So in addition to my mom's comment that "your blog makes it seem like Peace Corps is one big party", comes a couchsurfing email of "what do you do in Peace Corps?" and Steve's father's advice of: "you know, you should probably put something in about your job in case a future employer finds your site." As these all piled onto one another I figured, huh, maybe I should write about my work.
As to why I haven't: while I really enjoy my projects, I assume no one else wants to hear about them. Few bookstore shelves house tomes on "What I taught today" but there are enough about "Ukranian life and customs" and even far more about "I visited X amount of countries today, freezing my cajones off before getting mugged, attacked by dogs and suffering from ameobic dysentry while getting it on with 17 Scandanavian women in Greek-ruin strewn waters."
By the way, all of the above are true for me and scattered amongst the archives of this blog, save for the 17 Scandanavian women. In actuality, they were Ukranian.
Anyway, my job:
Today I only had one seminar, which went really well. The topic was Writing Skills and by the end my teachers had written some poems, rewritten the lyrics to "Hotel California", done some freewriting, filled in the word balloons on some "Calvin and Hobbes" strips, discussed Product Vs. Process writing, discussed error correction in writing (particularly I'm trying to get them to stop simply writing in corrections and instead am trying to get them to write comments like "go is an irregular verb" on the paper if the student wrote "goed" and make the student look up how to properly conjugate the verb; helps retention and prompts self-correction), touched on resume writing and using pen-pals and then I gave them a packet of writing activities. Hopefully they'll use some or all of what they did with their students.
In an hour I'm going to conduct my movie club at the library. It's attended by a group of university students with really good English (who, tit for tat, force me to practice my Russian when we hang out on the weekends), so we really get into the themes of the movies during the post-viewing discussions. Today we're watching "Breakfast Club" and will probably discuss teen culture and themes of popularity, alienation and acceptance.
After that I'll put on some music and write the 30 Olympiad Speaking tasks that my coordinator needs by tomorrow so we can get the test packets done by next week for the Olympiad competition the following week. Those are a bit of a slog. Every task has a topic followed by three particular points the student should address, and coming up with original tasks takes some brain racking. As seen in previous Olympiads I've judged, most students come with pre-memorized answers to nearly every topic imaginable and I feel my job is to throw them curve balls so I can see what their English level really is, not the English level of the tutor they paid to write the answers for them.
So that's my work for today. I'll probably study Russian for 20 minutes when I eat lunch here in a few minutes and tonight I'll prep for tomorrow's seminar on Listening Skills.
After that I'll pop some popcorn, though, and watch a DVD. It can't all be work, you know!