My attempts at teaching English have been, ah, somewhat hit-and-miss over the past six months. The main excuses I have given (where directly blaming other people couldn't be got away with) has been a lack of training and of suitable teaching materials to hand. I've spent too many hours trawling the web through well-meant but practically useless free ESL sites, and probably-not-quite-as-many hours devising lesson plans of my own invention which 90% of the time have proven to utterly fail to engage students in any degree. When I've asked other ESL teachers for advice I've mostly been recommended to "unlock my inner teacher within" as it were - ie, do whatever I think best.
Although I was aware of the BBC World Service web pages devoted to teaching English, I had failed to notice the downloadable lesson plans, of which dozens are available on line and many seem to be of excellent quality. Likewise, I missed the link to the British Council's Teaching English site, which has even more lesson plans (aimed more at school-age children), and a number of very useful books in PDF all completely free to download. There are also a wide range of articles for the edification of teachers, and both sites make good use of downloadable audio to be used in conjunction with classes, if desired.
Both these sites are extremely well-designed, and I suspect that they contain material as good as if not better than the many pay-for-access ESL resource sites. And if you please you can still go back to one of the open forum "Hey, here's a totally awesome idea for class!!! It REALLY works!!" sites for a handy back-up when in need of a change of pace, ie: a totally awesome variant on Hangman or Eye Spy. (OK, a lot of the ideas posted on sites such as Dave's ESL Cafe are very good indeed, but you do have to read through an awful lot of half-brained stuff before you find anything worth embarassing yourself in front of a room full of bored students for.)
The one actual, physical text-book I have, which I got my mother to order me from Amazon, is "Rediscover Grammar" by David Crystal. Concise and conveniently pocket-sized, it says on the back that it "remains the ideal guide and reference for teachers and students" - and so it is. I don't teach from it, I just occassionally use it to avoid embarassment by discreetly dipping in to check exactly what a preposition is.
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Tuesday, 19 June 2007
Wednesday, 13 June 2007
Grain Spirit
Wednesday 13th June - only 2 days to go to get hot water!
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I find that in spite of the longer hours, I am so far enjoying working at a vodka factory. I've had a tour of the plant, of course, and for my second day I was required to pose for news cameras drinking our premium product at an expo in the city. I also felt duty-bound to test our competitors' products at the same time, to confirm that we really do make the best.
Of course the regular workplace is an excessively sober environment, in spite of the presence of dozens of bottles of product in every office. My teaching schedule is pretty full - teaching two departments each day and then holding a conversation class each evening. In-between I have to prepare hand-outs etc, which is at least forty times easier than at school as here I'm supplied with both a computer and a printer that actually work, which I find makes a considerable difference towards getting things done.
It's an interesting time in the vodka trade in Mongolia, as the big companies are all on the point of breaking into the international market. I think that the potential for export sales to exceed the considerable domestic sales is certainly there, there surely being a certain cachet to Mongolian vodka. My own company, and a number of the competitors, are producing some real high-end stuff: to my surprise all made with 100% Mongolian organic wheat grain - I wasn't aware that wheat was grown on such a scale in this country, but it's one of the proud boasts of the industry.
One of the biggest problems for companies here is simply getting the product out of the country, as the only route is the not-always-reliable Trans-Mongolian railway - particularly complications arising over the degree of cooperation between the Chinese, Mongolian and Russian monopolies operating each section of the route. There's been considerable wrangling reported in the press this past six months between Russia and Mongolia over responsibility for a series of derailings near the border. As Mongolia's leading businesses start to get involved in a larger volume of international trade, these problems are likely to become acute, without considerable investment in the infrastructure of the only one viable route for freight to get in and out of the country.
Of course, the size of the vodka industry in Mongolia can certainly be seen from the negative side and the extent of alcoholism in the country. I'm told that the trend in the nation is slowly away from vodka drinking towards beer, which is maybe one incentive for companies to look abroad for sales. I'm also told that after copper mining, tax on the spirit industry represents the largest contribution to the state coppers - so for all the damage done by alcoholism in the country, I'm assuming that the new road that's been laid over the dirt track behind my apartment and the promised pay rise for teachers would not have happened without it.
My employers are very keen in sponsoring a number of worthy social initiatives in the country to promote a better image of what they do, and can at least justify themselves against the cheapest spirits on the market - those naturally favoured by the more committed drunks - in that they are producing a clean, quality product. Of course, once they get a good foothold selling as a luxury item abroad, then the significance of the domestic market to their profits will diminish: so you can do your bit towards securing the future of this great nation by rushing out and buying a bottle of Mongolian fire-water today. I would try and discreetly point you in the direction of the vodka made by my employers, by recommending that you buy the bottle with a picture of Genghis on the label, but unfortunately that distinction applies to every one of our competitors brands too.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I find that in spite of the longer hours, I am so far enjoying working at a vodka factory. I've had a tour of the plant, of course, and for my second day I was required to pose for news cameras drinking our premium product at an expo in the city. I also felt duty-bound to test our competitors' products at the same time, to confirm that we really do make the best.
Of course the regular workplace is an excessively sober environment, in spite of the presence of dozens of bottles of product in every office. My teaching schedule is pretty full - teaching two departments each day and then holding a conversation class each evening. In-between I have to prepare hand-outs etc, which is at least forty times easier than at school as here I'm supplied with both a computer and a printer that actually work, which I find makes a considerable difference towards getting things done.
It's an interesting time in the vodka trade in Mongolia, as the big companies are all on the point of breaking into the international market. I think that the potential for export sales to exceed the considerable domestic sales is certainly there, there surely being a certain cachet to Mongolian vodka. My own company, and a number of the competitors, are producing some real high-end stuff: to my surprise all made with 100% Mongolian organic wheat grain - I wasn't aware that wheat was grown on such a scale in this country, but it's one of the proud boasts of the industry.
One of the biggest problems for companies here is simply getting the product out of the country, as the only route is the not-always-reliable Trans-Mongolian railway - particularly complications arising over the degree of cooperation between the Chinese, Mongolian and Russian monopolies operating each section of the route. There's been considerable wrangling reported in the press this past six months between Russia and Mongolia over responsibility for a series of derailings near the border. As Mongolia's leading businesses start to get involved in a larger volume of international trade, these problems are likely to become acute, without considerable investment in the infrastructure of the only one viable route for freight to get in and out of the country.
Of course, the size of the vodka industry in Mongolia can certainly be seen from the negative side and the extent of alcoholism in the country. I'm told that the trend in the nation is slowly away from vodka drinking towards beer, which is maybe one incentive for companies to look abroad for sales. I'm also told that after copper mining, tax on the spirit industry represents the largest contribution to the state coppers - so for all the damage done by alcoholism in the country, I'm assuming that the new road that's been laid over the dirt track behind my apartment and the promised pay rise for teachers would not have happened without it.
My employers are very keen in sponsoring a number of worthy social initiatives in the country to promote a better image of what they do, and can at least justify themselves against the cheapest spirits on the market - those naturally favoured by the more committed drunks - in that they are producing a clean, quality product. Of course, once they get a good foothold selling as a luxury item abroad, then the significance of the domestic market to their profits will diminish: so you can do your bit towards securing the future of this great nation by rushing out and buying a bottle of Mongolian fire-water today. I would try and discreetly point you in the direction of the vodka made by my employers, by recommending that you buy the bottle with a picture of Genghis on the label, but unfortunately that distinction applies to every one of our competitors brands too.
Thursday, 7 June 2007
Summer Teaching, Sore Thumbs
Thursday 7th June 2007
Extremely good news is reported in today's UB Post for Mongolia's hard-working primary and secondary school teachers: the state is set to increase their salaries to in the region of $300 a month. This is a considerable raise - at present teachers in state schools are earning $60 - $100 a month - even in private schools the salary is only $200. The article was a little bit vague about when this increase will take place, however, as there seems to be an indication that the aim is for teachers to be earning $350 by 2015... so I'm unsure just yet whether the news will be any cause for celebration.
Mongolia's brief Spring seems to be over, and a hot and sweaty summer firmly established - although I'm told it may yet snow again, as it did overnight a week ago. For now the heat is here - to happily coincide with my district of the city having no hot water for the past three days and, I'm told, none until the 15th June. Bracing cold showers are now the order of the day.
There having been a short period of doubt since the school term ended, I've now had my summer job confirmed: I'll be working for three months tutoring the management team at a vodka distillery - perhaps it's an environment that I'll find myself better suited to. The plan is to give a structured lesson each day and then follow the lesson up with conversation with my students. I'll assess each student's ability and come up with an achievement plan for each and, god willing, we'll work together until September on improving their English, hopefully to everyone's satisfaction. There have been hints that the job may get me out and about in the countryside occasionally, but for the most part I'll be office-based.
Other than any opportunities that work throws up, this does now mean that I'm highly unlikely to see much more of the country for the remainder of my stay - as it is my firm plan to head straight back to Blighty once my contract is up in order to get over to Ireland in time for this year's Johnny Keenan Banjo Festival. Oh, and of course to see family and friends and stuff. For the present, in as much as I am planning for the future, I'm thinking that if I spend a year back in England working I'll be able to come back to Mongolia with some money in my pocket, and that then I'll have the luxury of not needing a salary, and be able to do as I please. I'd like 2009's sequel to this blog to be a year in a ger, far away from the smog, general chaos and satisfying variety of restaurants and bootleg dvds of the metropolis. It is entirely possible that my childhood ambition of becoming either a lighthouse-keeper or an astronaut may intervene, but I'm advised that it is a good thing to have goals.
Be assured that if work does give me the opportunities I will get myself out into rural Mongolia. I recently met a University professor of traditional medicine who I'm helping with a translation of a paper he's written on the early influences of Indian medicine in Mongolia. A very interesting man, he has kindly offered to let me join him on one of his trips to the countryside when I am free to go.
I did get back to Manzushir on Saturday, with a group of friends. It turns out that there's a bus to Zunmod for just under $1 each way, although this time we were getting a lift in a hybrid camper truck that had started its life in Ireland. There must be an increasing flow of traffic from Western Europe braving the journey here: at the hotel outside my apartment there are two 'Rotels' parked up today - converted HGVs fitted with every convenience - that appear to have made their way here from Germany.
We stayed at a new ger camp tucked away in a small valley at the edge of the park, and a very pleasant evening was had by all. I think that the ger cost around $30 for the night, which price included unlimited wood. The wood was needed as it was a cold night - it snowed some time around 2am. Worryingly, the chimney of our stove was propped up by a piece of wood and did not look remotely sturdy. After catching the chimney as it toppled out of place early in the evening we alerted staff at the camp, who made a makeshift repair. Later in the evening the chimney fell down again, narrowly missing braining and branding one of our party, and filling the ger with thick smoke. We got out into the very fresh air and this time staff replaced the stove with one that wasn't falling to pieces.
Out in the streets the bars now have their tables and sun shades out. Dave's Place now commands a respectable corner of the Culture Palace's tall-columned terrace - where along with the English conversation club host Dave and a very talented travelling Irish trad musician Sarah, I played a few tunes last night to a very generous audience. I'm hoping to make it a regular Wednesday night thing for the summer, at least until somebody objects forcibly enough. We'll be playing a mix of bluegrass and sing-along rock favourites by request. I've really not been playing much since things stopped at Mealody, so it's good to get back into it. I seem to have lost all my thumb-picks, however, so if anyone happens to be heading out to Mongolia this summer, please consider bringing me a few, as a desperately needed act of charity. Golden Gates by preference - large size, medium gauge.
Extremely good news is reported in today's UB Post for Mongolia's hard-working primary and secondary school teachers: the state is set to increase their salaries to in the region of $300 a month. This is a considerable raise - at present teachers in state schools are earning $60 - $100 a month - even in private schools the salary is only $200. The article was a little bit vague about when this increase will take place, however, as there seems to be an indication that the aim is for teachers to be earning $350 by 2015... so I'm unsure just yet whether the news will be any cause for celebration.
Mongolia's brief Spring seems to be over, and a hot and sweaty summer firmly established - although I'm told it may yet snow again, as it did overnight a week ago. For now the heat is here - to happily coincide with my district of the city having no hot water for the past three days and, I'm told, none until the 15th June. Bracing cold showers are now the order of the day.
There having been a short period of doubt since the school term ended, I've now had my summer job confirmed: I'll be working for three months tutoring the management team at a vodka distillery - perhaps it's an environment that I'll find myself better suited to. The plan is to give a structured lesson each day and then follow the lesson up with conversation with my students. I'll assess each student's ability and come up with an achievement plan for each and, god willing, we'll work together until September on improving their English, hopefully to everyone's satisfaction. There have been hints that the job may get me out and about in the countryside occasionally, but for the most part I'll be office-based.
Other than any opportunities that work throws up, this does now mean that I'm highly unlikely to see much more of the country for the remainder of my stay - as it is my firm plan to head straight back to Blighty once my contract is up in order to get over to Ireland in time for this year's Johnny Keenan Banjo Festival. Oh, and of course to see family and friends and stuff. For the present, in as much as I am planning for the future, I'm thinking that if I spend a year back in England working I'll be able to come back to Mongolia with some money in my pocket, and that then I'll have the luxury of not needing a salary, and be able to do as I please. I'd like 2009's sequel to this blog to be a year in a ger, far away from the smog, general chaos and satisfying variety of restaurants and bootleg dvds of the metropolis. It is entirely possible that my childhood ambition of becoming either a lighthouse-keeper or an astronaut may intervene, but I'm advised that it is a good thing to have goals.
Be assured that if work does give me the opportunities I will get myself out into rural Mongolia. I recently met a University professor of traditional medicine who I'm helping with a translation of a paper he's written on the early influences of Indian medicine in Mongolia. A very interesting man, he has kindly offered to let me join him on one of his trips to the countryside when I am free to go.
I did get back to Manzushir on Saturday, with a group of friends. It turns out that there's a bus to Zunmod for just under $1 each way, although this time we were getting a lift in a hybrid camper truck that had started its life in Ireland. There must be an increasing flow of traffic from Western Europe braving the journey here: at the hotel outside my apartment there are two 'Rotels' parked up today - converted HGVs fitted with every convenience - that appear to have made their way here from Germany.
We stayed at a new ger camp tucked away in a small valley at the edge of the park, and a very pleasant evening was had by all. I think that the ger cost around $30 for the night, which price included unlimited wood. The wood was needed as it was a cold night - it snowed some time around 2am. Worryingly, the chimney of our stove was propped up by a piece of wood and did not look remotely sturdy. After catching the chimney as it toppled out of place early in the evening we alerted staff at the camp, who made a makeshift repair. Later in the evening the chimney fell down again, narrowly missing braining and branding one of our party, and filling the ger with thick smoke. We got out into the very fresh air and this time staff replaced the stove with one that wasn't falling to pieces.
Out in the streets the bars now have their tables and sun shades out. Dave's Place now commands a respectable corner of the Culture Palace's tall-columned terrace - where along with the English conversation club host Dave and a very talented travelling Irish trad musician Sarah, I played a few tunes last night to a very generous audience. I'm hoping to make it a regular Wednesday night thing for the summer, at least until somebody objects forcibly enough. We'll be playing a mix of bluegrass and sing-along rock favourites by request. I've really not been playing much since things stopped at Mealody, so it's good to get back into it. I seem to have lost all my thumb-picks, however, so if anyone happens to be heading out to Mongolia this summer, please consider bringing me a few, as a desperately needed act of charity. Golden Gates by preference - large size, medium gauge.
