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.

Back To School

School started here last Wednesday, with a ceremony called “First Bell,” where parents and teachers join students in the yard to ring in the new school year. Besides the ceremonial ringing of a bell, there was a parade of new first grade students, welcome speeches from the director and selected students, song and dance performances, and an awful lot of balloons, which sometimes popped at moments terrifying to the new first graders.

Melissa's school:

Sam's School:

Then back to work. For the first two weeks or so, we’re supposed to sit in and observe as many classes and teachers as we can, before choosing the ones with whom we want to work. Melissa’s school has eight English teachers; mine only has four, and the way the schedule works out it looks like I’ll be working with at least three of them, so I don’t have quite the spread of options. My school starts teaching English in the fifth grade, though, as part of the Saakashvili government’s push for English education, they’re supposed to soon start from first grade.

Both of our schools were fairly recently renovated, and so we have some of the nicer facilities in the country (at least outside of the biggest cities). Most of our potential teaching counterparts have been very eager to work with us and involve us in their lessons. As is the case everywhere, some students are really excited and eager to learn, and some are…less so. Classroom management is a bit different here, and I think I’ll be glad to leave the disciplining mostly to my counterpart; the ear-pulling and head-smacking is not exactly my style.

There are advantages and challenges to teaching here. For me, the advantages have been a really excellent director and counterparts, the eager students (especially, in my case, in the younger grades), an extremely friendly and supportive teaching staff, facilities that are overall very nice, and the mystique that comes with being an American. I’m sure this will wear off in a few months, but for now it gets me some attention and respect from the kids that I probably wouldn’t get right off the bat in an American classroom. It’s also nice being in the Armenian school, since I get to hone my own language skills (I catch some of the kids smiling as I scribble down the translations they’re giving).

There are challenges as well. The Georgian government wants us to use new English textbooks, but these books are in Georgian, which neither the teachers nor many of the students know. So we’re using some books from Armenia (pretty good ones, in fact) with the Georgian/English book as a supplement -- a bit confusing for the kids. There’s a lot of emphasis on reading and translating complex texts, and not much chance for the students to practice basic communicative skills. We’re hoping to give them some more opportunities to do so. There is also a tendency to teach to the handful of ‘good’ students and leave the struggling or disinterested ones out. It’s nice that we’ll be working in pairs, so that hopefully we can bring more students into active participation.

There’ll be more to say as we start actively teaching, but for now, we’re happy to be back to work, meeting the students, and making our plans for the year.

Back to school and the world-famous "Sopo"

As you all know, our main job here in Georgia is to teach English to school children in Akhalkalaki. School will begin on Wednesday and we will spend the first two weeks attending various English classes taught by the many English teachers at our two schools. There are 5 schools in Akhalkalaki. The language of instruction at three of the schools is Armenian, Georgian at one and one--the biggest school in town--uses Russian. Sam is teaching at one of the Armenian schools; there are 3 (or maybe 4) English teachers at his school, and about 400 students, grades 1-12. I will be at the Russian school, with about 800 students and 8 English teachers. The goal of the PC Education program is not only for volunteers to teach the kids English, but also to help develop the skills of the English teachers in our communities. In this way, the idea goes, the volunteer's work is more sustainable; even after the PCV returns home after 2 years of service, the community continues to benefit from his being there, since the teacher he worked with speaks better English and knows more about communicative teaching methods that help the students to learn more. That's the hope, anyway.

While we're in the classroom, then, Sam and I will always work with a "counterpart," one of the local teachers. We are supposed to team teach, lesson plan together, collaborate on grading the students and generally work together on all aspects of teaching and the school year. Many PCVs also work with their counterparts on "secondary projects," those projects that are not directly related to the "primary project" (teaching English in the school). Some volunteers have worked with their counterparts to have students participate in after-school English conversation clubs, to work on writing grants to fix up or improve the school's bathroom facilities, to start some sort of athletic club, or on some other project. Counterparts are important to the PCVs not only as guides in the school, but also in the community, introducing us to others, helping us navigate language or cultural barriers, and giving us a nice chance to speak our native language with someone else for a while.

