) especially the sounds we just don't have in English and the ь, and ы for soft sounds and the very strange "iy" type sound (this really doesn't tell you the name of it though).

At last it does appear that we are going to move premises (considering we were suppose to do this before the start of the school term some ten days ago and we have told students we would have moved twice before, it is a pleasant surprise to be surrounded by bin bags with Vocabulary and text books lining their insides, preparing for their trip to the new premises. As such there is a strong chance (see near certain) that we will be helping to move all the material and furniture over to the new premises and could mean the relaxing weekend is nothing of the sort.

As for the rest of the day, well we aren't having our input sessions yet (training session for teacher that should happen every Friday) and so I have it off! I'm planning on searching Dnipro for a music shop and checking out the guitars there as I am having serious guitar withdrawal symptoms (it may have been responsible for me waking up at four this morning with a splitting headache)

Caught in it's Greep

This weekend I came under the grip of..er...greep! That's what the Russian word for flu and after noticing the initial signs of a dry throat on Friday evening by Sunday I made a desperate attempt at ordering some cough medicine from the local pharmacist. I had done very well up, managing to use my essential TEFL skills of gestures and miming to Elicit cough, sore throat, runny nose (although my face may have revealed some of that). After being handed a bottle with some instructions I assumed that I could research any of the word lots of words that I don't understand when I got home and then work out the full instructions. After all how different can Ukrainian cough medicine really be?
Well it turns out that the instructions were in Ukrainian, which Russian as Dutch is to English/German. It turns out that I had bought some of that "add to hot water and then inhale" stuff which isn't that effective anyway! As such my Sunday wasn't really the highlight of the week but more one spend in bed/in my flat/getting "cough medicine".
On the plus side, today I was given some Tesco (in Ukraine!?!) vapour rub and some Lemsip rip off from the very helpful Oleg and my Lesson went really well! A good thing too considering one of the co-directors observed me the children to see if they were at the right lesson (I was complimented on my attempts to get the students to not use Russian.
In today's lessons I had the days of the weeks with my young kids and the new point's system had a real affect on their behaviour and then I had my teenagers do present simple Vs present continuous. Both groups really picked up their lessons and really progressed which was a real blessing consider how hard the last two had been.
The only other main thing to report from the weekend just gone was my trip to Puzata Hata a almost canteen style restaurant with tradition Ukrainian food where I had my first Borsch (I was very impressed) as well as my almost staple food of Verenykya. I had also recorded a small video update from here but, unfortunately, my computer is having some issues with loading video's from the computer and so you will have to wait.

The Not so English Pub

In Dnipro there is an "English Pub" called Big Ben. I had slightly high hopes for Big Ben's seeing as it advertises itself as an English pub, surely this would be a place where it might even be possible to order things in English, watch the English football team on a television and maybe even encounter other English ex-pats in Dnipro.

As soon as we walked in my suspicions that this would actually be more of a Ukrainian take on an English pub and not actually that English at all. There was a small bar area with the obligatory chairs next to the bar (got that right) then they had a load of tables that definitely belonged to a restaurant (okay maybe they were going for the gastro pub idea, not traditional English pub but certainly on the rise.) They welcomed us in Russian (okay it is a Ukrainian city I'll accept that most people should speak Ukrainian or Russian but it would have been cool to have an nice "hello" echo out as we crossed the threshold...) There was a TV (the modern staple of an English Pub) but as I turned to my left I noticed that there a stage set up for a band!

After a quick check we had the conformation, no football, just the band. There was of course only one possible choice for us in light of this. We left and set of for the Irish pub (the description "just round the corner" was definitely not accurate in this case). We were all surprisingly impressed by the Irish pub, there was a plentiful supply of many different types of whisky (although most did appear to be Scottish blends, that can be forgiven) there menu included Irish classic as well as a very tasty steak and they had Guiness on tap! They also showed the England match!

Having watched England win 4-0 we decided to leave the Irish pub and head home, stopping for a final beer at a cafe/bar we had visited recently. At this point I decided to test my Russian out (as we had lost our more fluent Russian speaker earlier in the evening). It started well and I managed to ask for two beers and was completely understood. I was then asked something which I assumed was "which beer would you like" seeing a they serve a variety. I was wrong, what I was actually asked was if I wanted something to eat and given a couple of options. As such when our beers arrived so did some pistachio nuts and what I can only assume is the Ukrainian equivalent to Jerky. Luckily this still wasn't to expensive though it has now lead to some ridicule!

I have the weekend off from teaching so aside from doing a bit of preparation for next week It should be a great chance to relax after the start of the term. (yesterdays lessons involved breaking up a couple of fights, having teenage who seamed to forget everything they had learnt in the previous lesson and other such delights! hopefully the next lessons will go better.)

An Englishman, An Irishman, A Scotsman, An American, A Brizilian and A Ukrainian go to watch Football

One of the experiences that I was really looking forward to was going to watch a football game in the Ukraine. Having seen several games at different grounds around England I was really hoping to find out the similarities and difference between the culture. Would they have more vocal home support (let's be honest it can't be too hard), would I get to see a flare go off, would the Ultra's try and start a fight.

There was never any chance of the last one happening as I hadn't realised that the Ultra's and some other fans were boycotting the club because they had lost the last 3 games (which was an insult too far apparently, even though they were still second in the league). As such the ground was actually fairly empty and there wasn't too much singing and no flares were let of.

The football actually played was quite different to what we are use to in England and there was a much stronger focus on playing a passing game with a slow build up rather than quick counter attacking. As such many of the players moved around positions and there was a moment when the centre took the ball most of the way up the pitch.

Similarities between Arsenal could be brought with the tendency to pass the ball around the outskirts of the box looking for some option but not actually getting many shots of. Despite this as soon as Metalurg Donestk (the small brothers of the more famous Shaktar Donestk scored the game finally came to life with many more shots flying around at both ends. In the end the game finished 2-1 to Metalurg much to the joy of our Ukrainian friend who had bought the tickets for us (we hadn't realised that he didn't support Dnipro until the first goal flew into the net and then everyone near us knew).

Particular highlights about the differences included the cost (30 UAH which is somewhere around £3!!!) for a top flight match, the halftime cheerleaders (I haven't seen this at any English game yet) and in particular the moment at the end of the match where the captain and several other players went over to the Dnipro "Kop" and spoke to the fan's their to explain their poor form. Apparently this is expected (which kinda of diminished the gesture a bit) nether the less it was interesting to see the players held to account by the fans first and then the media.

All in all it was pretty enjoyable and I will definitely go to other matches.

Induction week at IH DNK

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.