In and of itself, the school day wasn’t anything unusual.
But I’m curious to see what comes of it. My first monthly report was due today.
I filled it in and emailed it from school because I don’t currently have
internet at home. As always with forms, I found I difficult to check “yes or no,”
because the questions asked never seem to be the ones I want asked. The first
question, though, asked about lesson-planning. I said frankly that my
co-teacher doesn’t plan…but that she also doesn’t have books for many of the
classes so how could she plan? I sent the form over a break and then went
outside to play with the kids. They taught me Georgian hand games and their
version of “ninja.” I taught them “London Bridge.” When I went back inside
though, my co-teacher looked up and informed me that she had written lesson
plans. Then she pulled out a book and showed me pages with graphs written all
in Georgian.
I guess she got a phone call (though she didn’t say). Ugh…that
makes me wish I had lied on the form. If she’s serious about writing plans, I’ll
have to spend another month trying to convince her to let me teach now and
again. But while I worry to myself off-line, I should also mention a related
side-note. On the form, there were four options offered per question and I had to
check which one most closely matched my situation. Interestingly, the supplied “best-case
scenario” for teaching style was not team teaching or co-operative teaching or
any such thing. It was that the Georgian teacher does most of the teaching while
the volunteer does warm-ups and speaking exercises. Just interesting…
After school, I was walking home with the teachers when they
told me we were stopping in at one of our student’s houses because his
grandfather had passed away. The boy was nowhere to be seen, but we walked into
a big room where three women in black were sitting on a couch. The poor dead
man was laid out in the middle of the room; we walked a circle around him and
then were on our way again with hardly a
“bodishi” whispered.
Then the school’s music teacher took me with her. She’s the
one who introduced me to that boy at the folk concert, and she was convinced
that he was still in Oni. She’s friends with his grandmother, and so we went to
his grandmother’s house. The whole time, she kept telling me how beautiful his eyes
and his nose were. She said, “See, you love him” a couple of times, ignoring my
insistences that I really am quite happy single. *Sigh* Georgian mothers.
As I thought, the boy had already left for London. So Manana
took me to her house for lunch (which we usually eat around 5 pm here). We
listened to classical music, she invited a French-speaking friend over to speak
to me (though I couldn’t answer), she fried eggs and sliced persimmons and
offered me cigarettes and chocolate as we sat under pictures of fishnet-stocking-ed
women. It was all rather hilarious. Then she gave me gifts—a pair of purple
panties and a couple of roses from her garden—and walked me home…so that she
could walk me past her son’s work and introduce us. Oh the persistence!
Eka came home from Tbilisi today, so once I got home we
discussed our Christmas plans. “Georgian Christmas” isn’t December 24th…so
we’re going to Italy for my Christmas and then coming back to Racha for hers.
If I have travel p’uli left after that, I may go to Berlin to meet up with a
friend and possibly head north for a few days. We’ll see…
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