Day 9: Crab Chips

Why hi! Sorry this might not be the most eloquent email, I didn't get a ton out of today sadly due to my first migraine ever (not so much fun)... and it was a real bummer because I was asked to be the substitute for middle/high school science starting today through the rest of the week and there was a staff meeting we attended, not to mention my 2nd graders and all of that craziness. I'm feeling a little better now and getting situated in our new host home. It's a mansion apartment! We have the entire second floor (yes, this apartment has two floors) to ourselves. It should be a very interesting experience (as this all has been already), our host mom is Russian and lived in Louisiana... she is also a single mother to two severely developmentally delayed boys (her 16 year old reads at a low 1st grade level) and holds a very prestigious job (I believe as the manager of this region) at Conoco-Philips Oil. Eeek! Anyway, we're getting nicely settled in and are slowly integrating into our school.

My mentor teacher is still wonderful. She is unendingly patient (as you need to be with that age group) and pays attention to every student when they speak, regardless of whether it's related. She just has such a way of imparting value to students, its no wonder they love her, especially when most of these kiddos have hard-working parents that are likely not home as often as they would like to be. She places a lot of trust and responsibility on her kids, taking time to teach them the skills to solve their own problems and reiterates when necessary. She employs repetition beautifully as a way of learning (of course different varieties of questioning and such but a lot of repetition of the same rules) and has a very calming, confident persona. I know I'll learn a lot from her while I work with her. We haven't really discussed my lesson in the class yet, but we will soon; I'll be going over to her and her husband's apartment for dinner sometime at the end of this week or this weekend and will discuss it then along with an interview :)

I think Keri and I are kind of sad to say goodbye to the home we've held since we've been here, the Krugers' apartment. Its not ours and we have no title over it, but it's been our refuge and the one piece of consistency this whole trip. That and the family has been a blast! We know we'll do fine here and that everything will be great in a few days, but it kind of feels like the beginning all over again. Oh well, it shall pass!

I'm trying to see if I can integrate anything into the science class near the end of the week, just into one of the class periods, but the teacher's lesson plans that he left are pretty strict, necessary, and time consuming. Hopefully if I motivate well I can slip something in in the last 15 minutes of class, but we'll see. The kids were awesome and extremely diverse! Out of 8 students, we had students from Kazakshtan, the U.S., Japan, Pakistan, Korea, Poland and France. Bah. I thought it would be an insurmountable challenge on Migraine Day, but they were extremely self-motivated and knew what was expected of them while their teacher was gone. At the end of the class I held an impromptu discussion of the lesson, asking some questions that applied the content to Astana, and then allowed them to grill me like I knew they wanted to :) they ended up asking me my age (of course), where I was from in America, and if it was as cold there as it is here. They were great, I can't wait to head over to the high school building each afternoon to talk a little science with them.

On another bright and happy note, I was taught how to use QSI's very own dysfunctional copy machine! Yay! I helped my mentor teacher by making some book packets and guiding questions/worksheets for tomorrow's reading groups. I've been working with two kiddos during this time; one of them is a Kazakhstan native and about where she needs to be, the other just got moved up to the 2nd grade from the preschool/kindergarten classroom and almost seems at the top of the class in reading and math already. Smart kid! But also a little socially immature and has a lot of energy. It's quite the test of patience, especially since the Kazakh girl is known for being passive-aggressive and inciting some mischief... should be fun to see how this plays out.

Anyway, I'd better get to sleep or I'll be one heap of miserable tomorrow. Keri and I both have had a bit of a hard time acclimating our bodies to this change the last few days, hope it doesn't last long... oh, and some of the kids think we're sisters; we think it's pretty funny and it kinda feels that way :)

Peace,
Chels