Friday, 1 June 2007
Happy Alcohol-Free Children's Day
Today is International Children's Day, one of the big celebrations on the Mongolian Calendar. It happily coincides with the formal end of school for the summer, although as I have remarked in the case of my own school, all practical teaching ended about a month ago. As with Women's Day and Teacher's Day, the observation of International Children's Day seems to be one of the happier legacies of the country's socialist past. Preparations at Sukhbaatar Square began on Wednesday night - a giant marquee was erected and, in pouring rain, cables bearing what must have been many thousands of balloons were hoisted around the not-inconsiderable length of the square's perimeter. In one corner of the square a display of different styles of ger and teepee (which is traditional amongst the Tsaatan (Reindeer) people of Northern Mongolia) has been assembled. Walking home across the square after a sunny day Thursday, I noted that every single balloon had already burst.
Exactly what celebrations will take place on the Square today I have no idea. All over the city, however, shops and businesses are closed, so that families can spend time together. My local Nomin hypermarket was open, however I found myself a little less inclined to be good natured towards the younger component of humanity on discovering that no alcohol was to be sold today. No alcohol! Putting my own unwilling sacrifice aside, it is, if you'll forgive me, a sobering reflection on the extent of alcoholism that a great number of children in this country, and indeed everywhere else, have to live with. A few weeks ago I saw a twelve year old girl at a shop buying a loaf of bread and a bottle of vodka. I didn't have the impression that the vodka was to be drunk at a bus stop with her friends - not having yet seen any indication of child-alcoholism here as is found in Liverpool and the UK - but rather that she was running an errand for her parents. A lot of the children who beg on the streets here - and their numbers are escalating with the beginning of the tourist season - must surely be runaways and orphans, but one guesses that a significant proportion are begging on behalf of their families, and that some of the money they get will be buying vodka for their parents. I've only actually been approached on maybe three occasions by adults asking for money, whereas pretty much every time I walk down Peace Avenue at least one child will see me and run up calling "Money, money, money."
An article by Madelene Beresford in this week's UB Post quotes official statistics saying that 35% of Mongolia's 5 to 14 year-olds (60,000 children) currently work. There are many cases where owing to sickness or alcoholism, the children are the only people working in a family. A further piece in the same paper tells the story of a woman and her children recently catapulted to fame after being randomly invited to participate in the reality show called "Lets stay overnight at your house." Their plight, which is surely typical of many other women and children in the country, has touched a chord nationally, and fortunately help for the family has poured in. Briefly, the woman had taken her two children and left the husband who had beaten her and indeed brought another woman into the house. Suffering from a damaged liver, quite possibly as a result of her spouse's ill-treatment of her, she struggled on with her life, getting by on 29,000Tugrik a month (approx $26) state benefits, having to spend 20,000T of that to rent a ger.
Anecdotally, I've heard too many stories here of people struggling against the odds after having been abandoned by an alcoholic husband or father. Family ties are strong in Mongolia, surely much stronger than in the West - but it seems that where those ties are broken, people are left acutely in need. I've heard some speculation on the root causes of men abandoning their families - some tending to blame socialism, and a tendency to turn over responsibility to the state, others see it as a problem arising from the selfishness of a consumer-capitalist society. Whatever the causes, hopefully the plight of Tungalag and her two young children will, having brought more attention to this common problem, generate some agreement and will to change the circumstances for the people who are getting left behind.
In other news, I'm still hoping to get away to the countryside this weekend. Unfortunately I can't make my big trip to stay with a nomadic family and milk horses because my boss at the school, quite possibly out of spite, has insisted that I can't have Monday off and must attend a meeting about the next school year (at which I have not been asked to teach) - for which I'll be asked to make recommendations about the syllabus in order for them to be shot-down and or ignored. I wrote a 5,000 word report with such revolutionary recommendations as 1) for teachers not to actively encourage, indeed to actually discourage students from open plagiarism and cheating; 2) for foreign teachers to be supplied with teaching material. I haven't bothered to suggest that a tiny degree of support from management and colleagues wouldn't go amiss, as I didn't want to make my report a mere record of grievances. I have a blog for that.
Exactly what celebrations will take place on the Square today I have no idea. All over the city, however, shops and businesses are closed, so that families can spend time together. My local Nomin hypermarket was open, however I found myself a little less inclined to be good natured towards the younger component of humanity on discovering that no alcohol was to be sold today. No alcohol! Putting my own unwilling sacrifice aside, it is, if you'll forgive me, a sobering reflection on the extent of alcoholism that a great number of children in this country, and indeed everywhere else, have to live with. A few weeks ago I saw a twelve year old girl at a shop buying a loaf of bread and a bottle of vodka. I didn't have the impression that the vodka was to be drunk at a bus stop with her friends - not having yet seen any indication of child-alcoholism here as is found in Liverpool and the UK - but rather that she was running an errand for her parents. A lot of the children who beg on the streets here - and their numbers are escalating with the beginning of the tourist season - must surely be runaways and orphans, but one guesses that a significant proportion are begging on behalf of their families, and that some of the money they get will be buying vodka for their parents. I've only actually been approached on maybe three occasions by adults asking for money, whereas pretty much every time I walk down Peace Avenue at least one child will see me and run up calling "Money, money, money."
An article by Madelene Beresford in this week's UB Post quotes official statistics saying that 35% of Mongolia's 5 to 14 year-olds (60,000 children) currently work. There are many cases where owing to sickness or alcoholism, the children are the only people working in a family. A further piece in the same paper tells the story of a woman and her children recently catapulted to fame after being randomly invited to participate in the reality show called "Lets stay overnight at your house." Their plight, which is surely typical of many other women and children in the country, has touched a chord nationally, and fortunately help for the family has poured in. Briefly, the woman had taken her two children and left the husband who had beaten her and indeed brought another woman into the house. Suffering from a damaged liver, quite possibly as a result of her spouse's ill-treatment of her, she struggled on with her life, getting by on 29,000Tugrik a month (approx $26) state benefits, having to spend 20,000T of that to rent a ger.
Anecdotally, I've heard too many stories here of people struggling against the odds after having been abandoned by an alcoholic husband or father. Family ties are strong in Mongolia, surely much stronger than in the West - but it seems that where those ties are broken, people are left acutely in need. I've heard some speculation on the root causes of men abandoning their families - some tending to blame socialism, and a tendency to turn over responsibility to the state, others see it as a problem arising from the selfishness of a consumer-capitalist society. Whatever the causes, hopefully the plight of Tungalag and her two young children will, having brought more attention to this common problem, generate some agreement and will to change the circumstances for the people who are getting left behind.
In other news, I'm still hoping to get away to the countryside this weekend. Unfortunately I can't make my big trip to stay with a nomadic family and milk horses because my boss at the school, quite possibly out of spite, has insisted that I can't have Monday off and must attend a meeting about the next school year (at which I have not been asked to teach) - for which I'll be asked to make recommendations about the syllabus in order for them to be shot-down and or ignored. I wrote a 5,000 word report with such revolutionary recommendations as 1) for teachers not to actively encourage, indeed to actually discourage students from open plagiarism and cheating; 2) for foreign teachers to be supplied with teaching material. I haven't bothered to suggest that a tiny degree of support from management and colleagues wouldn't go amiss, as I didn't want to make my report a mere record of grievances. I have a blog for that.
Monday, 21 May 2007
Dust Pneumony, Man's Best Friend is a Fish, Knock-off DVDs,
I wrote most of this entry last Thursday and started
A beautiful spring day. We had a few days rain a week or so ago and now everywhere is green. It's quite a transformation, as the city has many tree-lined avenues. Wandering around before sunset last night I was quite stunned, realizing that more than having simple affection for the place, Ulaanbaatar can actually be, well, beautiful. If you're considering an impulsive jaunt to Mongolia then don't hesitate, get over here immediately.
Every word of it true, of course, however, that afternoon the sky turned an ominous muddy brown. Now, we've had plenty of windy days here where the dust in the street gets caught up in gusts and stings your eyes, but that Thursday's dust had clearly arrived from elsewhere, and with purpose. My cleaner warned me to batten down the hatches. By oversight I left the bedroom window open, and after a few hours a thick layer of black grime had gathered on the sill and much had blown out across the bed. The wind howled in the elevator shaft.
This weekend I have been down with a crippling flu, which I am fairly certain was brought on by the dust. A lot of other people I know have been ill, some think from food poisoning or a summer cold, but I am certain that it's the black dust. The first night I had difficulty breathing, the next two days I could barely move from fever, and I've had a pounding headache to today. The dust pneumony has threatened to break my proud record of only having taken one day off sick in my whole working life. (That day was when working in Holland - I had a cold which left me physically unable to cycle the six miles into a headwind to work. It was November and I was living in a tent in an unheated cow shed.) I managed to struggle in to school this morning, for the first of my last two days, to mark more exam essay questions. This did at least cheer me up. The 7th Grade question was 'My favourite pet animal'. About 70% of the students had memorised or were copying the exact same essay about owning a dog. The really clever students had cunningly substituted the word 'dog' for some other animal. So there were countless cats as "man's best friend", needing to be taken for daily walks, the same applying to rabbits, both of which "repay the kindness of their owner with loyalty and devotion". My favourite essay, however, was about a fish, which amongst other things "can be trained to do useful tricks, like collecting the morning newspaper."
The tourist season has begun, but I think that the number of travellers is still pretty low. I see a lot more westerners about, but so far I think that's mostly warm weather bringing the expats out. There is a fairly failsafe way of spotting an expat - 99% (myself included) can be spotted by our dress. Not traditional deel or leather caps, but knock-off 'North Face' gear from China.
Speaking of knock-off merchandise from China, and spring being the perfect time to sit indoors with the curtains closed, the 'Happy Shop' is still keeping stocked with the latest DVD releases from the US and Europe - usually with a good quality picture and costing just under $2 a movie. This week I bought The Last Confederate, which I believe isn't due to be released for a while yet, Frank Miller's 300, Flags of Our Fathers, Kill Bill (vols 1 and 2), The Last Samurai, Hot Fuzz, Seraphim Fallsand, er, the new Ninja Turtles cartoon and Mr Bean's Holiday (honestly, I bought it for Mongolian friends - having discovered that Mr Bean is enormously popular over here. In a popular culture quiz, just about every single student I have taught has correctly identified Rowan Atkinson as the actor responsible - probably making him the most famous living Englishman after James Blunt). Being housebound has given me plenty of time to catch up on my viewing, when the headaches have allowed it.
Seraphim Falls, the new western starring Liam Neeson and Pierce Brosnan (or Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson according to the credits on the back of the dvd sleeve, which appear to be for "Batman"), is a pretty interesting movie: cinema-goers get two films for the price of one. One is a gritty and engaging struggle for survival, the other a mysterious and allegorical something-or-other. I prefer the former. Both, however, are representative of some of the more interesting westerns of the '70s, when the genre - post-Wild Bunch, post-Leone, post-Vietnam and Watergate - lost its way. Just how far the western lost its way is indicated by the fact that Dances With Wolves was considered to be the genre's return. The finish of Seraphim Falls seems thoughtful and well-meant, but is on the whole pretty lame. Still, the first half-hour or so might be one of the best man-hunt sequences on film. A shivering Pierce Brosnan struggle to light a fire or die after escaping pursuit by falling into an icy river, will prompt you to think "This film can't get any better." Unfortunately, it doesn't.
A beautiful spring day. We had a few days rain a week or so ago and now everywhere is green. It's quite a transformation, as the city has many tree-lined avenues. Wandering around before sunset last night I was quite stunned, realizing that more than having simple affection for the place, Ulaanbaatar can actually be, well, beautiful. If you're considering an impulsive jaunt to Mongolia then don't hesitate, get over here immediately.
Every word of it true, of course, however, that afternoon the sky turned an ominous muddy brown. Now, we've had plenty of windy days here where the dust in the street gets caught up in gusts and stings your eyes, but that Thursday's dust had clearly arrived from elsewhere, and with purpose. My cleaner warned me to batten down the hatches. By oversight I left the bedroom window open, and after a few hours a thick layer of black grime had gathered on the sill and much had blown out across the bed. The wind howled in the elevator shaft.
This weekend I have been down with a crippling flu, which I am fairly certain was brought on by the dust. A lot of other people I know have been ill, some think from food poisoning or a summer cold, but I am certain that it's the black dust. The first night I had difficulty breathing, the next two days I could barely move from fever, and I've had a pounding headache to today. The dust pneumony has threatened to break my proud record of only having taken one day off sick in my whole working life. (That day was when working in Holland - I had a cold which left me physically unable to cycle the six miles into a headwind to work. It was November and I was living in a tent in an unheated cow shed.) I managed to struggle in to school this morning, for the first of my last two days, to mark more exam essay questions. This did at least cheer me up. The 7th Grade question was 'My favourite pet animal'. About 70% of the students had memorised or were copying the exact same essay about owning a dog. The really clever students had cunningly substituted the word 'dog' for some other animal. So there were countless cats as "man's best friend", needing to be taken for daily walks, the same applying to rabbits, both of which "repay the kindness of their owner with loyalty and devotion". My favourite essay, however, was about a fish, which amongst other things "can be trained to do useful tricks, like collecting the morning newspaper."
The tourist season has begun, but I think that the number of travellers is still pretty low. I see a lot more westerners about, but so far I think that's mostly warm weather bringing the expats out. There is a fairly failsafe way of spotting an expat - 99% (myself included) can be spotted by our dress. Not traditional deel or leather caps, but knock-off 'North Face' gear from China.
Speaking of knock-off merchandise from China, and spring being the perfect time to sit indoors with the curtains closed, the 'Happy Shop' is still keeping stocked with the latest DVD releases from the US and Europe - usually with a good quality picture and costing just under $2 a movie. This week I bought The Last Confederate, which I believe isn't due to be released for a while yet, Frank Miller's 300, Flags of Our Fathers, Kill Bill (vols 1 and 2), The Last Samurai, Hot Fuzz, Seraphim Fallsand, er, the new Ninja Turtles cartoon and Mr Bean's Holiday (honestly, I bought it for Mongolian friends - having discovered that Mr Bean is enormously popular over here. In a popular culture quiz, just about every single student I have taught has correctly identified Rowan Atkinson as the actor responsible - probably making him the most famous living Englishman after James Blunt). Being housebound has given me plenty of time to catch up on my viewing, when the headaches have allowed it.
Seraphim Falls, the new western starring Liam Neeson and Pierce Brosnan (or Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson according to the credits on the back of the dvd sleeve, which appear to be for "Batman"), is a pretty interesting movie: cinema-goers get two films for the price of one. One is a gritty and engaging struggle for survival, the other a mysterious and allegorical something-or-other. I prefer the former. Both, however, are representative of some of the more interesting westerns of the '70s, when the genre - post-Wild Bunch, post-Leone, post-Vietnam and Watergate - lost its way. Just how far the western lost its way is indicated by the fact that Dances With Wolves was considered to be the genre's return. The finish of Seraphim Falls seems thoughtful and well-meant, but is on the whole pretty lame. Still, the first half-hour or so might be one of the best man-hunt sequences on film. A shivering Pierce Brosnan struggle to light a fire or die after escaping pursuit by falling into an icy river, will prompt you to think "This film can't get any better." Unfortunately, it doesn't.