Because counterparts are so critical to the success of us education PCVs, we get the chance to choose which counterpart we want to work with (in some schools in smaller villages or towns, some volunteers only have one counterpart with whom to work; usually this works out ok, though, since that usually means that that counterpart is the one who filled out the application for a volunteer and truly wants them to be there). In order to know who to work with, Sam and I will be observing classes for the first two weeks. We'll get a chance to see what methodologies and strategies and activities the teachers use, the level of the students, which grades are best- (and worst-) behaved. We'll (hopefully) get a feel for which teachers want to work with us and with which teachers we would work best. We will be able to decide which age group we'd like primarily like to work with.

Georgian school students, according to recent reforms by the Georgian Ministry of Education, are supposed to start learning English this year in from the third grade. By 2012, they should all begin studying English from first grade. Previously, during Soviet times and until the very recent past, most school students studied German as their foreign language (their third language, usually, since kids tended to have their native language as their language of instruction and studied Russian each year as well). English is quickly supplanting Russian in Georgia, though, and fewer students are studying Russian as seriously. The decline of Russian in Georgia is especially pronounced in Georgian communities. In minority communities (of Armenians, like in Akhalkalaki, or of Azeris, like in Kelsey's village), Russian still has a stronger foothold. Our town has very strong Russian skills, most likely due almost entirely to the presence of a Russian military base that functioned here until January 2008. With so many native Russian speakers in town, it just made a lot of sense for all of the signs to be written in multiple languages (Russian and Armenian, sometimes with Georgian as well) and it kept up the population at the Russian schools (there used to be two Russian schools in town when the base was open). We've seen from our summer camps that kids still speak Russian, some better than others, but all better than any of the kids in our training village of Kortaneti.

Once school officially starts later this week, we'll share some more stories about how things go.

But before signing off on this post, I have one more fun story to share. I had another brush with "fame" here in Georgia this past week. The woman who authors the English textbook most commonly used in Georgian schools called Peace Corps and asked for 4 volunteers to help record dialogues in English for the CDs that will accompany the newest edition of her books. I was one of the lucky chosen and spent last Monday in Tbilisi in a little blue recording studio, reading the part of "Sopo" for the latest edition of "2000 Plus" for 5th grade students. It was a crazy trip. Some of my memorable lines included telling "Irakli" that he couldn't sign up for wrestling at school because he is too skinny; reciting a recipe for deviled eggs; correcting "Luka's" abysmal geography; and, with all the volunteers, chanting a multiplication table. I'm sure that now, with this new edition, all the kids in Georgia will become better speakers of English. I'll be scouring the bookstores now, trying to grab a copy to show off my new-found fame.

"Tatia," "Luka" and "Irakli" getting into character


The sound technician starting things off


The world-famous (or at least Georgia-famous) Tatiana Bukia, directing the dialogues

One more round of summer camp

It's been a little while since our last blog post, and this is mostly due to the fact that we have been pretty darn busy recently. Being busy again is a very welcome change from where our activity level was when we first got to site (remember Sam's recent post about the number of books we've read since we've been here?), but we are sorry to have let slip our blog-writing duties.

In the past two weeks, we entirely finished up our summer camp duties. We went back to the summer camp we had been working with for two extra days (on top of the 12 we had already worked) to "rehearse" a few English-language songs we had worked on with the kids so they could perform them for the final day of camp's big blowout concert/talent show.

Campers waiting for the talent show to begin


During our previous 12 days of camp we had sung Old MacDonald (they loved choosing animals that don't make recognizable sounds, like foxes and deer) and If You're Happy and You Know It.

Sam, leading a rousing rendition of Old MacDonald


We also played some games with The Beatles' Hello, Goodbye. Another big hit was that we taught them the chorus of the K'naan song Wavin' Flag (we sang the World Cup theme version, which they all knew from watching the World Cup, not the original version, which is much better). Last, but certainly not least, we frequently played/sang Johnny Works with One Hammer. (Sadly, and by tremendous oversight, we did not get a video of this. You say/sing "Johnny works with one hammer, one hammer, one hammer, Johnny works with one hammer, now he works with two" up to 5 hammers. While singing, you pump your fist as if you are working with a hammer. You add your other fist for 2, stomp one foot and then the other for 3 and 4 and then add some head banging for 5. After a few go-throughs, the kids are whiplashed and exhausted, so this is an all-around great activity. I'm sure we'll get a video of it at some point in our 2 years here.)

Sadly, I only have a picture of Johnny Works with One Hammer


We spent two days going over these songs again and they kids chose to perform Old MacDonald and Wavin' Flag at the concert. It was a great success.

