Valentine's Week

Regardless of how I ever chose to observe certain secular holidays in the U.S. (i.e. MLK Day, President’s Day, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day), in Azerbaijan, these holidays make great topics for English conversation clubs with automatic segues to cultural exchange. For Valentine’s Day last week, I decided to use the theme for both of my student conversation clubs. Valentine’s Day is recognized in Azerbaijan as “Lover’s Day,” and I realized that my school-day version of Valentine’s Day, where all the kids wear red and bring valentines and candy for each other may be a bit out of touch with some of the current notions surrounding the holiday here. I decided to spin the theme so we learned about compliments. I taught new words like “kind, pretty, beautiful, interesting, generous, honest, friendly, patient” and told my students that Valentine’s Day is a good opportunity to give compliments to people we care about, like our family and friends. At the end of the day, I handed out a pink index card and had the students write a valentine (in English of course!) to one of their family members. The stipulation was that each valentine had to include a compliment and the line, Happy Valentine’s Day! As I was proof-reading through their notes, I made a last-minute addition that beautiful is an adjective that describes women, while we use handsome to describe men. I also gave my students the task of translating their valentines when they give their cards to the respective recipients to make sure they’re understood properly. One of my students wrote to her older brother who is currently in the middle Azerbaijan’s compulsory military service for young men. She wrote that he is a “kind and handsome boy,” decorated the card with red and purple hearts, and even included an “I love you” before she signed her name! As we were leaving, she asked me if it’s okay if she waits to give it to him next year when he’s home for Valentine’s Day.

The older group, which happen to be all girls, completed this valentine card task rather quickly, so I passed out extra index cards and gave them the opportunity to write to their friends, too. I ended up receiving a valentine from one of my 9^th graders that read:

Dear Annie!

You are a honest person!!!

Happy Valentine’s Day!

It’s always nice to know your students have such a keen eye for character, isn’t it?

On Friday, the final day of my Valentine’s Week, I was teaching articles a, an and the (which, for the record, was a coincidence and had no relation to the valentine I received from my student) to a 7^th grade class. Because the Azeri language lacks articles, it’s a rather difficult topic for my counterparts to teach and for students to understand. So I had presented most of the material for this lesson, and I could tell my counterpart was hanging on my every word to make sure the examples she wanted to present would be accurate. After I had given a series of example sentences, my counterpart jumped in and gave the example: He is a beautiful boy. She immediately shot an approval-seeking glance my direction, and as I was endorsing her sentence with a slight nod of my head, I heard “handsome,” come from one of my conversation club students sitting in the front row. “He is a handsome boy.”

Azerbaijan is cold.

We were warned during training that the first few months at site are cold. It’s a rough time to begin service as the winter months are difficult. Just make it to Novruz everyone says. Novruz, Azerbaijan’s biggest holiday, falls at the end of March and is a celebration of new life: the turning of winter into spring. I suppose I gave this warning as much consideration as I gave all of the disappointed scoldings [ie: “Annie, where is your jacket!?”] I received from my dad every year come November. In winter, Azerbaijan is cold. And not the kind of cold where the worst part of the trip is the first ten minutes you spend in the car waiting for your heat to kick in. It’s a no insulation, the walls in this building are merely conducting the cold from the ice clinging to the outside of the building, kind of cold. The kind of cold where you can’t tell whether or not you’re burning your fingers on the stove because they’re numb. The I can’t draw a straight line across the blackboard because I can’t feel the chalk between my fingers kind of cold. I walk around everyday wearing at least three layers of pants and three to four shirts to stay warm. It’s not abnormal for me to wear my scarf and hat all day until I’m in my bed and the two thick comforters I’m lying under have trapped enough body heat to keep me warm. And I wait to get in bed until I know for sure I don’t need to do anything else before falling asleep because I know that once I am under my covers, it will take a nuclear attack (or, in a similar vein, my alarm clock waking me up for school the next day) for me to get out. Last Sunday, I hung up my hand-washed clothes on our clothesline to dry. Today, 6 days later, they are still frozen to the line. I thought Mother Nature needed a laugh. And maybe Kəklik, my host mom, too. 

Despite this Georgia girl’s instinct to stay huddled near the heater until it’s warm enough to wear t-shirts outside, I’ve been in the process of establishing a semi-regular schedule. I began writing this post with the intention of describing a normal day for me and found that task to be an incredibly inaccurate portrayal of my life at site so far. Hence, the beginning about the cold weather because that seems to be the only day-to-day constant. During the week, I’ve been spending my days at school co-teaching English classes and conducting conversation clubs after school. My schedule evolved after I finished observations and actually began teaching. Now, I’m working with all 6 English teachers, and I’m teaching two 6^th grade classes, two 7^th grade classes, an 8^th grade class and a 9^th grade class. I have conversation clubs after school 4 days per week: 2 days for teachers and 2 days for students.

On Monday afternoons, I have conversation club for 6^th, 7^th and 8^th grade students. So far, there’s been a huge turnout for this group. I’ve had up to 30 students show up, which is radically different from the 12-14 student classes that I teach during the school day with another English teacher. This group is very enthusiastic and a lot of fun to teach. Because of the language barrier (albeit an ever shrinking language barrier from both sides), I have to demonstrate and charade through most of the activities at least once. We’ve covered topics like numbers, time, family, hobbies and animals. However, their favorite topic so far was learning the ABC song. And no matter how many times I sang the song to the tune as every literate person in America knows it, these students somehow managed to slightly alter the intonation of certain letters and created their own ABC tune. However, I’m learning to choose my battles, and the last battle worth fighting right now would be standing in front of a group of 30 middle schoolers in an attempt to alter their ABC tune. I take what I can get. Following the ABC’s, I did a special lesson on the vowels, which for them, are particularly difficult letters. I wrote “vowels: A E I O U” across the board and taught them each letter to the tune of Who Let the Dogs Out. While pointing at the letter A on the board, I sang “Who let the A out?” And the students responded “a, a, a, a.” Point to letter E, “Who let the E out?” “e, e, e, e”…so on an so forth. Apparently both songs, although pitchy and slightly off beat, were catchy because the next day at school, two of my 6^th graders asked if we could do the ABC songs during our lesson. If you had seen them ask so sweetly, trying so hard to ask in English, you wouldn’t have been able to say no either. My counterpart thinks I’ve lost my mind.

My street to the right. 

My street to the left. 

An activity for my 7th grade class. Thank you, Aunt Judy!

(front). A present for me from one of my students. The top says 'Happy Family!' And from left to right it's Dad, Emily, me and Mom.

(back).