Friday, 18 May 2007
School is Over, Some Lessons Learned
The school term is suddenly over - a little sooner than I expected, having again failed to realise that it wouldn't occur to anyone to keep me informed about a little thing like my job being finished. To be fair, I've had a summer tutoring job offered to me and so discovering that I now have two weeks holiday is a very pleasant surprise. There'll be a few exams for me to invigilate and mark next week, but no more classes, the Wednesday just gone being my last.
I'll certainly miss teaching the little blighters. All told, I have to admit that I found teaching the 4th grade a lot easier than teaching the 9th, 10th and 11th. I also have to say that I've not had any indication from the school that they're particularly happy with the work I've done - although they have found me a very nice job to move on to. I can't be certain whether this is a cultural thing or a reflection on my abilities or personality. I'm aware that I'm not a particularly easy person for a manager to have to deal with - I have no time to listen to criticisms of how I work, and I generally have a thousand and one suggestions on how everybody else involved could do things better to make things work for me. These aren't qualities that I generally put on my CV, but I'm aware of them. I do believe that I am genuinely committed to doing a job conscientiously, and I hope that I've done as well as I am able over the past five and a half months.
Some things have worked, and other things haven't. One problem I had right at the beginning of the job was expecting students to address me by my surname. Nice for me to feel like a teacher and a bona-fide member of the adult world. Unfortunately, I was unaware that Mongolians don't have surnames - so typically a teacher would be addressed as "Jim Teacher" rather than, say, "Mr MacTavish, sir!" I guess I partly had it in mind that the whole social structure of a school depended on such fundamental forms of repectful address - ignoring the fact that they were entirely meaningless in Mongolian. Furthermore, I was denied the opportunity to bellow "Jones: stop running in the corridor!" or "What was that you said, Smith?"
I am glad that I abandoned trying to teach from the coursebook after the first term. It made no sense to be boring the students rigid with material they were already covering with a teacher who they could actually understand. Of course, this made me entirely responsible for the quality of the materrial I chose in replacement.
The students preferred working in teams rather than alone. I was never able to persuade the students to address each other in English much on these occasions, but they must have got something out of these lessons, by virtue of their remaining awake at least. Of course, in a larger team there would always be an opportunity for somebody to doze off - likewise, working in pairs it would usually be the case that the brainiest student would carry the burden of the work. If students were expected to work on their own, it was only the smallest proportion that came up with anything at all.
Most of the students did not want to discuss or work on current affairs, pretty much whatever the topic. They might say that they would like to work on something they werte personally interested in - like say a certain movie or singer: invariably that would engage the interest of only those students who particularly liked that subject. If the entire class were allowed to chose a subject to work on (even within a limited scope, such as "My Favourite Movie" or "A Person I Admire") then that would be taken as a signal for students to do absolutely whatever they wished, and no work at all would be done.
Students did very much enjoy doing quizzes, particularly in teams. The favourite format for this was "Jeopardy" - where teams pick a category and then a difficulty level of question to answer. I found that even in quizzes where I'd made the questions far too difficult, causing annoyance and complaint, the students at least remained involved. The students liked the introduction of random factors - engineered by a coin toss or the draw of a card - into the game. Also, they got a lot of fun out of thinking up stupid names for their teams. With the 4th grade I would usually insist taht the boys and girls play in mixed-gender teams. This would provoke howls of protest from all, but as soon as the game started, the teams would be united in their desire to win.
Competitions with the 4th grade students did create a few situations where tears fell. A short while back, my mother posted me some jars of Marmite. For the next two days I had little else to do in class but dare the students to try the stuff. One group of 4th graders formed a very eager queue, with each trying to eat more bread coated in the black substance than the others. In the next class, I decided to use Marmite as a forfeit in a Spelling Bee. Unfortunately, the poor girl who lost was so overcome by the situation that, although she gamely ate her piece of bread, she burst into tears and sobbed for the rest of the class. "Look, it tastes horrible, but it's really, really good for you," was the best I could guiltily manage in an attempt to console her.
I have reported that I was entirely unable to convey a love for literature to any of my students. Whilst the 11th grade managed to get through some pieces and express a degree of appreciation for the subject matter, it was very clear that they would have preferred not to have bothered. Students in all grades, however, produced some excellent pieces of creative writing in class. My favourite responses came from an essay question I set asking the students to write an imaginary news report to fit one of the following headlines from the year 2027 "Scientists abolish sleep - Welcome to the 24/7" and "Knowledge Implants - 40,000 gigabytes of learning direct to your brain. Never study again!" The responses were imaginative and entertaining. Somewhat sinisterly, very few of the students foresaw any negative impact from these two very probable future developments - but why should they? By and large, the students I taught are very happy to embrace the changes that technology brings.
Their embracing of the modern world led to my pretty much entirely abandoning the concept of homework. I decided that if I wanted to read a Wikipedia article on a subject it would be quicker to visit the site myself, rather than ask the students for a 500 word essay. One area of creative writing that produced some really worthwhile stuff was poetry written during class. One student cheerfully completed his two poems at home, and came back the next day with a rhyme from a greetings card (complete with unfunny innuendo) and a poem from somebody else's blog - which was so bad that it could have been written by my 9th grader, except that it included the words nostalgia and forlorn. Forlorn! the very word is like a bell! Tolling a warning to the wary: here be plagiarism. I printed out the Plagiarism entry from Wikipedia and put my name to it, but the irony went unappreciated. Incidentally, the Wikipedia entry makes some very good points about how plagiarism is perceived in different cultures - that developing societies do not share the western aversion to it.
Some class exercises that I picked up from sites like Dave's ESL Cafe, which were 100% guaranteed to capitivate a classroom went down like the proverbial lead balloon. However, I was very glad to have that kind of resource available, and usually if something worked with one class, it would go along well in the others. My hit rate might have been 50/50, which is surely good enough. No matter how many times it happened, however, I was left feeling pretty abject when a class did not work out.
Fortunately, I had started the job with one thought at the back of my mind: at the very worst, all I'll turn out to be is a bad teacher - and teachers are supposed to suck. What kind of education would a child get if all their teachers were wonderful, creative, inspirational human beings? At the very best, it would set them out in life with unrealistic expectations.
I'll certainly miss teaching the little blighters. All told, I have to admit that I found teaching the 4th grade a lot easier than teaching the 9th, 10th and 11th. I also have to say that I've not had any indication from the school that they're particularly happy with the work I've done - although they have found me a very nice job to move on to. I can't be certain whether this is a cultural thing or a reflection on my abilities or personality. I'm aware that I'm not a particularly easy person for a manager to have to deal with - I have no time to listen to criticisms of how I work, and I generally have a thousand and one suggestions on how everybody else involved could do things better to make things work for me. These aren't qualities that I generally put on my CV, but I'm aware of them. I do believe that I am genuinely committed to doing a job conscientiously, and I hope that I've done as well as I am able over the past five and a half months.
Some things have worked, and other things haven't. One problem I had right at the beginning of the job was expecting students to address me by my surname. Nice for me to feel like a teacher and a bona-fide member of the adult world. Unfortunately, I was unaware that Mongolians don't have surnames - so typically a teacher would be addressed as "Jim Teacher" rather than, say, "Mr MacTavish, sir!" I guess I partly had it in mind that the whole social structure of a school depended on such fundamental forms of repectful address - ignoring the fact that they were entirely meaningless in Mongolian. Furthermore, I was denied the opportunity to bellow "Jones: stop running in the corridor!" or "What was that you said, Smith?"
I am glad that I abandoned trying to teach from the coursebook after the first term. It made no sense to be boring the students rigid with material they were already covering with a teacher who they could actually understand. Of course, this made me entirely responsible for the quality of the materrial I chose in replacement.
The students preferred working in teams rather than alone. I was never able to persuade the students to address each other in English much on these occasions, but they must have got something out of these lessons, by virtue of their remaining awake at least. Of course, in a larger team there would always be an opportunity for somebody to doze off - likewise, working in pairs it would usually be the case that the brainiest student would carry the burden of the work. If students were expected to work on their own, it was only the smallest proportion that came up with anything at all.
Most of the students did not want to discuss or work on current affairs, pretty much whatever the topic. They might say that they would like to work on something they werte personally interested in - like say a certain movie or singer: invariably that would engage the interest of only those students who particularly liked that subject. If the entire class were allowed to chose a subject to work on (even within a limited scope, such as "My Favourite Movie" or "A Person I Admire") then that would be taken as a signal for students to do absolutely whatever they wished, and no work at all would be done.
Students did very much enjoy doing quizzes, particularly in teams. The favourite format for this was "Jeopardy" - where teams pick a category and then a difficulty level of question to answer. I found that even in quizzes where I'd made the questions far too difficult, causing annoyance and complaint, the students at least remained involved. The students liked the introduction of random factors - engineered by a coin toss or the draw of a card - into the game. Also, they got a lot of fun out of thinking up stupid names for their teams. With the 4th grade I would usually insist taht the boys and girls play in mixed-gender teams. This would provoke howls of protest from all, but as soon as the game started, the teams would be united in their desire to win.
Competitions with the 4th grade students did create a few situations where tears fell. A short while back, my mother posted me some jars of Marmite. For the next two days I had little else to do in class but dare the students to try the stuff. One group of 4th graders formed a very eager queue, with each trying to eat more bread coated in the black substance than the others. In the next class, I decided to use Marmite as a forfeit in a Spelling Bee. Unfortunately, the poor girl who lost was so overcome by the situation that, although she gamely ate her piece of bread, she burst into tears and sobbed for the rest of the class. "Look, it tastes horrible, but it's really, really good for you," was the best I could guiltily manage in an attempt to console her.
I have reported that I was entirely unable to convey a love for literature to any of my students. Whilst the 11th grade managed to get through some pieces and express a degree of appreciation for the subject matter, it was very clear that they would have preferred not to have bothered. Students in all grades, however, produced some excellent pieces of creative writing in class. My favourite responses came from an essay question I set asking the students to write an imaginary news report to fit one of the following headlines from the year 2027 "Scientists abolish sleep - Welcome to the 24/7" and "Knowledge Implants - 40,000 gigabytes of learning direct to your brain. Never study again!" The responses were imaginative and entertaining. Somewhat sinisterly, very few of the students foresaw any negative impact from these two very probable future developments - but why should they? By and large, the students I taught are very happy to embrace the changes that technology brings.
Their embracing of the modern world led to my pretty much entirely abandoning the concept of homework. I decided that if I wanted to read a Wikipedia article on a subject it would be quicker to visit the site myself, rather than ask the students for a 500 word essay. One area of creative writing that produced some really worthwhile stuff was poetry written during class. One student cheerfully completed his two poems at home, and came back the next day with a rhyme from a greetings card (complete with unfunny innuendo) and a poem from somebody else's blog - which was so bad that it could have been written by my 9th grader, except that it included the words nostalgia and forlorn. Forlorn! the very word is like a bell! Tolling a warning to the wary: here be plagiarism. I printed out the Plagiarism entry from Wikipedia and put my name to it, but the irony went unappreciated. Incidentally, the Wikipedia entry makes some very good points about how plagiarism is perceived in different cultures - that developing societies do not share the western aversion to it.
Some class exercises that I picked up from sites like Dave's ESL Cafe, which were 100% guaranteed to capitivate a classroom went down like the proverbial lead balloon. However, I was very glad to have that kind of resource available, and usually if something worked with one class, it would go along well in the others. My hit rate might have been 50/50, which is surely good enough. No matter how many times it happened, however, I was left feeling pretty abject when a class did not work out.
Fortunately, I had started the job with one thought at the back of my mind: at the very worst, all I'll turn out to be is a bad teacher - and teachers are supposed to suck. What kind of education would a child get if all their teachers were wonderful, creative, inspirational human beings? At the very best, it would set them out in life with unrealistic expectations.
Saturday, 12 May 2007
Rubik's Cubes, iBooks
Confiscating or attempting to confiscate Sony Walkman phones and iPods all the time is one of the untrammeled joys of my profession. I can get a bit carried away: meeting recently with two Ukranian friends I had to stop myself from yanking the ear-phones out of the ears of one, and restrict myself to an "If you were one of my students..." admonishment.
Recently a bit of variety has been injected into the situation at school by some genius deciding to present all of the students with a Rubik's cube each, and giving them a month to hone their skills before a competition at the end of term. What a great idea. I guess someone thought that there was a risk, however infinitesimal, of students getting bored of listening to BX or System of a Down or wottevah, and actually start paying attention to their classes. Happily that possibility has been averted, thanks to the timely intervention of Professor Rubik's 1974 invention - a record low of attention-paid has been achieved, and I've got a growing collection of the bloody things in my locker.
These kids with their iPods though, tchah! I have complained often enough on this site of the difficulty in finding decent English reading material in Ulaanbaatar (I mean, what is this place, Outer Mongolia?), and mentioned that I have been very much taken by the ebooks available to download from the Project Gutenberg website. The problem with ebooks is that while they're convenient with clogging your hard drive with every major work of literature in western civilization, even laptops are not very portable as far as a quick read goes. And there's me with an iPod mostly empty other than a very extensive collection of Bluegrass and Johnny Cash (the new 'Personal Files' release is, incidentally, just incredible) and now the occasional video download of Prime Minister's Questions and the sister broadcast Ask A Ninja. Well, slowly the wheels of my brain ticked and I thought to check online whether it's possible to download an ebook onto an iPod. Of course it is indeed possible - the book gets stored in the iPod's 'Notes' section. There's a website where over 11,000 books from Project Gutenberg have been converted to formats for downloading to 'readers', including iPod Notes.
Of course many people will say that it's no fun reading from a screen slightly smaller than 2 inches across, and on the whole it's not - I do find it leaves me a little groggy after an hour or so. However, it's tolerable, especially when the alternative is reading a disintegrating copy of R. F. Delderfield's "God is an Englishman" and paying 3000 Tugrik for the privilege. The backlight of course means that you can read without disturbing sleeping companions or indeed getting out of bed to turn the light off when you're finished (which has always been a considerable chore during those times of my life when, as now, I've been without the luxury of a bedside lamp). And when someone asks "Is that Jeremy Clarkson yer watching there on yer iPod?" you can reply "No, I was just reading 'Jurgen' - you know, the controversial 1919 James Branch Cabell satire. It's rather good, actually." This affords a warming glow of smugness and self-satisfaction that can sustain oneself long after the battery on the bloody thing has died again.
Recently a bit of variety has been injected into the situation at school by some genius deciding to present all of the students with a Rubik's cube each, and giving them a month to hone their skills before a competition at the end of term. What a great idea. I guess someone thought that there was a risk, however infinitesimal, of students getting bored of listening to BX or System of a Down or wottevah, and actually start paying attention to their classes. Happily that possibility has been averted, thanks to the timely intervention of Professor Rubik's 1974 invention - a record low of attention-paid has been achieved, and I've got a growing collection of the bloody things in my locker.