After our big summer camp was over, I headed to a different minority community in Georgia, the Azerbaijani village of Kharajalar, where fellow volunteer Kelsey will be spending her next two years. She was running her summer camp and I went to help out for two days. Kelsey was with us in Kortaneti during training; they put all of the volunteers who would be serving in minority areas together because our learning of three languages necessitated a weird language schedule and it made sense for us all to stick together. Kelsey's ingenious idea for keeping her campers occupied was to make them race back and forth in pairs, holding a balloon between their heads (no hands!) and answer English questions when they got to the end. It was fantastic.

Making English learning as amusing as possible for the teacher


Kelsey's village is only about a stone's throw from Tbilisi, so we headed into the capital on the weekend. We also visited some other volunteers in another big city not far from Tbilisi, Rustavi. You might remember some of our pictures of Rustavi from our trip there in June (Soviet blocs of apartments, as far as the eye can see!). The most exciting part of the weekend (or at least the part that came closest to making us all cry for laughing so hard) was when we inadvertently ordered 20 hot dogs. Who knew that asking for 5 hot dogs (one each) would instead yield 20?

I think we're probably all still belching


After returning from Kelsey's camp and the capital 4 hot dogs heavier (and believe me, I felt those 4 hot dogs), Sam and I launched into our final summer camp of the year. We had had requests from many of the older students we'd come across for a chance for them to practice English with us (the town's camp was only for students aged 9-14). We held a 3-day mini-camp last week, Monday through Wednesday, at the town's administration building to comply with these requests. On day one, we talked with the students (about 20 in all, mostly girls). We played a lot of speaking games to encourage them to get over any anxiety or shyness about speaking in front of one another and it went really well. We were really impressed at how well the kids could express themselves in English.

On the second day, we listened to a lot of English-language music (everything from U2 to Outkast, Bob Marley to Bob Dylan, Louis Armstrong to System of a Down). We had the students fill out some worksheets we had created: fill in the blanks with song lyrics, circle the correct song lyrics, match the idiom with the meaning. They did really well with this, too, and really got into it. (On a side note, the Armenian-American band System of a Down is extremely popular here in our Armenian community. We were initially really excited to find a universally loved band, thinking "Great! We can use their songs to teach English!" Then we realized that this is one of their most popular songs here. So much for teaching English...)

The third and final day was movie-watching day, and as we did in Kortaneti, we showed Finding Nemo. Since these kids were older and had a better grasp of English, we asked them to write down words they heard but didn't know, as well as the names of as many characters as they could. When we paused the movie at 15-minute (or so) intervals to discuss what had gone on thus far, we were able to talk about some of the jokes-for-adults and cultural references that were entirely above the level of the younger kids we showed it to previously. They really enjoyed it and, impressively, all sat captivated by it, diligently taking notes and asking questions at each break.

When this camp ended, we had a lot of requests for renewed sessions or get-togethers in the future. We do hope to form a conversation club or after-school English group once we get into the swing of things with the school year, and it was really encouraging to hear so many students requesting it.

So now we are totally done summer camp and gearing up for the start of the school year. The first day of school is September 15, but most teachers are starting to trickle back now, to work on preparing their curricula and figure out what their schedules will be. I went in to my school today and met lots teachers (I'm getting really good at recognizing faces, but am still abysmally bad at remembering names). Sam will go in to his school tomorrow. Then, before we know it, we'll be in the daily grind and teaching classes.

Blessing of the Grapes

We had a few trips in mind for this weekend, but then we learned that Sunday was the grand reopening of the local church, under renovation for the past two years. It was a big deal, and much of the town turned out, so we were glad we stayed. Sunday was also a holy day for the blessing of grapes in the Armenian Orthodox church (connected with the feast of the Assumption of Mary). During the service, grapes are blessed and then handed out to the congregation. A lamb was also sacrificed (although it didn't seem to have been actually killed at the church) and served with lavash.

After the ceremony, the local folklore group performed Armenian dances. We then went with our friend Marianna to an aunt's house for coffee, where we had our futures told in the grounds left in the bottom of the cup. All good things there, and while the dog that our fortune-teller saw was believed to indicate a loyal friend, we're kind of hoping it's an actual dog when we get back (or a mighty Caucasian shepherd dog that becomes our true companion here). An ostrich was also seen in my future, but I forget what that's supposed to mean. Again, kind of hoping for an actual ostrich.

Handing out the grapes

Blessed grapes

Folklore performance

Melissa cut my hair today. She welcomes comments.

