oh, the pressure to come up with a witty title.

10 July, 2009

Okay, I know I wrote a blog yesterday, but I have time and am gonna write another to post this weekend.

I now understand how difficult it is to be a teacher. I’ve always respected my teachers, but now being on the other side of the equation; I’m in awe of them.

Being a foreign language teacher, without speaking the native language well, is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I know how difficult it is to teach kids to read. I mean, I didn’t learn how to read until the second grade. I really do understand the difficulties with reading.

So think about how hard it can be to learn to read, and now, imagine this: you finally get a student to know their alphabet and letter sounds. You get them to sound out, say, and essentially read C-A-T. The enthusiasm that a native speaker feels when they understand the word and can associate it with the object is missing here because my students don’t know what C-A-T means. They’ve learned “mishik” for cat their entire lives. So the task is not only to teach them to read words, but to understand. And beyond that, the Russian students that don’t know Kyrgyz are sometimes still confused because not only do they not know “cat”, they also don’t know the Kyrgyz word, so my translations are useless. Welcome to life as a TEFL Peace Corps Volunteer. Haha

That is the frustrating side of life. And in the very next club, when teaching past tense, amongst all of the “yesterday, I ate.” “yesterday, I studied.” And “yesterday, I talked.” sentences, a student will pull out a “yesterday, I played hide and seek with my friends outside.” And will make my jaw drop and make me feel like I might actually stand a chance of helping a student improve their English. yay.

And that is why it is called an emotional rollercoaster. The ups and downs happen every day. But in the long run, the ups outnumber the downs and that makes it worth it.

Gotta go chai eech.

Still miss you.
Love from Kyrgyzstan,
Jess