These kids with their iPods though, tchah! I have complained often enough on this site of the difficulty in finding decent English reading material in Ulaanbaatar (I mean, what is this place, Outer Mongolia?), and mentioned that I have been very much taken by the ebooks available to download from the Project Gutenberg website. The problem with ebooks is that while they're convenient with clogging your hard drive with every major work of literature in western civilization, even laptops are not very portable as far as a quick read goes. And there's me with an iPod mostly empty other than a very extensive collection of Bluegrass and Johnny Cash (the new 'Personal Files' release is, incidentally, just incredible) and now the occasional video download of Prime Minister's Questions and the sister broadcast Ask A Ninja. Well, slowly the wheels of my brain ticked and I thought to check online whether it's possible to download an ebook onto an iPod. Of course it is indeed possible - the book gets stored in the iPod's 'Notes' section. There's a website where over 11,000 books from Project Gutenberg have been converted to formats for downloading to 'readers', including iPod Notes.
Of course many people will say that it's no fun reading from a screen slightly smaller than 2 inches across, and on the whole it's not - I do find it leaves me a little groggy after an hour or so. However, it's tolerable, especially when the alternative is reading a disintegrating copy of R. F. Delderfield's "God is an Englishman" and paying 3000 Tugrik for the privilege. The backlight of course means that you can read without disturbing sleeping companions or indeed getting out of bed to turn the light off when you're finished (which has always been a considerable chore during those times of my life when, as now, I've been without the luxury of a bedside lamp). And when someone asks "Is that Jeremy Clarkson yer watching there on yer iPod?" you can reply "No, I was just reading 'Jurgen' - you know, the controversial 1919 James Branch Cabell satire. It's rather good, actually." This affords a warming glow of smugness and self-satisfaction that can sustain oneself long after the battery on the bloody thing has died again.
Thursday, 3 May 2007
Supermarket English, Taxi Mongolian, F Grades, Poetry
Thursday 3rd May
There's now a very languid heat throughout the day and warm night breezes, but still no green shoots appearing: as yet there's been no rain. Thursday afternoon is now the calm lull in my week - no lessons at school and no evening classes either. I've just started a job teaching the managers of a supermarket chain basic English three nights a week. It's the first class that I've been left entirely to my own devices to devise and run, which I am slightly surprised to find is coming as an almost welcome challenge rather than a dreaded chore. It's strangely enjoyable trying to work a supermarket twist into every lesson plan - suggestions are welcome, folks. So far the students seem very happy with the class - although admittedly I've only taught two classes so far, so there's plenty of scope for disillusionment to settle in before my contracted month is over.
The lessons are at the supermarket's HQ, which is at the very western edge of the city. In conversation I'm frequently challenging the way that my fellow expats criticise the driving here, countering that it's certainly no worse than London even if the lane-changing and light-jumping is somewhat colourfully individualistic. It now occurs to me that my experience of Ulaanbaatar's traffic has been fairly limited, my opinions, some might say, coming from a sheltered viewpoint - spending most of my time around the city centre and only usually getting a cab late at night when the streets are mostly empty. The experience is a bit more enterrorficating on the ring roads at rush hour, particularly at the big junctions. My admiration goes out to the traffic cops who stand in the middle of the tornadoes of steel and rubber, permanently blowing on their whistles and vigorously waving their batons as ton after ton of painful death speeds by them with mere inches to spare, or screams to a juddering stop and reluctanctly concedes his authority.
I can now ask "How much?" and count to nineteen, whilst also knowing the words for hundred and thousand - an achievement I am very proud of in spite of the fact that it has taken me five months to attain. Combined with "Yakshtay?!" ("Are you taking the piss, mate?") this means that I am rising to a level of mastery of taxi-driver Mongolian hitherto only dreamed of. No longer do I settle for tourist rates! No longer do I accept a charge of 40p when I know damn well it should be 15p! In outrage I will complain "Bi bagsh, bi bagsh" ("Me teacher, me teacher") - I guess that once I can say "I am not a tourist" then I'll have learnt everything I need to know. I can give the number of my district, and have an impressively accurate mental GPS of the city, although this isn't guaranteed reliable after 2am/five pints. There's a sizable degree of confidence that arises from conquering this sphere of daily life.
Incidentally, as I don't think I've mentioned this before, in UB every car is a potential taxi - one just stands at the edge of the sidewalk (a more appropriate term than pavement as it simply indicates where pedestrians are found, rather than any expected degree of surfacing) and waits for the first fume-belching, exhaust-rattling vehicle to pull over. This is how everybody who gets around by taxi manages it, and there doesn't appear to be a level of risk to the activity worth worrying about. In fact (very much contrary to the advice given by hotels etc all over the city) in my experience it's generally only in the licensed cabs with meters that a really concerted effort is made to rip-off foreigners: every single time I've got into one on my own the meter has either been switched off or else it climbs at an astronomical rate. I had a fairly heated exchange with one driver who was trying to charge me about ten dollars (enough to get you to the moon and back) which might have turned ugly were it not broad daylight and outside a fancy hotel. Private citizens have always been far more modest when they've tried to overcharge me - only doubling the fare rather than asking for 5 or 10 times the going rate.
My job at the school, as I have previously remarked, is now drawing to a close. Final exams are underway or approaching for all the grades. I am being magnanimous in my scoring, only partly because my departmental senior has politely and cautiously informed me that F grades are not given in Mongolia. They're built into the school's grading software of course, but they have to be creatively avoided. Sometimes I'm reluctant to play along with this - such as today stopping the 10th grade (advanced class) student who can neither speak, read nor write a word of English, from transcribing the essay his neighbour had generously scribbled out for him. I have been given the freedom to teach my classes however I liked so this a bit spoil-sportish of me, I know, and will doubtless gamely give him a D when the time comes, but I do kind of enjoy the exasperated "he-just-doesn't-get-it" looks from students when I insist on their not copying work in exams. Looking at the results as far as their essays and this terms creative writing go, I allow myself the luxury of shaking my head and concluding that they just don't get, because a lot of the work that I've insisted they do for themselves has actually been fresh, original and a pleasure to read. The classrooms and walls of the school are plastered with the students' poetry and prose. This is because the Mongolian teachers get a cut in their pay if the walls aren't plastered with the "students'" work. Almost every single word so neatly printed out in curly fonts is lifted from a 1950s rock and roll song or is just direct from Wikipedia, complete with all the link words still underlined. And yet, when I force my students at a metaphorical gun point to write a poem in 10 minutes or less if they don't want an F grade this term, I get charming results like
Spring
Spring is beginning of
something new
In Spring we saw
new herbs, vegetables
In Spring it
rains very first time
of the new year
That rain brings love
all living things
will fall in love
That's the beginning of
Life.
which may not be Keats but it's refreshing indeed to read after marking 20 essays about "A Mongolian who has made a great contribution to this country" - which proved, surprise, surprise, to be 20 identi-kit potted bios of guess-which plucky young son of the steppe, visions of oceans united in his merciless eyes? I particularly liked the inclusion of the word "vegetables", which has an earthy and prosaic rhythm that takes the poem away from mere cliche.
There's now a very languid heat throughout the day and warm night breezes, but still no green shoots appearing: as yet there's been no rain. Thursday afternoon is now the calm lull in my week - no lessons at school and no evening classes either. I've just started a job teaching the managers of a supermarket chain basic English three nights a week. It's the first class that I've been left entirely to my own devices to devise and run, which I am slightly surprised to find is coming as an almost welcome challenge rather than a dreaded chore. It's strangely enjoyable trying to work a supermarket twist into every lesson plan - suggestions are welcome, folks. So far the students seem very happy with the class - although admittedly I've only taught two classes so far, so there's plenty of scope for disillusionment to settle in before my contracted month is over.
The lessons are at the supermarket's HQ, which is at the very western edge of the city. In conversation I'm frequently challenging the way that my fellow expats criticise the driving here, countering that it's certainly no worse than London even if the lane-changing and light-jumping is somewhat colourfully individualistic. It now occurs to me that my experience of Ulaanbaatar's traffic has been fairly limited, my opinions, some might say, coming from a sheltered viewpoint - spending most of my time around the city centre and only usually getting a cab late at night when the streets are mostly empty. The experience is a bit more enterrorficating on the ring roads at rush hour, particularly at the big junctions. My admiration goes out to the traffic cops who stand in the middle of the tornadoes of steel and rubber, permanently blowing on their whistles and vigorously waving their batons as ton after ton of painful death speeds by them with mere inches to spare, or screams to a juddering stop and reluctanctly concedes his authority.
I can now ask "How much?" and count to nineteen, whilst also knowing the words for hundred and thousand - an achievement I am very proud of in spite of the fact that it has taken me five months to attain. Combined with "Yakshtay?!" ("Are you taking the piss, mate?") this means that I am rising to a level of mastery of taxi-driver Mongolian hitherto only dreamed of. No longer do I settle for tourist rates! No longer do I accept a charge of 40p when I know damn well it should be 15p! In outrage I will complain "Bi bagsh, bi bagsh" ("Me teacher, me teacher") - I guess that once I can say "I am not a tourist" then I'll have learnt everything I need to know. I can give the number of my district, and have an impressively accurate mental GPS of the city, although this isn't guaranteed reliable after 2am/five pints. There's a sizable degree of confidence that arises from conquering this sphere of daily life.
Incidentally, as I don't think I've mentioned this before, in UB every car is a potential taxi - one just stands at the edge of the sidewalk (a more appropriate term than pavement as it simply indicates where pedestrians are found, rather than any expected degree of surfacing) and waits for the first fume-belching, exhaust-rattling vehicle to pull over. This is how everybody who gets around by taxi manages it, and there doesn't appear to be a level of risk to the activity worth worrying about. In fact (very much contrary to the advice given by hotels etc all over the city) in my experience it's generally only in the licensed cabs with meters that a really concerted effort is made to rip-off foreigners: every single time I've got into one on my own the meter has either been switched off or else it climbs at an astronomical rate. I had a fairly heated exchange with one driver who was trying to charge me about ten dollars (enough to get you to the moon and back) which might have turned ugly were it not broad daylight and outside a fancy hotel. Private citizens have always been far more modest when they've tried to overcharge me - only doubling the fare rather than asking for 5 or 10 times the going rate.
My job at the school, as I have previously remarked, is now drawing to a close. Final exams are underway or approaching for all the grades. I am being magnanimous in my scoring, only partly because my departmental senior has politely and cautiously informed me that F grades are not given in Mongolia. They're built into the school's grading software of course, but they have to be creatively avoided. Sometimes I'm reluctant to play along with this - such as today stopping the 10th grade (advanced class) student who can neither speak, read nor write a word of English, from transcribing the essay his neighbour had generously scribbled out for him. I have been given the freedom to teach my classes however I liked so this a bit spoil-sportish of me, I know, and will doubtless gamely give him a D when the time comes, but I do kind of enjoy the exasperated "he-just-doesn't-get-it" looks from students when I insist on their not copying work in exams. Looking at the results as far as their essays and this terms creative writing go, I allow myself the luxury of shaking my head and concluding that they just don't get, because a lot of the work that I've insisted they do for themselves has actually been fresh, original and a pleasure to read. The classrooms and walls of the school are plastered with the students' poetry and prose. This is because the Mongolian teachers get a cut in their pay if the walls aren't plastered with the "students'" work. Almost every single word so neatly printed out in curly fonts is lifted from a 1950s rock and roll song or is just direct from Wikipedia, complete with all the link words still underlined. And yet, when I force my students at a metaphorical gun point to write a poem in 10 minutes or less if they don't want an F grade this term, I get charming results like
Spring
Spring is beginning of
something new
In Spring we saw
new herbs, vegetables
In Spring it
rains very first time
of the new year
That rain brings love
all living things
will fall in love
That's the beginning of
Life.
which may not be Keats but it's refreshing indeed to read after marking 20 essays about "A Mongolian who has made a great contribution to this country" - which proved, surprise, surprise, to be 20 identi-kit potted bios of guess-which plucky young son of the steppe, visions of oceans united in his merciless eyes? I particularly liked the inclusion of the word "vegetables", which has an earthy and prosaic rhythm that takes the poem away from mere cliche.
Monday, 16 April 2007
Magic Pine Football Boots
Wherever possible, I try and use the same lesson plan for all my classes, regardless of age or ability. This works more often than it doesn't, partly because I get the chance to tinker and improve on things, in mainly obvious ways that for no good reason failed to occur to me the first time around. Today's classes (and tomorrow's and the day after's no doubt) got the Noun Bag. I imagine it's an idea that has been used half a million times before: I wrote down forty or so nouns of as wide and random a selection I could think of, including objects, places, people and so on. I split the first few classes into groups and got them each to pull four or five nouns out of the bag, and then try to think of a story to fit. The results were very encouraging. By my last class I realized that it would work better to have the class split into groups and to each separately try and come up with their own stories for the same selection of nouns.
My favourite story of the day came from a selection that included teacher, football, pine tree, Ferrari, camera and waitress. It went something like this:
A teacher loves football and is due to play in a big competition. One night in his dreams, a wizard tells him to go to a certain pine tree in the forest and make a pair of football boots from the wood. So he wakes up, does so, and indeed goes ahead and wins the match. The prize is a Ferrari, with which he impresses a waitress: they fall in love; and he buys her a camera.
My favourite story of the day came from a selection that included teacher, football, pine tree, Ferrari, camera and waitress. It went something like this:
A teacher loves football and is due to play in a big competition. One night in his dreams, a wizard tells him to go to a certain pine tree in the forest and make a pair of football boots from the wood. So he wakes up, does so, and indeed goes ahead and wins the match. The prize is a Ferrari, with which he impresses a waitress: they fall in love; and he buys her a camera.
Wednesday, 11 April 2007
Enkhbayar, 76 Monkeys go "Blah, blah"
Wednesday 11th April
I heard the rain falling against my window last night, a sound I last heard more than four months ago.
President Enkhbayar will be visiting Britain on 17-18th April, so be on the lookout for reports of him describing Britain as Mongolia’s “Third Neighbour”. Actually, on his last visit to the UK he was described as an anglophile in the press, which may not be an exaggeration: apparently he has translated works by Dickens, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf into Mongolian. Indeed, according to his Wikipedia entry, Enkhbayar studied literature at Leeds in the 1990s. I wonder if he was at any of the parties I stumbled into in Headingley around that time?
Enkhbayar’s a curious figure in Mongolian politics: a man who seems to have quite an air of dignity and trustworthiness about him. I’m not aware of him being directly linked with any of the many scandals and irregularities reported in the press and gossiped on the streets, but I haven’t heard anyone speak with much enthusiasm about him. The most usual comment, spoken perhaps with feelings of having been betrayed, is that he is more concerned to look after himself and his family than his country.
I had a very successful class with my evening college students recently, working on Very Short Stories, as published in WIRED magazine and posted about some time earlier in this blog. The students as previously seemed to really enjoy the exercise (although were universally baffled by the WIRED offerings) and came up with some pretty good ones: “Iceberg hits; he drowns: she lives.”(Titanic, of course) and “76 Monkeys go ‘Blah, blah.’” Apparently there are 76 members of government (or parliament, I’m not sure which), and that is how they are collectively known.
I heard the rain falling against my window last night, a sound I last heard more than four months ago.
