Aigir Part 2

Aigir Part 2,

In 20 rotations of the Earth there are many newsworthy events which take place in the world. Without news from the outside world I sometimes felt like I was under water. I bought a cell phone in Ufa but the signal was incredibly weak in the village. Through Skype my family was able to reach me when I stood in certain areas of the camp and didn’t move more than a few feet away. Every time I heard news of the outside world it was like bursting to the surface of a lake and taking a huge, deep breath of air. Then I would go back under for however long until the next scheduled call.

That may sound extreme, and it is, but it can be strangely nice. We are constantly plugged into the news and the internet, so much that there can be withdrawal pains when we are removed from them. However, when the mental shouts for information begin to subside, there is an eerie quiet left over, an eerie calm. I certainly wouldn’t want to live that way forever, but for a short time I was only concerned with how cold it was in the morning and how sunlight lingered over the mountains until midnight.

I am not a teacher by trade. I have friends who are teachers and never once have they said it was easy. Since moonlighting as a teacher, I now understand why. I have played several different roles in my life but “Teacher” was a new act. When I decided I was going to try this, I asked for a few guidelines. What I was told was “You know English, you can teach it.” To this day I’m still not sure if that’s true, but I tried my best.

I started by determining what my strengths and weaknesses were. I believe I have a fairly decent, innate sense of grammar. I can look at something, as many people can, and know that it’s wrong and how to fix it. I cannot, however, explain why it’s wrong. (I still have someone proofread my work though, mostly so I can blame them if a mistake gets through.) Unless I was going to spend weeks before my teaching gig relearning grammar rules (I was not), teaching those rules was out of the question. Then I wondered about what native speakers have that non-native speakers don’t. The answer was simply that they speak like natives. I decided I was going to focus on the spoken language. Speaking skills were clearly the best product I had to offer.

I wrote out an entire ten day lesson plan. Each day was a new discussion topic with questions and points to hit. I had placed enough information, or so I thought, to fill the 50 minute teaching sessions. One of the things I found out on my own about teaching was that things never go as planned, particularly timelines. Some days I didn’t have enough time to cover half my lesson and some days I had to pull teeth to make my lessons last long enough.

Each day I learned new tricks with which to engage the kids. When I started I always asked them how they were doing to get their minds working in English. While some responded with fine, there were many others who responded in great length about how they were enjoying the camp or how cold it was. I often prompted the kids to engage with each other in discussion about certain topics. When they did this I watched. It was strange to be on the other side of the table. This was my “Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes” moment. It was while I was observing these kids that I realized just how horrible of a student I was in grade school. The problem is that there was no way for me to realize just how bad I was when I was younger. So, I offer this to all the teachers who put up with me on my road to adulthood: I apologize for being a contrary, frustrating, ass of a student. Also, thank you.

As I’ve said, a ten day shift is filled with a lot of things including unexpected events. In the first shift I had the chance to climb several of the mountains surrounding the village and stare off cliffs into the open air. I also had the chance swim in one of the rivers which flow through those mountains. I got to sit up late and drink tea with my fellow staff members listening to Russian folk songs. The bottom line is that this camp was awesome.

On one of the nights I spent relaxing with the staff several of them were cooking pelmeni, that famous traditional Russian dish. After only eating a butter/noodle/meat/water mixture for more than a week something different looked incredibly appealing. I wasn’t a particular fan of pelmeni but I decided I’d ask to try it. They said sure and I tried it. It tasted delicious. I ate some more and felt incredibly satisfied.

If I remember correctly from my Psych. 101 class, the body mind connection is particularly strong when it comes to food-related illness. This was incredibly apparent to me when I woke up around six the next morning to expel all of the pelmeni I had found so delicious the night before. After all the pelmeni was gone I spent the next two and a half days expelling everything else that was in my body. Win (Sarcasm). My guess is that I picked up some sort of virus that the rest of the staff was used to because they were all glowing when I met up with them for the breakfast I did not eat.

That morning I was scheduled to drive the Waz, an old Russian jeep, over a small and incredibly bumpy 18 kilometer mountain pass. Despite feeling awful, I got what I needed together and met up with the two guys who would be my copilot and navigator. One was a camp expeditor/translator student at the university and the other was the handyman at the camp. We push started the jeep and got on our way.