Bookshelf

Well, we’ve wrapped up the summer camp, and I think it’s fair to call it a success. Of course no one’s gone from zero to fluent in the space of a few weeks, but the kids really enjoyed our games and activities, learned a few songs in English, have pretty much nailed numbers, colors, and animals, and can at least get through a basic “hello, how are you” kind of conversation. All told we had contact with 250 kids during the course of the camp, got to know the wonderful people involved in organizing and running the camp, and we’ve seen some of our games and activities adopted by the counselors and the kids themselves. Now we’re taking a bit of a break and working to plan a few days of English activities for the older (high school) English students before school starts.

Wednesday we were invited to lunch in Akhaltsikhe with the U.S. Ambassador to Georgia, John Bass, and the U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, Marie Yovanovitch. Both are incredibly smart, energetic, and dedicated, extremely knowledgeable about the countries in which they serve, and very engaged with the projects that the U.S. government is funding and encouraging. Melissa and I have really felt proud, walking around Akhalkalaki and talking with people here, of the work that the U.S. has been doing in this community – building roads, funding scholarships and exchange programs, among other things. These are things that matter to people and make a difference. Both ambassadors were also really interested in the work that we volunteers have been and will be doing, and we had a really good exchange.

While we’ve been a good bit busier this summer than initially feared (beyond the camp, we’ve spent a lot of time visiting people and getting to know the community) we’ve still had plenty of time for reading. Thanks to my dad’s timely gift of a Kindle to each of us, we’ve been able to carry hundred-tome libraries here in the space of a pocket book. Since most everything written prior to 1923 and a number of things written since have entered the public domain, we’ve been able to raid Project Gutenberg and Amazon for free books, which is to say books made for the Peace Corps budget. We purchased a few newer books for the Kindles before we left, and the Peace Corps office has a very nice lending library, so we haven’t been dwelling entirely in the 19th century here.

Anyhow, here’s the list of what we’ve been reading or rereading so far…feel free to make suggestions, especially of those old public domain books:

Melissa

The Lord of the Rings (trilogy), J.R.R. Tolkien
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Mark Haddon
Middlemarch, George Eliot
The Awakening and Selected Stories, Kate Chopin
Dracula, Bram Stoker
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Emma, Jane Austen
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
Currently Reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson

Sam

Aesop’s Fables
Foundation, Isaac Asimov
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin
A Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin
A Storm of Swords, George R.R. Martin
Walden, Henry David Thoreau
The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
The Book of Wonder, Lord Dunsany
Othello, William Shakespeare
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, Edwin Abbott
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. III, Robert Caro
Currently Reading: David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

I’ve also been reading one of the Thousand and One Nights a day, so as not to forget my Arabic (and because they are fantastically great stories – I’m just at the part where Haroun al-Rashid swaps his royal robes for a lice- and flea-ridden fisherman’s shirt so he can go listen to a trespassing pair of musicians without scaring them away – that’s what good music does to you!), and have lately started puzzling through some Dostoevsky in Russian, so as to learn important vocabulary words like “dreamer,” “trance,” and “dusk.”

Hard to believe we’ll go back to school for planning in under two weeks. Until then, we’ll be keeping ourselves busy with our high school camp, Armenian lessons, the grand re-opening of our local church, hopefully a day trip or two, a Peace Corps event in Tbilisi, and Melissa’s voyage to Kharajalara to help Kelsey with her summer camp.

We’re both really excited to start work, and we’ve found a lot that we’d like to do here outside of the schools as well. I’m sure at times it will feel like a slog trying to keep our energy up in the midst of the language barrier and cultural differences, the occasional bout of homesickness, and the workaday routine, but there’s a lot of good work to do, a lot of really great people to do it with, and if we need a break, well, The Lord of the Rings is sitting right there on the Kindle.

Life at Permanent Site and Summer Camp Part Deux

As the summer winds on here in Akhalkalaki and we get some weeks at permanent site under our belts (been here for 3 and a half weeks so far), we've slowly started to piece together a daily routine that is more involved and more social. When we first got here, it was quite a shock to our systems--we had come straight from our 10-week pre-service training (or PST in Peace Corps parlance), where every waking second was planned for us, filled with homework, classes, training, practicum, etc. Once we got to site, we no longer had a set routine, we no longer were surrounded by other volunteers and we had to start from square one with our host families, getting to know them and working through all the issues we had long resolved in our PST host families (like what foods we like to eat and how much is a normal amount for us to eat and why we don't especially like food that is prepared with half a bottle of sunflower oil).

