More thoughts on the school year

By this point, Sam and I have managed to see most of the English classes taught at our schools (not as easy a task as we first imagined; my school has 33 separate classes of English, each which meet 3 times a week, but many of these are held during the same class period). We have a short week at school this week because of some Peace Corps meetings we'll be attending on Thursday and Friday, but Sam is starting to team teach tomorrow and I'll start next week.

As our PC assignment, we're supposed to teach in the schools for at least 15 hours each week, although we are allowed to teach up to 20 or more hours per week. We are supposed to teach with a counterpart, a permanent English teacher in the school and cooperate in the classroom and in planning the lessons. Many volunteers have one counterpart that they work with exclusively. Neither Sam nor I can realistically work with only one teacher, however, since most of the English teachers (and most teachers here, it seems) don't teach 15 hours per week. Teachers' hours vary drastically, some teaching 5 or 6 hours per week, others teaching upwards of 20 (working 18 hours per week seems to be considered a full load). In a school meeting held near at the start of the year, my school director announced that my school has nearly 800 students and just over 100 teachers. We certainly do not have anything near an 8:1 student-teacher ratio (most classes have about 25 students).

With these shorter teaching hours, and thus lower pay, many teachers hold private lessons with students to supplement their incomes. It seems like students take private lessons in many subjects, but that languages tend to be the most popular private courses. The Georgian Ministry of Education attempted to push through a reform this summer that was aimed at cutting down on the number and necessity of private lessons by requiring that teachers work at least 18 hours per week in the schools or be fired. The reform fell through after a huge outcry about it; if it had been enacted the huge underemployment problem faced by the majority of teachers would have become a large unemployment problem in many towns, so for now teachers can teach the lower number of hours and still have time to teach private lessons on the side.

Students' schedules here differ pretty drastically from what I remember from my public school days, too. There seem to be more topics taught to each grade and all students in a given grade will have the same schedule (an 11th-grade class at my school, for example, might have biology, math, physics, chemistry, literature, Georgian, English, Armenian, geography, history and gym and maybe a few other topics that I'm forgetting; they would go to 7-8 classes per day and have a varying number of hours of each class per week). Classes are run in a different way, too. Students are assigned to a "class," a group of 24 or so other students, from the start of school (or sometimes from the 5th grade) and they will stay with this group of kids throughout their primary and secondary education. Teachers sometimes also stay with their "classes" and travel with the kids through the grades (so an English teacher that teaches English to a given 7th-grade class one year will teach that same group of students when they're in the 8th grade and 9th grade and so on, until they graduate).

There are a number of things that schools here in Akhalkalaki don't have that American schools do. First is electives and individual scheduling. All students in each grade take exactly the same classes. There aren't different levels within a topic (so no splits for, say, students who could do advanced calculus and those who would do better in remedial algebra). In our English classes this has been one of the biggest challenges. In the upper grades, there are a handful of students who can speak in correct sentences and paragraphs, but many students (if not the bulk) have a difficult time answering questions like "What is your name?" or "How old are you?". Also, any kind of elective-type class we might have had isn't offered at the school. If you want to study music or art or dance or a foreign language outside of the required 4 at my school (that is, Russian, English, Armenian and Georgian), you have to go to a separate school or find private lessons. Second big difference is a lack a lunch break or cafeteria. Our schools have small so-called cafeterias, where students can buy a roll or a sandwich or sometimes some candy or juice, but there isn't an option (nor is there time) for them to buy a lunch. Next, the schedule for students varies day-to-day (at least at my school) and students could begin at 9:00am and go until 1:30pm on Monday, then start at 9:40am the next day or end at 2:15pm or basically just have a different number of classes (and thus hours in school) depending on the day. Another big difference has to do with textbooks. Some of the books at my school are distributed to the students from the school, but for many of the classes, students must purchase their own books. This has meant that, in many English classes at least, the majority of students continue to not have the textbook into the second full week of school.

There are a number of additional differences between the daily life in school here and in America, and I'm sure we'll continue writing about these differences as we see them. All in all, though, we're excited to be back to school and to get started into team teaching.