President Enkhbayar will be visiting Britain on 17-18th April, so be on the lookout for reports of him describing Britain as Mongolia’s “Third Neighbour”. Actually, on his last visit to the UK he was described as an anglophile in the press, which may not be an exaggeration: apparently he has translated works by Dickens, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf into Mongolian. Indeed, according to his Wikipedia entry, Enkhbayar studied literature at Leeds in the 1990s. I wonder if he was at any of the parties I stumbled into in Headingley around that time?
Enkhbayar’s a curious figure in Mongolian politics: a man who seems to have quite an air of dignity and trustworthiness about him. I’m not aware of him being directly linked with any of the many scandals and irregularities reported in the press and gossiped on the streets, but I haven’t heard anyone speak with much enthusiasm about him. The most usual comment, spoken perhaps with feelings of having been betrayed, is that he is more concerned to look after himself and his family than his country.
I had a very successful class with my evening college students recently, working on Very Short Stories, as published in WIRED magazine and posted about some time earlier in this blog. The students as previously seemed to really enjoy the exercise (although were universally baffled by the WIRED offerings) and came up with some pretty good ones: “Iceberg hits; he drowns: she lives.”(Titanic, of course) and “76 Monkeys go ‘Blah, blah.’” Apparently there are 76 members of government (or parliament, I’m not sure which), and that is how they are collectively known.
Wednesday, 21 March 2007
American Questions, Presentations, Grading, Stab Boy
Wed 21st March
The school is hosting an English Olympiad at the weekend in which students from all the schools in the city are invited to compete. I’ve had the American Culture, Society and History questions I set rejected on the grounds of my not being American (rather than because they are all very arsey questions which allow a 33 year old to say “Ha! You didn’t know that? What do you know?” to an annoyed 15 year-old Mongolian honours student). Here are my favourite ones, for your edification: (answers at the bottom of this post, and Wikipedia, presumably)
-Which founding father was a leading figure in the Enlightenment, and among countless other achievements invented bifocal glasses and a peculiar musical instrument which was later rumoured to cause insanity in the listener?
-Who is the current Vice-President of the US?
-Born around 1595, the daughter of a native american chief, which princess reputedly saved the lives of colonials, in 1607, by pleading on their behalf with her father? She died on a visit to England in 1617, and is buried at Gravesend, Kent.
-The citizens of which American city were only given the right to vote in Presidential elections after the 23rd Amendment of the US Constitution in 1963?
My term plan of setting the students to do presentations to lesson my teaching load didn’t really come off, with only a handful of students believing it was worth the effort of trying to improve their grade from a notoriously bollixy teacher. It did inspire me to give the students a lecture on why Hitler wasn’t so great, which I enjoyed and which seemed to provoke some interest from the 11th grade.
I took the opportunity to castigate my students for relying on PowerPoint and the internet (without which I would have had some trouble with my Shackleton presentation, but need I remind you that hypocrisy is a teacher’s prerogative?): a lot of students had one variant or another on ‘the-dog-ate-my-memory-stick’ excuse for not having their work ready to give. All the Power-Pointed presentations that were given ended with a screen proudly saying “Sources : www.google.com”
Does this happen in the US and UK too? I imagine it does. Whatever happened to the time-honoured tradition of getting one book on a subject from the library, then listing half the bibliography as your source? Is that too much trouble for this generation of cyber-slackers?
I’ve also been sounding-off to my colleagues on the failings of education systems where grades are the only thing that students, parents and schools are interested in.
To be fair to the school, if it was the only thing they were interested in, then they’d have relieved me of my grading duties at the end of last term; and to be fair to Mongolia, the grade-obsession must be near universal, wherever education is practised. Much as I was as a student, I am convinced that as far as teaching and learning go, grading, beyond ‘pass’, ‘fail’ and maybe ‘distinction’, is about 93.4% useless.
The carrot I use to get the 4th grade to hand in work is that I draw them a little cartoon rather than write a score - a carrot or themselves looking stupid if the work was poor, a happy rabbit, or a zombie, or a baby smoking a cigarette, depending on their preference, if the work was good. This has worked surprisingly well - as the poor students are rewarded in as much as they all get a cartoon, but I find they all make more effort with their work even though some of the ‘lazy student’ drawings are better than the rabbits; naturally, though, nothing could be cooler than a baby smoking a cigarette.
In occasional bouts of homesickness I find my way to www.icliverpool.co.uk to read the latest news from the Echo: home of balanced, informative journalism. Today I learned that Liverpool gangs are producing skunk cannabis "one puff of which can cause schizophrenia" (well, we already know it induces paranoia), and was moved by a touching photograph of Stab Boy and his mother, who blames the infamous Chucky movies (source of all juvenile crime in Merseyside for many years now, well, apart from instant-schizophrenia skunk) for her son's recent behavioural problems. Actually, now I have a pseudo-broadband connection I am listening to Radio 4 a lot, so I am well aware that the Echo is making the most of local variants on what seem to be the big stories at the moment in the national press: nonetheless, I admire the particular panache with which those exemplary Echo hacks manage to churn this stuff out. Well done!
American Quiz answers: Ben Franklin, Dick Cheney, Pocahontas, Washington D.C.
The school is hosting an English Olympiad at the weekend in which students from all the schools in the city are invited to compete. I’ve had the American Culture, Society and History questions I set rejected on the grounds of my not being American (rather than because they are all very arsey questions which allow a 33 year old to say “Ha! You didn’t know that? What do you know?” to an annoyed 15 year-old Mongolian honours student). Here are my favourite ones, for your edification: (answers at the bottom of this post, and Wikipedia, presumably)
-Which founding father was a leading figure in the Enlightenment, and among countless other achievements invented bifocal glasses and a peculiar musical instrument which was later rumoured to cause insanity in the listener?
-Who is the current Vice-President of the US?
-Born around 1595, the daughter of a native american chief, which princess reputedly saved the lives of colonials, in 1607, by pleading on their behalf with her father? She died on a visit to England in 1617, and is buried at Gravesend, Kent.
-The citizens of which American city were only given the right to vote in Presidential elections after the 23rd Amendment of the US Constitution in 1963?
My term plan of setting the students to do presentations to lesson my teaching load didn’t really come off, with only a handful of students believing it was worth the effort of trying to improve their grade from a notoriously bollixy teacher. It did inspire me to give the students a lecture on why Hitler wasn’t so great, which I enjoyed and which seemed to provoke some interest from the 11th grade.
I took the opportunity to castigate my students for relying on PowerPoint and the internet (without which I would have had some trouble with my Shackleton presentation, but need I remind you that hypocrisy is a teacher’s prerogative?): a lot of students had one variant or another on ‘the-dog-ate-my-memory-stick’ excuse for not having their work ready to give. All the Power-Pointed presentations that were given ended with a screen proudly saying “Sources : www.google.com”
Does this happen in the US and UK too? I imagine it does. Whatever happened to the time-honoured tradition of getting one book on a subject from the library, then listing half the bibliography as your source? Is that too much trouble for this generation of cyber-slackers?
I’ve also been sounding-off to my colleagues on the failings of education systems where grades are the only thing that students, parents and schools are interested in.
To be fair to the school, if it was the only thing they were interested in, then they’d have relieved me of my grading duties at the end of last term; and to be fair to Mongolia, the grade-obsession must be near universal, wherever education is practised. Much as I was as a student, I am convinced that as far as teaching and learning go, grading, beyond ‘pass’, ‘fail’ and maybe ‘distinction’, is about 93.4% useless.
The carrot I use to get the 4th grade to hand in work is that I draw them a little cartoon rather than write a score - a carrot or themselves looking stupid if the work was poor, a happy rabbit, or a zombie, or a baby smoking a cigarette, depending on their preference, if the work was good. This has worked surprisingly well - as the poor students are rewarded in as much as they all get a cartoon, but I find they all make more effort with their work even though some of the ‘lazy student’ drawings are better than the rabbits; naturally, though, nothing could be cooler than a baby smoking a cigarette.
In occasional bouts of homesickness I find my way to www.icliverpool.co.uk to read the latest news from the Echo: home of balanced, informative journalism. Today I learned that Liverpool gangs are producing skunk cannabis "one puff of which can cause schizophrenia" (well, we already know it induces paranoia), and was moved by a touching photograph of Stab Boy and his mother, who blames the infamous Chucky movies (source of all juvenile crime in Merseyside for many years now, well, apart from instant-schizophrenia skunk) for her son's recent behavioural problems. Actually, now I have a pseudo-broadband connection I am listening to Radio 4 a lot, so I am well aware that the Echo is making the most of local variants on what seem to be the big stories at the moment in the national press: nonetheless, I admire the particular panache with which those exemplary Echo hacks manage to churn this stuff out. Well done!
American Quiz answers: Ben Franklin, Dick Cheney, Pocahontas, Washington D.C.
Wednesday, 28 February 2007
Shackleton
Wednesday 28th February
I'm moderately pleased with how my presentation on Ernest Shackleton went at school today. Classes have not been going so great recently (since English Literature has become optional classes have finally dwindled down to a stable number of students: zero), so the largely positive reception from the 10th and 11th graders cheered me up.
I had never heard of the great man myself until I saw the Imax movie 'Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure' whilst I was working in Boston five years ago. At the end of the screening the audience had erupted into spontaneous, sustained applause, the tears had rolled down my cheeks and I'd felt a surge of patriotic pride - as though I had somehow shared in the achievement of the crew of the Endurance.
What has, of course, played such an important role in making the story of Shackleton and his crew's incredible survival so immediate to a modern audience, is the photography of expedition member Frank Hurley. It took me a while to find the photos at a reasonable resolution for projection on the internet, but happily I eventually stumbled upon the website of the National Library of Australia. They have a pretty extensive collection of Hurley's photographs, all available to download free of charge for study or personal use. Searching on the keywords 'Hurley' and 'Shackleton' turns up 135 images.
What was a new perspective on Hurley's work for me was the realisation that the Australian photography was no accidental artist - there is evidence in the collection of double-exposures and touched-up images - most notably the phony sunset on this image of the launch of the lifeboat James Caird.
Anyhow, I used about 30 images of the expedition, and finished with a picture from the trenches in World War I (several of the crew members whose lives had been preserved with such care by Shackleton were then thrown away by generals in the bloody battlefields of northern France) and a moody photograph of Shackleton's grave on South Georgia, posted online by some recent pilgrim there. I didn't script my presentation, because I'm too lazy, but extemporised - hopefully without getting too lost. Given the photographs, the story of the Endurance tells itself.
The idea of asking students to give a presentation on Great People from History came when a student asked me for help with a presentation he'd been asked to give on Martin Luther King Jr. This was at a formal dinner on Martin Luther King Day - which was to say, about one hour's time. I very much admire the Mongolian characteristic of leaving things to the very last minute - it reminds me of somebody. He'd done a very reasonable job on it, although it was also pretty clear that he only had the vaguest idea who Martin Luther King Jr was, and had basically lifted a lot of very dry biographical data from somewhere on the web (great detail on King's education, various academic achievements and posthumous decorations). I suggested he think about why King had made a mark on history, to which my student very honestly admitted to having no idea. Amongst other characteristics I suggested that MLK had moral authority - a description I smugly felt to be very apt.
This same student is to be the first up to give a presentation on a great figure from history. His subject (once I said that he couldn't just recycle the Martin Luther King script that I (mostly)wrote) is... Adolf Hitler. I had a look at his subject headings for his work: "Rise to Power", "Military Success", "Genocide" and "Last Days". Oh, and also "Moral Authority".
I'm moderately pleased with how my presentation on Ernest Shackleton went at school today. Classes have not been going so great recently (since English Literature has become optional classes have finally dwindled down to a stable number of students: zero), so the largely positive reception from the 10th and 11th graders cheered me up.
I had never heard of the great man myself until I saw the Imax movie 'Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure' whilst I was working in Boston five years ago. At the end of the screening the audience had erupted into spontaneous, sustained applause, the tears had rolled down my cheeks and I'd felt a surge of patriotic pride - as though I had somehow shared in the achievement of the crew of the Endurance.
What has, of course, played such an important role in making the story of Shackleton and his crew's incredible survival so immediate to a modern audience, is the photography of expedition member Frank Hurley. It took me a while to find the photos at a reasonable resolution for projection on the internet, but happily I eventually stumbled upon the website of the National Library of Australia. They have a pretty extensive collection of Hurley's photographs, all available to download free of charge for study or personal use. Searching on the keywords 'Hurley' and 'Shackleton' turns up 135 images.
What was a new perspective on Hurley's work for me was the realisation that the Australian photography was no accidental artist - there is evidence in the collection of double-exposures and touched-up images - most notably the phony sunset on this image of the launch of the lifeboat James Caird.
Anyhow, I used about 30 images of the expedition, and finished with a picture from the trenches in World War I (several of the crew members whose lives had been preserved with such care by Shackleton were then thrown away by generals in the bloody battlefields of northern France) and a moody photograph of Shackleton's grave on South Georgia, posted online by some recent pilgrim there. I didn't script my presentation, because I'm too lazy, but extemporised - hopefully without getting too lost. Given the photographs, the story of the Endurance tells itself.
The idea of asking students to give a presentation on Great People from History came when a student asked me for help with a presentation he'd been asked to give on Martin Luther King Jr. This was at a formal dinner on Martin Luther King Day - which was to say, about one hour's time. I very much admire the Mongolian characteristic of leaving things to the very last minute - it reminds me of somebody. He'd done a very reasonable job on it, although it was also pretty clear that he only had the vaguest idea who Martin Luther King Jr was, and had basically lifted a lot of very dry biographical data from somewhere on the web (great detail on King's education, various academic achievements and posthumous decorations). I suggested he think about why King had made a mark on history, to which my student very honestly admitted to having no idea. Amongst other characteristics I suggested that MLK had moral authority - a description I smugly felt to be very apt.
This same student is to be the first up to give a presentation on a great figure from history. His subject (once I said that he couldn't just recycle the Martin Luther King script that I (mostly)wrote) is... Adolf Hitler. I had a look at his subject headings for his work: "Rise to Power", "Military Success", "Genocide" and "Last Days". Oh, and also "Moral Authority".
Saturday, 17 February 2007
Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler, Jon Ronson
Saturday 17th Feb
Having abandoned teaching from textbooks, but still wishing to put the burden of work on my students rather than myself, I’ve themed the first part of this term on one of the few subjects suggested by students as ‘interesting’: Famous People. To start with, in each of the 9th to 11th grade classes I got the kids to play ‘Who Am I?’ - I wrote the names and a brief bio of a selection of famous persons living and dead onto pieces of paper and a student chose one at random, to answer yes/no questions until somebody guessed their identity. It’s a game that is presumably known the world over, and the students seemed to enjoy it. Napoleon was the easiest to guess - once the students had hazarded European and French then there was no hesitation. I was surprised that the only Mongolian I had included, Zanabazar - who is probably the most culturally influential person in Mongolia’s history - proved to be extremely obscure for the students. It seems that beyond the Khans and Sukhbaatar (hero of the revolution, and founder of the still ruling Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party) the students only have a vague notion of their nation’s history. I am sure that they would strongly object to that statement, but that’s the appearance given to me.
Almost half the students - mostly but not exclusively the boys - have no interest in any history beyond The Secret History - the near contemporary narrative account of Genghis Khan’s reign. The Secret History probably comes 3rd place after Harry Potter and the Da Vinci Code as most commonly cited favourite book. Comic book versions of the life of Genghis and his generals are extremely popular with young lads, and even the 4th Grade girls will hotly dispute which of Genghis’ wives was the most intelligent or beautiful. It has been much noted elsewhere that since the beginning of democracy in Mongolia, the cult of Chinggis has grown and grown. Young Mongolians are fiercely proud of their ancestor, and it colours their perception of every other period or person in history.
