April 9, 2012

I had to set up my alarm again to make sure I was on time for my 8:00am class. I stopped by the dean’s office to verify the spelling of the names of the teachers receiving a certificate of participation and to confirm my new schedule as the students contradicted what he had written the previous week. I got to my classroom and no students were present. Somehow, the dean corralled three students, who had not being presented the previous Friday, and I had to try and run a class with them. When I asked a student to pretend she had had a particular experience for the sake of the exercise, she didn’t understand what I meant. I also said “imagine”, “create”, or “make it up”, but to no avail. And this is an exercise for a student who’s graduating as an interpreter in just two and a half months and also from the group Nigora kept saying was her best group in terms of fluency.

The second class was also the other interpreter group and attendance here was also very light. Apparently, they’re having exams this week and students are staying home to memorize or practice whatever they think will be in the exams. The teacher group was the last one and was simply beyond exhaustion by then as I don’t usually teach three hour and half classes in a row. I went to the soup place and then on home chatting with one of the students from my former level one group who complained about not having me as a teacher since the one she has now only speaks Tajik. She mentioned the students were planning on going to the dean to complain about not having a native (or near-native in my case) teacher any longer. Dark clouds had appeared in the sky and the temperature had dropped suddenly as we shivered while waiting for the mini-van.

I took a quick nap knowing that Tohir would be coming around by 3:00pm to rehearse his interview with the IRCR. I made coffee when he came and we ended up talking about everything under the sun, but his interview. There was heavy thundering and then it began to rain in earnest. When it came time for him to go to his English class, I promised to conduct the mock interview with him on the telephone the next day as that would approximate the experience he’d have a lot closer than face to face.

It was time to do more research for my presentation as I’m trying to find some role plays for the teachers to perform after my lecture so as to make it more interactive. I had a chunk of bread, some cheese and juice for dinner and went to bed to continue reading “Makeda”.