Since it is summer, we won't get started back to school and teaching and a daily routine until mid-September. Until that time, we are supposed to be working to integrate into the community (by getting to know people here) and we should start to look at what the community lacks, and what sorts of secondary projects we could undertake during our service (our primary project, of course, being to teach English in the schools and transfer skills and new methodologies to our English teacher counterparts). We should also find language tutors to continue improving our language skills.

For the first week here, we were extremely proud of ourselves if we had one planned activity outside of the house, be it a meeting with one of the English teachers at our school, with someone from one of the local NGOs (non-governmental organizations) or with someone else from the community. We spent a lot of time just talking with our host family, going for long walks (and morning runs) around town, studying, reading and talking on the phone with other volunteers about how we would possibly find things to fill the time until September. Remember, we were used to being busy from 9am to 6pm, surrounded by other English-speaking volunteers and having homework to keep us busy all the time. In short, it was a fairly difficult transition to make, to come to permanent site in the summer. Even the volunteers in the business and social entrepreneurship program (working with NGOs) have had a rough go of it, many of them finding that, although they go to work each day, that does not necessarily imply that they have things to do (since summer time means that many organization employees are off for trainings or vacation, leaving the office fairly deserted).

More recently, though, things have been starting to pick up for us, the main reason being that we have started holding our summer camp for kids in town. We previously wrote about the 4-day summer camp we hosted in Kortaneti, where we played games with the kids focused on improving their English skills. Each Education volunteer here is supposed to hold a summer camp that is at least 7 days long, for at least 2 hours per day. Sam and I each have to host a camp, and we started asking questions about how we could do this from our first day at site.

As it turns out, our town for the past two years has put on a free camp for all the kids here, ages 9-14. They fund the camp from the town budget, and provide the kids with lunch each day. They take 120-125 kids for 15 days straight to a nice forested area just outside of the city and let them play games and just generally be outside and able to run around. Each morning at 11am, the kids gather outside of the town hall and a bus takes them to the camp, picking them back up again at 4pm. The camp has two shifts, with 125 different kids able to attend for 15 days (so it runs for 30 total days). When we started asking questions about camp, our counterparts and school directors talked with local government officials about just having us join up with the preexisting camp. Sam and I had a nice chat with some folks from the local government and it was decided that we could plan English activities and games for the kids for 12 days, for 2-3 hours each day.

We were anxious about the camp at first; it's a lot of kids and we didn't know what to expect in terms of English levels or interest in playing educational games. Moreover, we were nervous about what the local government employees would think of us. But having a pre-set location and time and setting and guaranteed group of kids was far too good an option to pass on, so we agreed to run our camp in conjunction with the town camp. We sat for a while discussing what kinds of games and lessons we would try to teach and wrote out fairly detailed lesson plans and got all our materials together and crossed our fingers.

Happily, the experience we gained during our training summer camp was extremely helpful in getting us prepared for this summer camp. We've played lots of games, focused on teaching (or refreshing) English. The varying levels of English knowledge among the kids has been a bit of a challenge (we have kids who have not studied any English, as well as kids who have studied for anywhere between 1 and 5 years of English). We try to run activities and play games that require different levels of knowledge, though, which seems to work pretty well. On each day we have a rotating group of between 15 and 30 students, playing games, singing songs and working to speak in English as much as possible.

So far we have had 6 days of camp. Yesterday we got a day off, as Sunday was the last of the first 15 days and the new group of students would need to be put together for the second set of campers. We'll get a chance today to see how this second group pans out--although the first round of camp taught us a lot of lessons about properly planning for camp (seems to be a good idea to start each day with some big, loud, running type of game to draw kids in for the quieter, more focused speaking exercises, which should then be broken up by another running, crazy activity, and so on).

We'll finish this round of summer camp on Sunday, August 8 and have almost finished the summer camp requirements at that point (having done 12 total days of camp, each of us responsible for and "in charge" of 6 of those days). As we began planning with the town officials for camp, though, two of them mentioned having teenage kids who were too old for the camp but would still love to have the chance to meet with us and practice their English and couldn't we do something for these high school students too? Not wanting to bite the hand that feeds us, we decided to just do 12 days of camp with these younger kids and agreed to do a shorter (2-4 days) "camp" with some of the older students afterward. That's our plan for now, as long as we make it through the next six days of camp!