For example, Adolf Hitler. Hitler, or ‘Gitler’ as the Mongolians usually call him, is, I am sorry to say, greatly admired by the young men I teach. “He was a great general” “He gave great speeches” “Everybody was afraid of him”: these accolades are given in a reverent tone by every student who has spoken on him - except, happily, for the scorn from a handful of the girls who have objected that Hitler was a terrible man. Ironically, however, whilst the lads can accept with an amused grin that Hitler is usually perceived as being the very worst criminal in history in western countries, they are deeply shocked and offended at the notion that Genghis Khan is also often included in the roll-call of historical infamy.
I’m hoping that I can encourage the students to look at other aspects of greatness in historical figures than the numbers of millions murdered or subjugated. I’ve set the classes to do a presentation on a chosen person from history - for myself I’m going to do a slideshow about Ernest Shackleton. A very macho figure, but someone who’s notable achievement was a heroic failure, and who is remembered because of the people his ambition didn’t kill.
I think I’d also like to see how the class respond to reading some Jon Ronson, too. Ronson’s English in “Out of the Ordinary” is clearly written, with short sentences, and to the point. I think that his writing is well within my student’s reading abilities; they hate being given a piece to read that’s more than 500 words long. I’d like to see the students’ reaction to humorous writing about social embarrassment and ostentatiously failing to be a good role model to his son. I’ll try the piece on Goths in Starbucks or the one about getting his trousers mended. With startling generosity, Ronson has posted most of the best short pieces from the book at his Amazon Blog.
Like Larry David, Ronson’s best asset is writing about his own failings and insecurities. That isn’t to say that there isn’t a lot of merit to his attempts at serious ‘offbeat’ journalism, but where the implied Ronson sometimes irritates there, it delights in those pieces that focus entirely on himself. I enjoyed large parts of “Them” - particular the first piece concerning Osama Bin Laden's 'mouthpiece’ Omar Bakri, but grew increasingly irritated by Ronson's faux naiveté in the rest of the book. It was after reading "Them" that I first came across Jon Ronson’s by-line in the Guardian. Initially I read his self-obsessed pieces in a rather sneering manner - “What ‘amusing’ anecdote has Ronson got to say about himself this time, I wonder?” I’d started out reading Auberon Waugh’s columns in much the same way - not that I would wish to draw too strong a comparison between the two writers, beyond the fact that it was what offended me about each writer that initially drew me to reading them.
One thing that Jon Ronson admits in his book, is that he is an occasional self-Googler. Mentioning Jon Ronson in the text of your web site is a well-known technique in the blogging community for artificially boosting site traffic. Within two hours of my first post that mentioned him I had a hit from a blog search for “jon ronson”. The ISP address for the visitor included Ronson in the host name - suggesting that, as a cyber-equivalent of the Devil himself, no sooner do you mention Jon Ronson’s name online, than he appears. The same searcher has visited the site four times, all from Googling “jon ronson”. Curiously, no other ISP has visited the site with that search. And no one at all has arrived by Googling “louis theroux”.
Having abandoned teaching from textbooks, but still wishing to put the burden of work on my students rather than myself, I’ve themed the first part of this term on one of the few subjects suggested by students as ‘interesting’: Famous People. To start with, in each of the 9th to 11th grade classes I got the kids to play ‘Who Am I?’ - I wrote the names and a brief bio of a selection of famous persons living and dead onto pieces of paper and a student chose one at random, to answer yes/no questions until somebody guessed their identity. It’s a game that is presumably known the world over, and the students seemed to enjoy it. Napoleon was the easiest to guess - once the students had hazarded European and French then there was no hesitation. I was surprised that the only Mongolian I had included, Zanabazar - who is probably the most culturally influential person in Mongolia’s history - proved to be extremely obscure for the students. It seems that beyond the Khans and Sukhbaatar (hero of the revolution, and founder of the still ruling Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party) the students only have a vague notion of their nation’s history. I am sure that they would strongly object to that statement, but that’s the appearance given to me.
Almost half the students - mostly but not exclusively the boys - have no interest in any history beyond The Secret History - the near contemporary narrative account of Genghis Khan’s reign. The Secret History probably comes 3rd place after Harry Potter and the Da Vinci Code as most commonly cited favourite book. Comic book versions of the life of Genghis and his generals are extremely popular with young lads, and even the 4th Grade girls will hotly dispute which of Genghis’ wives was the most intelligent or beautiful. It has been much noted elsewhere that since the beginning of democracy in Mongolia, the cult of Chinggis has grown and grown. Young Mongolians are fiercely proud of their ancestor, and it colours their perception of every other period or person in history.
For example, Adolf Hitler. Hitler, or ‘Gitler’ as the Mongolians usually call him, is, I am sorry to say, greatly admired by the young men I teach. “He was a great general” “He gave great speeches” “Everybody was afraid of him”: these accolades are given in a reverent tone by every student who has spoken on him - except, happily, for the scorn from a handful of the girls who have objected that Hitler was a terrible man. Ironically, however, whilst the lads can accept with an amused grin that Hitler is usually perceived as being the very worst criminal in history in western countries, they are deeply shocked and offended at the notion that Genghis Khan is also often included in the roll-call of historical infamy.
I’m hoping that I can encourage the students to look at other aspects of greatness in historical figures than the numbers of millions murdered or subjugated. I’ve set the classes to do a presentation on a chosen person from history - for myself I’m going to do a slideshow about Ernest Shackleton. A very macho figure, but someone who’s notable achievement was a heroic failure, and who is remembered because of the people his ambition didn’t kill.
I think I’d also like to see how the class respond to reading some Jon Ronson, too. Ronson’s English in “Out of the Ordinary” is clearly written, with short sentences, and to the point. I think that his writing is well within my student’s reading abilities; they hate being given a piece to read that’s more than 500 words long. I’d like to see the students’ reaction to humorous writing about social embarrassment and ostentatiously failing to be a good role model to his son. I’ll try the piece on Goths in Starbucks or the one about getting his trousers mended. With startling generosity, Ronson has posted most of the best short pieces from the book at his Amazon Blog.
Like Larry David, Ronson’s best asset is writing about his own failings and insecurities. That isn’t to say that there isn’t a lot of merit to his attempts at serious ‘offbeat’ journalism, but where the implied Ronson sometimes irritates there, it delights in those pieces that focus entirely on himself. I enjoyed large parts of “Them” - particular the first piece concerning Osama Bin Laden's 'mouthpiece’ Omar Bakri, but grew increasingly irritated by Ronson's faux naiveté in the rest of the book. It was after reading "Them" that I first came across Jon Ronson’s by-line in the Guardian. Initially I read his self-obsessed pieces in a rather sneering manner - “What ‘amusing’ anecdote has Ronson got to say about himself this time, I wonder?” I’d started out reading Auberon Waugh’s columns in much the same way - not that I would wish to draw too strong a comparison between the two writers, beyond the fact that it was what offended me about each writer that initially drew me to reading them.
One thing that Jon Ronson admits in his book, is that he is an occasional self-Googler. Mentioning Jon Ronson in the text of your web site is a well-known technique in the blogging community for artificially boosting site traffic. Within two hours of my first post that mentioned him I had a hit from a blog search for “jon ronson”. The ISP address for the visitor included Ronson in the host name - suggesting that, as a cyber-equivalent of the Devil himself, no sooner do you mention Jon Ronson’s name online, than he appears. The same searcher has visited the site four times, all from Googling “jon ronson”. Curiously, no other ISP has visited the site with that search. And no one at all has arrived by Googling “louis theroux”.
Monday, 12 February 2007
English Literature is Optional
Monday 12th February
Inevitably, the first week back in school after two weeks’ recovery time was a mixed experience, mostly of the spirit-grinding character. I would surely have benefited from doing more preparation during the break, although I did concoct a lot of ambitious but extremely vague notions of doing a lot of themed classes throughout the coming term. The fact that I hadn’t actually physically planned anything out turned out not to matter a great deal, as, presumably some time late Sunday night, the school's entire timetable had been completely rewritten.
The big change for me is that my literature classes had now been made optional - something I had begged for in relation to the 9th graders but would like to have saved as a last resort for the 10th and 11th. I spent most of last weeks classes holding ‘surveys’ of the students opinions about English and what to do about it. A great way out of getting around not having planned work for the week but also for stealing ideas from the students themselves (Not that the ideas would necessarily be any good, but then I could have the joy of telling the kids “Yes, this lesson sucks, but that’s YOUR FAULT because it was YOUR IDEA - Hah!”) Well, particularly to the background of timetable chaos, the results of the survey were pretty uniformly depressing. The greater part of the students requested “More interesting lessons” with only about two out of sixty students suggesting anything that might be of interest to themselves (“Talking about famous people, shopping, movies”). “More interesting” basically means more games and fun exercises, and more oportunities to chat to each other (in Mongolian). Well, I’m prepared to concede them a little more fun, in strictly measured doses of course, but on the whole, I reserve the right to be as boring and un-fun as I like. It is a teacher’s most sacred prerogative.
My 11th grade got quite involved in a discussion of what to study in Literature, with an agreement to read more short stories and look at something in the vein of Harry Potter and “The Da Vinci Code”, both of which these bone-idle kids have read from cover to cover. I had it in mind to maybe try and get copies of “The Hobbit” at least or “A Wizard of Earthsea” as a Rowling antidote, and half a notion to force extracts of “The Name of the Rose” and the “Illuminatus!” trilogy to de-Brown them. The 11th grade did pretty well last term, giving the extracts of “Hamlet” a sporting chance, suffering Dylan Thomas with dignity and generally hiding their disappointment that the course would not be all Monkey’s Paws. Everything looked quite promising: and then the class became optional, and 5 students out of the twenty turned up. No students from the 10th grade classes are choosing to take English. And the 9th grade class which I had begged to be made optional is still on the syllabus, sat there in the ungodly monday morning hours, with the students less willing than ever to have anything whatsoever to do with books.
Still, the five-student classes will hopefully turn out to be very worthwhile, although I do feel that i am losing the battle to force these kids to appreciate English literature. The students were very keen to read Sherlock Holmes and so I settled on “The Stock-Broker’s Clerk” purely on the merit of it being one of the shortest stories. It turns out on reading it (and preparing a vocab sheet! Before the lesson! I am a teacher!) that it has lots of good use of English idioms and phrases that are still common currency (“at the end of my tether” “I was in the swim” and so on), but it isn’t the most exciting of Holmes’ adventures - and is indeed just a rewrite of the funnier “The Red-Headed League” which Conan Doyle seems to have forgotten having written. Well, I’ll see how they got on with it tomorrow. In the meantime I wrote them a very clever little essay about the character Sherlock Holmes and his wide influence on later fiction, which they are sure to find informative and inspiring. I even managed, in the best teaching tradition of disparaging everything the students admire, to work in a snidey reference to “The Da Vinci Code” (which, needless to say, and also in the best teaching tradition, I have never read). Once they’ve finished with that I’m intending to try some Jack London, particularly “To Light a Fire” and “A Piece of Steak”, both of which I recall as being short but gripping, and concerning the cold, wolves and boxing, all of which ought to be able to hold a Mongolian’s attention for half an hour at least.
For my other classes, I am belatedly dispensing once and for all with the text book I have been given. The course (Upstream Intermediate and Advanced) is extremely good, but the students, who are already studying the course with the Mongolian teachers do not want to study it with me too. Personally I think that if I could get their attention they could really benefit from letting me teach it, but as soon as the text book opens their minds close, and I am finally giving up. All remaining classes will be conversation or based on newspaper articles and lessons I steal off the Internet. I have also had the brilliant notion of getting the class to prepare Power Point (ie slideshow) presentations on subjects of their choice, with that whole class being their lesson - cleverly getting myself out of having to prepare that lesson, and again giving me recourse to being able to say “Yes, this lesson sucks, but that’s YOUR FAULT because it was YOUR IDEA - Hah!”
You may be wondering whatever happened to my threats to teach Mongolians bluegrass, which had caused a degree of consternation in some parts of the globe. Many historians consider that the rampages of Genghis Khan were only alleviated by the fact that the banjo had not yet been invented in the 13th century. As of yet, the world is safe. I have not been able to inspire a sudden interest in all things hillbilly amongst my young charges, but I am working on it. Last week was my first after-school music group, which a handful of students finally signed up for once another student helpfully rewrote my unsigned “Bluegrass Music Club” poster and replaced it with “Live Music Club”. I’ve now got 6 8th grade piano-playing girls, who want to form an EMO Rock Band. In my own time I am trying to meet up with some local musicians who a mutual friend is in touch with - hopefully after all the meatballs and vodka of next weekend’s White Moon celebration are over with we can manage to get together.
Finally, just to prove that I am complaining about my job from Outer Mongolia and not Basingstoke, here's a picture of the ger recently assembled outside my apartment block.
Inevitably, the first week back in school after two weeks’ recovery time was a mixed experience, mostly of the spirit-grinding character. I would surely have benefited from doing more preparation during the break, although I did concoct a lot of ambitious but extremely vague notions of doing a lot of themed classes throughout the coming term. The fact that I hadn’t actually physically planned anything out turned out not to matter a great deal, as, presumably some time late Sunday night, the school's entire timetable had been completely rewritten.
The big change for me is that my literature classes had now been made optional - something I had begged for in relation to the 9th graders but would like to have saved as a last resort for the 10th and 11th. I spent most of last weeks classes holding ‘surveys’ of the students opinions about English and what to do about it. A great way out of getting around not having planned work for the week but also for stealing ideas from the students themselves (Not that the ideas would necessarily be any good, but then I could have the joy of telling the kids “Yes, this lesson sucks, but that’s YOUR FAULT because it was YOUR IDEA - Hah!”) Well, particularly to the background of timetable chaos, the results of the survey were pretty uniformly depressing. The greater part of the students requested “More interesting lessons” with only about two out of sixty students suggesting anything that might be of interest to themselves (“Talking about famous people, shopping, movies”). “More interesting” basically means more games and fun exercises, and more oportunities to chat to each other (in Mongolian). Well, I’m prepared to concede them a little more fun, in strictly measured doses of course, but on the whole, I reserve the right to be as boring and un-fun as I like. It is a teacher’s most sacred prerogative.
My 11th grade got quite involved in a discussion of what to study in Literature, with an agreement to read more short stories and look at something in the vein of Harry Potter and “The Da Vinci Code”, both of which these bone-idle kids have read from cover to cover. I had it in mind to maybe try and get copies of “The Hobbit” at least or “A Wizard of Earthsea” as a Rowling antidote, and half a notion to force extracts of “The Name of the Rose” and the “Illuminatus!” trilogy to de-Brown them. The 11th grade did pretty well last term, giving the extracts of “Hamlet” a sporting chance, suffering Dylan Thomas with dignity and generally hiding their disappointment that the course would not be all Monkey’s Paws. Everything looked quite promising: and then the class became optional, and 5 students out of the twenty turned up. No students from the 10th grade classes are choosing to take English. And the 9th grade class which I had begged to be made optional is still on the syllabus, sat there in the ungodly monday morning hours, with the students less willing than ever to have anything whatsoever to do with books.
