PST

My apologies for these entries being few and far between lately, the issue is that the Soum I am in now, Erdene, is pretty small, so there is no internet café or anything like that. Our Mongolian language teacher though happens to be married to the school computer teacher so she works that angle for us to get some internet time in the school about once a week… J we love her. So things have been very busy, which I think will be the trend all through pre-service training (PST). I always have 4 hours of language class every weekday. My Mongolian language speaking capability is still pretty shaky, but I am seeing progress!!! A current peace corps volunteer (PCV) said Mongolian is like the 4th hardest language for English speakers to learn or something like that, so I’m being as patient as I can with it. Then with the rest of the day I either have Cross Culture class or Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) class. With both of these there are native Mongolian teachers paired with PCV Trainers. Cross Culture is very interesting and is teaching us all of the must-know type of information, as well as history, customs, community development, etc. TEFL sessions are also interesting and just very practical stuff for us to be learning. Part of our TEFL training is called Micro-teaching, where we are actually teaching Mongolian kids with another trainee. So far we have done 3 micro-teaching sessions. Our last session on grammar was by far our most successful lesson. We have had 6-8 Mongolian students at these, and we teach them a lesson for a half hour. It is an English lesson, so we speak English, but there is a great variety in the amount of English the students we are teaching speak. That is probably the biggest challenge with these sessions… what if what we plan is way too easy because it involves words/concepts they already all know. Or… what if we get blank stares the whole half hour because they can’t understand a word we are saying!? Luckily, we have had a nice balance between these two extremes thus far! Apparently though when we get to our sites for our real teaching this coming fall there tends to be this huge range of English speaking abilities within classes, not to mention class sizes are upwards of 40 students I guess. In my free time I hang out with my host family, who is wonderful and takes amazing care of me (not as good as my real mom back home, but they are up there!) The other day I got home and my host sisters were cutting into a sheep’s stomach… they laughed pretty hard at my face. I help out with the cooking/cleaning (that’s right real family, I help with these things) and my best friend Ann would laugh at how I slow the process down with my cutting of the vegetables, but hey if they want me to help that’s what they get! I and the other trainees also find time to play soccer (or bombok –rough translation from Cyrillic to English). Though the other day we started playing on a patch of “grass” that at least had some grass amidst the rocky, bumpy dirt, and the soccer ball popped within the fist five minutes of our game. The rest of the game was played with a flat old basketball a kid had. Oh and another trainee and myself were captains picking teams at the beginning, and none of these little Mongolian boys wanted to be on the girls team. As in they literally refused to come be on my team when I picked them (funny how that sexism in sports is pretty much across the board in the U.S. and abroad). Anyways, by the end of the game the boys that did agree to be on my team were happy they did J