Still, the five-student classes will hopefully turn out to be very worthwhile, although I do feel that i am losing the battle to force these kids to appreciate English literature. The students were very keen to read Sherlock Holmes and so I settled on “The Stock-Broker’s Clerk” purely on the merit of it being one of the shortest stories. It turns out on reading it (and preparing a vocab sheet! Before the lesson! I am a teacher!) that it has lots of good use of English idioms and phrases that are still common currency (“at the end of my tether” “I was in the swim” and so on), but it isn’t the most exciting of Holmes’ adventures - and is indeed just a rewrite of the funnier “The Red-Headed League” which Conan Doyle seems to have forgotten having written. Well, I’ll see how they got on with it tomorrow. In the meantime I wrote them a very clever little essay about the character Sherlock Holmes and his wide influence on later fiction, which they are sure to find informative and inspiring. I even managed, in the best teaching tradition of disparaging everything the students admire, to work in a snidey reference to “The Da Vinci Code” (which, needless to say, and also in the best teaching tradition, I have never read). Once they’ve finished with that I’m intending to try some Jack London, particularly “To Light a Fire” and “A Piece of Steak”, both of which I recall as being short but gripping, and concerning the cold, wolves and boxing, all of which ought to be able to hold a Mongolian’s attention for half an hour at least.
For my other classes, I am belatedly dispensing once and for all with the text book I have been given. The course (Upstream Intermediate and Advanced) is extremely good, but the students, who are already studying the course with the Mongolian teachers do not want to study it with me too. Personally I think that if I could get their attention they could really benefit from letting me teach it, but as soon as the text book opens their minds close, and I am finally giving up. All remaining classes will be conversation or based on newspaper articles and lessons I steal off the Internet. I have also had the brilliant notion of getting the class to prepare Power Point (ie slideshow) presentations on subjects of their choice, with that whole class being their lesson - cleverly getting myself out of having to prepare that lesson, and again giving me recourse to being able to say “Yes, this lesson sucks, but that’s YOUR FAULT because it was YOUR IDEA - Hah!”
You may be wondering whatever happened to my threats to teach Mongolians bluegrass, which had caused a degree of consternation in some parts of the globe. Many historians consider that the rampages of Genghis Khan were only alleviated by the fact that the banjo had not yet been invented in the 13th century. As of yet, the world is safe. I have not been able to inspire a sudden interest in all things hillbilly amongst my young charges, but I am working on it. Last week was my first after-school music group, which a handful of students finally signed up for once another student helpfully rewrote my unsigned “Bluegrass Music Club” poster and replaced it with “Live Music Club”. I’ve now got 6 8th grade piano-playing girls, who want to form an EMO Rock Band. In my own time I am trying to meet up with some local musicians who a mutual friend is in touch with - hopefully after all the meatballs and vodka of next weekend’s White Moon celebration are over with we can manage to get together.
Finally, just to prove that I am complaining about my job from Outer Mongolia and not Basingstoke, here's a picture of the ger recently assembled outside my apartment block.
Friday, 2 February 2007
Teachers' Day, More Technology Gripes (State Department Store Boycott!), Word of the Day is 'Fecund'
Friday 2nd February 2007
It is eerily quiet in the school today, only a very few members of staff coming in for the day after the annual Teachers' Day celebrations.
The socialist era gave Mongolia special days celebrating the acchievement of many different workers - there's a Builders' Day, a Nurses' Day, etc. My colleague who told me this proudly informed me that Teachers' Day was the first such holiday and, as everybody has had a teacher or has a child who currently has one, it is by far the most important. Mongolia's revolutionary hero, Sukhbaatar, believed that Mongolia needed modern and effective education, so in honour of him and as a mark of extreme respect for the most noble of professions, Teachers' Day is held on the weekend closest to Sukhbaatar's birthday (which I believe is today, Friday 2nd Feb).
Preparations for the day were impressive. We were told to be at the school for 9am sharp to take a bus out to a Ger holiday camp for the day. Indeed, by 9.45am everyone had arrived and we were ready to go. There was a very good turnout, although my American colleagues opted out of the experience (ominously owing to having previously experienced Teachers' Day). I helped load up one of the busses with the boxes of fruit, crates of soft drinks, and the six crates of beer and two crates of vodka.
We drove west through the city in the direction of the airport. As we neared the power stations the smog got thicker and thicker, until the power stations themselves as we passed were completely lost in the dirty yellow air, the tops of the smokle-belching chimneys somehow visible above and ghostly silhouettes of ger and ramshackle buildings in the foreground. I am glad I live in the east of the city.
We spent the day in a deluxe camp just outside the city, at the foot of the Bogd Khaan mountains. Our bus had turned off the paved road, and hurtled up a muddy track to the camp, up in a valley above and out of view of the pollution around the city. It's a beautiful location for an impressively ugly camp. In the 'Modern' part of the camp there's a new hotel building made from Lego and surrounding it a dozen of Barratt's finest semi-detached housing cubes.
We, however, were in the 'Traditional' facility and so made our way to the four large concrete gers for each team of 15 or so teachers that the school had been arbitrarily divided into. The weather yesterday and today has been ridiculously warm: getting out of the bus into the sunlight of this sheltered valley really felt like spring.
By 11.30 we'd settled into our temporary home: Russian MTV playing on the flat-screen TV, the chairs all gathered around a table on which fruit and drink had been piled. To allow one more person to take a seat I sat on a bedside cabinet which was just as comfortable as the flat-seated wooden chairs - when I offered to bring a second one over I was told that while it might be ok for me to sit on a cabinet, it wouldn't do for Mongolians. I later got in trouble for leaning on one of the fake ger's two fake centreposts and then for walking between the centreposts across the non-existent hearth; this was poor ger etiquette, even in a fake ger: although the teacher who informed me of the first custom broke it herself within five minutes and most teachers didn't show much compunction about crossing the hearth.
We started the day, of course, with a vodka toast, and much wishing each other a happy Teachers' Day. Then we went to the giant concrete ger restaurant for lunch with the rest of our colleagues. For all my sneering at the ugliness of this luxury camp, the food was very good. Of course we had more vodka with the meal, and glasses of Grants Whisky too to toast the success of two of our prize-winning teachers. As Grants is so much more expensive than even the very best vodka here, my colleagues did their best to like it, albeit with somewhat confused expressions on their faces.
A humorous film made by each of the teams in the past week was shown, for which Oscars were awarded. Best Female Actor went to a male teacher - not previously known for being in a great deal of touch with his feminine side, too say the least - who did an extremely entertaining Les Dawson-esque routine. I'm not sure which film was made by my team; presumably owing to some kind of unfortunate error of communication, I hadn't been asked to be in it. There were a lot of speeches and giving of prizes and plaques. Everybody seemed to be having a very good time. After a decent amount of food and an indecent amount of alcohol we merrily made our way outside for numerous games and challenges.
In the end the only challenge I took part in as a participant was the tug-o-war, and I'm afraid that my team, for which I was the anchor, got pretty quickly and convincingly defeated. I really think that the rest of my team has to take the blame for their poor coordination. I was a very enthusiastic spectator to the extremely serious sumo wrestling bouts, of which the female contests seemed particularly aggressively fought. Sumo is a very popular here since the rise of Ulaanbaatar's champion Yokozuna; I have yet to witness the Japanese variety but can safely say that I am at least a convert to Drunken Female Teachers' Sumo.
There were no horses available to hire for a trek yesterday, which is probably as well. Instead with a few of my colleagues I climbed the mountain over our camp in time to catch the spectacular sunset. Fist to the top I was also very excited to see a very large dark brown-feathered bird gliding from the forest on the far side of the hill, across the ridge below me and out across the valley. My colleagues insist that I can't have seen an eagle, but it was a very big bird of some kind, and I'm glad I saw it.
Back at the restaurant we had our evening meal accompanied by more vodka, whisky, Russian champagne and Bulgarian wine. This was followed by a very enthusiastically danced disco. Finally, before leaving we returned to our team ger to polish off remaining beer, tangerines and pseudo-Ferrero Rocher (actually, of all fake brands, Russian chocolates seem just as good if not better than the brands they rip off). My colleagues very kindly and easily agreed to sing some traditional Mongolian songs, which I am now determined to learn. Most of the teachers joined in, and they sang very feelingly and well. And indeed, once they'd started with the singing it carried on onto the bus and all the way back to the school. I think there was a plan to invade a night club somewhere, but fortunately the people I caught a taxi with dropped me off at home, meaning I was very gratefully able to call it a night at 11pm.
No doubt the fresh air and exercise managed to dilute the excessive drinking, and I didn't feel too bad today. Went to the State Department Store to return the 1Gb memory stick which I bought 5 days ago and which stopped working after the second time I used it. The guy at the desk of the electronic goods section when he eventually deigned to serve me helpfully confirmed that the stick is indeed broken, but regretted that in spite of the piece of paper saying '1 year guarantee' the code on my receipt says that the product can only be returned on the day of purchase. He sympathetically suggested that I speak to a manager on the 5th floor. Following directions on that floor I found a corridor with two dozen assorted despairing wretches standing and sitting on the floor ouside an ornate office door bearing a sign in Mongolian. I turned away from the Kafka-esque scene with a deep breath, and resolved that the $30 spent on the stick needed to be considered a lesson learned, and so calmly walked away. I resolved not to shop at the State Department store again - although I took that not to include the Nomin supermarket at the back of the ground floor, where I stopped by to pick up some washing powder.
Crossing Sukhbaatar Square I saw an impressive military parade - the soldiers in red and blue with the sunlight shining from their gleaming pointed helmets as they marched with sabres and guns to the foot of the Sukhbaatar monument, where they slightly spoiled the effect of their neat and orderley marching by shuffling about somewhat comically so as to stand in an evenly spaced line. This and the accompanying brass band I later realised was to be for the President or Prime Minister to perform some ceremony to mark Sukhbaatar's birthday Unfortunately, I had to get to the school to tutor a student and sadly I did not have my camera with me to record the very impressive scene.
I get numerous text messages from my network provider everyday on my mobile phone. Mostly I can't understand them - although sometimes I can see that they're the times of movies on TV, or of the Tugrik's exchange value to the dollar. Occassionally there is an English 'Word of the Day' accompanied by a translation in Mongolian. Today's word is 'fecund'. There was even a helpful example sentence given to illustrate the word in context: 'That field over there is fecund.' I imagine that all over the city there are now students of English fervently hoping to asked whether they can recommend anywhere as particularly suited for the planting of crops. They're sure to be gutted if there are no fecund fields in sight when the question is asked, though.
It is eerily quiet in the school today, only a very few members of staff coming in for the day after the annual Teachers' Day celebrations.
The socialist era gave Mongolia special days celebrating the acchievement of many different workers - there's a Builders' Day, a Nurses' Day, etc. My colleague who told me this proudly informed me that Teachers' Day was the first such holiday and, as everybody has had a teacher or has a child who currently has one, it is by far the most important. Mongolia's revolutionary hero, Sukhbaatar, believed that Mongolia needed modern and effective education, so in honour of him and as a mark of extreme respect for the most noble of professions, Teachers' Day is held on the weekend closest to Sukhbaatar's birthday (which I believe is today, Friday 2nd Feb).
Preparations for the day were impressive. We were told to be at the school for 9am sharp to take a bus out to a Ger holiday camp for the day. Indeed, by 9.45am everyone had arrived and we were ready to go. There was a very good turnout, although my American colleagues opted out of the experience (ominously owing to having previously experienced Teachers' Day). I helped load up one of the busses with the boxes of fruit, crates of soft drinks, and the six crates of beer and two crates of vodka.
We drove west through the city in the direction of the airport. As we neared the power stations the smog got thicker and thicker, until the power stations themselves as we passed were completely lost in the dirty yellow air, the tops of the smokle-belching chimneys somehow visible above and ghostly silhouettes of ger and ramshackle buildings in the foreground. I am glad I live in the east of the city.
We spent the day in a deluxe camp just outside the city, at the foot of the Bogd Khaan mountains. Our bus had turned off the paved road, and hurtled up a muddy track to the camp, up in a valley above and out of view of the pollution around the city. It's a beautiful location for an impressively ugly camp. In the 'Modern' part of the camp there's a new hotel building made from Lego and surrounding it a dozen of Barratt's finest semi-detached housing cubes.
We, however, were in the 'Traditional' facility and so made our way to the four large concrete gers for each team of 15 or so teachers that the school had been arbitrarily divided into. The weather yesterday and today has been ridiculously warm: getting out of the bus into the sunlight of this sheltered valley really felt like spring. By 11.30 we'd settled into our temporary home: Russian MTV playing on the flat-screen TV, the chairs all gathered around a table on which fruit and drink had been piled. To allow one more person to take a seat I sat on a bedside cabinet which was just as comfortable as the flat-seated wooden chairs - when I offered to bring a second one over I was told that while it might be ok for me to sit on a cabinet, it wouldn't do for Mongolians. I later got in trouble for leaning on one of the fake ger's two fake centreposts and then for walking between the centreposts across the non-existent hearth; this was poor ger etiquette, even in a fake ger: although the teacher who informed me of the first custom broke it herself within five minutes and most teachers didn't show much compunction about crossing the hearth.
We started the day, of course, with a vodka toast, and much wishing each other a happy Teachers' Day. Then we went to the giant concrete ger restaurant for lunch with the rest of our colleagues. For all my sneering at the ugliness of this luxury camp, the food was very good. Of course we had more vodka with the meal, and glasses of Grants Whisky too to toast the success of two of our prize-winning teachers. As Grants is so much more expensive than even the very best vodka here, my colleagues did their best to like it, albeit with somewhat confused expressions on their faces.
A humorous film made by each of the teams in the past week was shown, for which Oscars were awarded. Best Female Actor went to a male teacher - not previously known for being in a great deal of touch with his feminine side, too say the least - who did an extremely entertaining Les Dawson-esque routine. I'm not sure which film was made by my team; presumably owing to some kind of unfortunate error of communication, I hadn't been asked to be in it. There were a lot of speeches and giving of prizes and plaques. Everybody seemed to be having a very good time. After a decent amount of food and an indecent amount of alcohol we merrily made our way outside for numerous games and challenges.
In the end the only challenge I took part in as a participant was the tug-o-war, and I'm afraid that my team, for which I was the anchor, got pretty quickly and convincingly defeated. I really think that the rest of my team has to take the blame for their poor coordination. I was a very enthusiastic spectator to the extremely serious sumo wrestling bouts, of which the female contests seemed particularly aggressively fought. Sumo is a very popular here since the rise of Ulaanbaatar's champion Yokozuna; I have yet to witness the Japanese variety but can safely say that I am at least a convert to Drunken Female Teachers' Sumo.
There were no horses available to hire for a trek yesterday, which is probably as well. Instead with a few of my colleagues I climbed the mountain over our camp in time to catch the spectacular sunset. Fist to the top I was also very excited to see a very large dark brown-feathered bird gliding from the forest on the far side of the hill, across the ridge below me and out across the valley. My colleagues insist that I can't have seen an eagle, but it was a very big bird of some kind, and I'm glad I saw it.
Back at the restaurant we had our evening meal accompanied by more vodka, whisky, Russian champagne and Bulgarian wine. This was followed by a very enthusiastically danced disco. Finally, before leaving we returned to our team ger to polish off remaining beer, tangerines and pseudo-Ferrero Rocher (actually, of all fake brands, Russian chocolates seem just as good if not better than the brands they rip off). My colleagues very kindly and easily agreed to sing some traditional Mongolian songs, which I am now determined to learn. Most of the teachers joined in, and they sang very feelingly and well. And indeed, once they'd started with the singing it carried on onto the bus and all the way back to the school. I think there was a plan to invade a night club somewhere, but fortunately the people I caught a taxi with dropped me off at home, meaning I was very gratefully able to call it a night at 11pm.
No doubt the fresh air and exercise managed to dilute the excessive drinking, and I didn't feel too bad today. Went to the State Department Store to return the 1Gb memory stick which I bought 5 days ago and which stopped working after the second time I used it. The guy at the desk of the electronic goods section when he eventually deigned to serve me helpfully confirmed that the stick is indeed broken, but regretted that in spite of the piece of paper saying '1 year guarantee' the code on my receipt says that the product can only be returned on the day of purchase. He sympathetically suggested that I speak to a manager on the 5th floor. Following directions on that floor I found a corridor with two dozen assorted despairing wretches standing and sitting on the floor ouside an ornate office door bearing a sign in Mongolian. I turned away from the Kafka-esque scene with a deep breath, and resolved that the $30 spent on the stick needed to be considered a lesson learned, and so calmly walked away. I resolved not to shop at the State Department store again - although I took that not to include the Nomin supermarket at the back of the ground floor, where I stopped by to pick up some washing powder.
Crossing Sukhbaatar Square I saw an impressive military parade - the soldiers in red and blue with the sunlight shining from their gleaming pointed helmets as they marched with sabres and guns to the foot of the Sukhbaatar monument, where they slightly spoiled the effect of their neat and orderley marching by shuffling about somewhat comically so as to stand in an evenly spaced line. This and the accompanying brass band I later realised was to be for the President or Prime Minister to perform some ceremony to mark Sukhbaatar's birthday Unfortunately, I had to get to the school to tutor a student and sadly I did not have my camera with me to record the very impressive scene.
I get numerous text messages from my network provider everyday on my mobile phone. Mostly I can't understand them - although sometimes I can see that they're the times of movies on TV, or of the Tugrik's exchange value to the dollar. Occassionally there is an English 'Word of the Day' accompanied by a translation in Mongolian. Today's word is 'fecund'. There was even a helpful example sentence given to illustrate the word in context: 'That field over there is fecund.' I imagine that all over the city there are now students of English fervently hoping to asked whether they can recommend anywhere as particularly suited for the planting of crops. They're sure to be gutted if there are no fecund fields in sight when the question is asked, though.
Tuesday, 30 January 2007
Apple Praised and Censured, Divine Intervention, Teachers' Day
Tuesday 30th January 2007
Just to reassure those of you who may have been thinking of starting up a crisis fund to help me out of my recent technical difficulties - my iBook eventually recovered, through its own mysterious means. No damage done - although the date on the calendar was mysteriously changed to 1970. I should also post my apologies to Project Gutenberg and the author(s) of the King James Bible - it seems that iTunes and its system-choking Album Artwork feature were the source of my processing meltdown.
Furthermore, I was paid in full by my dear Turkish friend, thanks, apparently, to the good grace of Allah, who saw to it that the school managed to sell some text books. I am reluctant, however, to have future remuneration dependent on the intervention of the deity. Some heated words were regretably spoken last night, but, cash in my pocket, I don't hold any hard feelings.
Meanwhile, Thursday will be "Teachers' Day" for which all kinds of exciting activities have been planned at a ger-restaurant outside the city. I can't reveal much about the planned activities as the meeting I was required to attend today for my 'team'(?) at the forthcoming festivities was held entirely in Mongolian and - presumably to allow me the thrill of surprise - noone bothered to translate any of it. Watch this space.
Weather report: Conditions have been sub-tropical: Saturday was a sweltering -6c with a breeze that I would have sworn was balmy. This has cleared the smog, although since Saturday there has been a bit of a bite in the air again.
Just to reassure those of you who may have been thinking of starting up a crisis fund to help me out of my recent technical difficulties - my iBook eventually recovered, through its own mysterious means. No damage done - although the date on the calendar was mysteriously changed to 1970. I should also post my apologies to Project Gutenberg and the author(s) of the King James Bible - it seems that iTunes and its system-choking Album Artwork feature were the source of my processing meltdown.
Furthermore, I was paid in full by my dear Turkish friend, thanks, apparently, to the good grace of Allah, who saw to it that the school managed to sell some text books. I am reluctant, however, to have future remuneration dependent on the intervention of the deity. Some heated words were regretably spoken last night, but, cash in my pocket, I don't hold any hard feelings.
Meanwhile, Thursday will be "Teachers' Day" for which all kinds of exciting activities have been planned at a ger-restaurant outside the city. I can't reveal much about the planned activities as the meeting I was required to attend today for my 'team'(?) at the forthcoming festivities was held entirely in Mongolian and - presumably to allow me the thrill of surprise - noone bothered to translate any of it. Watch this space.
Weather report: Conditions have been sub-tropical: Saturday was a sweltering -6c with a breeze that I would have sworn was balmy. This has cleared the smog, although since Saturday there has been a bit of a bite in the air again.
Monday, 29 January 2007
Technical Problems, Performing Cats, Nurses are Women
Monday 29th January 2007
Thursday I had the joy of experiencing meltdown with my iBook, quite possibly as a result of downloading the King James Bible from the Project Gutenberg site. My laptop now won't boot up, which may be repairable with a system restore disc - unfortunately mine is nestled away in a packing case somewhere in Liverpool, and Apple don't seem to have got an awful lot of suppliers out here in Mongolia.
I cheered myself up by going to see the visiting Russian circus on Saturday afternoon. I was particularly drawn by the feature in the UB Post which promised performing dogs and cats. I was not disappointed - my particular favourite being the cat which lay on its back in a special harness and rolled a ball on its feet. The acrobats and trapeze artists were all Mongolian and pretty impressive. On the whole though, the circus was a very scrappy affair. The kids in the seats surrounding us had been to see it three times, and mostly came for the tigers in the Grand Finale. One of the kids admonished me for clapping too enthusiastically during a trapeze act.
Through asking my colleagues and students I have learned that the overwhelming majority of Mongolians express a marked aversion to cats. By way of explanation I have been told a rather involved story concerning a Buddhist monk who crucified a cat and set the creature adrift on a river. The cat was rescued and nursed back to health. Years later the monk passed by the cat's home and the vengeful creature attacked him and bit through his jugular. Well, so I was told.
Over the weekend I worked recording a CD of basic English grammar - spending hours reading out lists of words and sentences such as: "The pen is on the table", "Mr Smith is going to work", and "Nurses are women." The grammar book is the work of my Turkish night school employer, a very charming man and tireless self-promoter. His own name finds its way into his exercises, such as "Our English Teacher Mr ------ is very good" and "'Who are two good writers?' 'Charles Dickens and Mr ------ are two good writers.'" I haven't actually been paid for my work yet, which situation is almost made worthwhile by the overblown excuses and promises calling down God as a witness that I will certainly be paid by noon tomorrow. I'm due to work at the night school this evening - for the fourth day running I was promised I would be paid by noon yesterday - that he would phone me and come to wherever I was to bring me my money. I am looking forward to hearing his latest excuse this evening. In the meantime, I am looking to find another evening job.
Thursday I had the joy of experiencing meltdown with my iBook, quite possibly as a result of downloading the King James Bible from the Project Gutenberg site. My laptop now won't boot up, which may be repairable with a system restore disc - unfortunately mine is nestled away in a packing case somewhere in Liverpool, and Apple don't seem to have got an awful lot of suppliers out here in Mongolia.
I cheered myself up by going to see the visiting Russian circus on Saturday afternoon. I was particularly drawn by the feature in the UB Post which promised performing dogs and cats. I was not disappointed - my particular favourite being the cat which lay on its back in a special harness and rolled a ball on its feet. The acrobats and trapeze artists were all Mongolian and pretty impressive. On the whole though, the circus was a very scrappy affair. The kids in the seats surrounding us had been to see it three times, and mostly came for the tigers in the Grand Finale. One of the kids admonished me for clapping too enthusiastically during a trapeze act.
Through asking my colleagues and students I have learned that the overwhelming majority of Mongolians express a marked aversion to cats. By way of explanation I have been told a rather involved story concerning a Buddhist monk who crucified a cat and set the creature adrift on a river. The cat was rescued and nursed back to health. Years later the monk passed by the cat's home and the vengeful creature attacked him and bit through his jugular. Well, so I was told.
Over the weekend I worked recording a CD of basic English grammar - spending hours reading out lists of words and sentences such as: "The pen is on the table", "Mr Smith is going to work", and "Nurses are women." The grammar book is the work of my Turkish night school employer, a very charming man and tireless self-promoter. His own name finds its way into his exercises, such as "Our English Teacher Mr ------ is very good" and "'Who are two good writers?' 'Charles Dickens and Mr ------ are two good writers.'" I haven't actually been paid for my work yet, which situation is almost made worthwhile by the overblown excuses and promises calling down God as a witness that I will certainly be paid by noon tomorrow. I'm due to work at the night school this evening - for the fourth day running I was promised I would be paid by noon yesterday - that he would phone me and come to wherever I was to bring me my money. I am looking forward to hearing his latest excuse this evening. In the meantime, I am looking to find another evening job.
Monday, 8 January 2007
Workaholic, Encore en Bogdkhaan Uul, Bones, Rocks, Peanuts
Monday 8th January 2007
It has been a while since I’ve had the chance to sit down and write either this or the many emails and letters I have promised people (sorry). I could blame myself (congenital laziness, watching too much TV, having nothing worth writing, etc) but the fact is that my conniving employer tricked me into agreeing to produce 8 exam papers by today. It would be “no problem at all,” I boasted. I managed to ‘finish’ (well, slightly more than start) 4 papers by about 9.30pm last night, when I angrily threw my books aside, cursed my boss for allowing me to agree to such a head-wrecking task, and watched a DVD of ‘Snakes on a Plane’ (accompanied by a few vodka and cokes) in rebellion. I dreamt of exam questions all night. When I set a reading piece in the classroom, I have no problem coming up with a half dozen thoughtful and engaging questions that manage to both test the students’ abilities and enable them to learn from the process. Multiple choice, fill in the blanks (which is what are preferred for exam papers here) I find it takes me half an hour to come up with one facetiously worded question, ie - (from my first paper) Complete the following sentence using a gerund:
It is very annoying for me ________(deal) with sudden changes in my schedule.
I didn’t even know what a gerund was until a few weeks ago. And I spelled sentence ‘sentance.’
Of course, I took the correct approach to informing my boss that I hadn’t done the work I’d agreed to do: I went to her office first thing this morning and complained at great length about my incompetence in the area of test writing. I’ve been given a week’s reprieve.
It is very refreshing being in a job where, owing to a complete absence of any other suitable candidates, I can be honest about my failings. There is no need to lie and claim to be punctual, hard-working, competent, etc. Today I went to visit the Turkish teacher’s language school. He very much wants me to start working for him. At present his courses are indeed taught by “100% foreign English teachers” as his literature boasts, but he has not attempted to hide from me that he really, really needs to hire a native speaker. We discussed terms. “I have to tell you,” I said, “I’ve no previous experience teaching English, am extremely lazy and not at all drawn to the idea of hard work.” I start next Monday, teaching 2 hours in the evening Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.
I’m promised that I’ll be paid a decent salary - I’ll check exactly how much tomorrow (if it’s T10,000, ie £4 an hour then that buys a decent meal at a restaurant). After talking terms though (and me further saying that the salary is very important to me regardless of my ability) my new boss then told me that one of my students will be a member of the Mongolian group Guys666! That’s the fellers who are currently pictured on the back of Hite beer cans, and who I previously mentioned in the blog here.If I’d known that I’d be teaching Guys666 then I would have agreed to work for nothing.
In all serious, though, although I am congenitally lazy, I think I may enjoy the tutoring job, and it should be an interesting change to teach students who are all motivated to learn.
Yesterday, other than spending a few weary hours in the evening attempting to work, I spent the day out hiking in the Bogdkhaan Uul again - this time dragging two young french travellers, Mathieu and Francois, along with me, so as not to be trespassing on my own. There was fresh snow on the ground, creating a pleasant contrast with my previous hike; the sun, of course, shone as brightly as ever and again there was barely a breath of wind. Crossed the path of many more people out gathering firewood. At the top of a mountain pass Francois found two camel heads and two horse heads left at the foot of a pile of stones (an ‘ovobo’ I think the word is) presumably for shamanic reasons.Unfortunately the powdery fresh snow was not as good for sledging on the plastic sack I’d saved from my previous trip. Mathieu and Francois are travelling on the Trans-Mongolian, with the aim of eventually heading to Kazakhstan and driving back to France. They keep a blog of their travels at onetrip-onenoise.over-blog.com (written in French for some reason)
Saturday I went to the Museum of Natural History. The Gobi desert has been the location of some of the most important finds in palaentology, and Ulaanbaatar has some of the most significant finds in this splendid and very soviet era museum. I was most excited to see the fossil of two dinosaurs who died locked in (assuredly) mortal combat: the only such dinosaur remains in the world. I don’t know what dinosaurologists say, but my 2 minute inspection led me to conclude that the smaller dinosaur, which looks in a pretty bad shape, managed, with a kick of its sharply clawed feet, to rip the stomach out of the more powerful-looking one in its death-throes. There are also about half a dozen dinosaur egg nests, and (ah!) a fossilized nest of deceased newly hatched dinosaurs.
An irresistable appeal to me of the Museum of Natural History is the building itself, which is as soviet-era forbidding and run-down as you could hope to imagine. I will return someday soon and pay the T5000 photography fee to take pictures of the walls and dimly lit corridors. This is a real Natural History museum, with stuffed birds and insects pinned to cards. No high falutin’ interactive displays - unless you count iron meteorites that you can rub or try to pick up (heavy) when the attendants aren’t watching.
As I didn’t bring my notebook with me I couldn’t jot down any of the gems of asian English from the display labels. To compensate, here’s the label from the back of a chinese packet of salted peanuts:
THIS PRODUCT IS MADE OF SELECTED SHANDONG GREAT PEANUT KERNELS AND PROCESSED WITH ADVANCED EQUIPMENT AND TECHNOLOGY OF THE WORLD. IT IS TASTY AND CRISP, NOT OILY, AND IS A KIND OF CONVENIENT TOURING FOOD AS WELL. YOU MAY CHOOSE IT AS A PRESENT OR ENTERTAIN GUESTS WITH IT. IF IT GOES WITH TEA AND WINE, A NICE FLAVOUR COULD BE ENJOYED.
It has been a while since I’ve had the chance to sit down and write either this or the many emails and letters I have promised people (sorry). I could blame myself (congenital laziness, watching too much TV, having nothing worth writing, etc) but the fact is that my conniving employer tricked me into agreeing to produce 8 exam papers by today. It would be “no problem at all,” I boasted. I managed to ‘finish’ (well, slightly more than start) 4 papers by about 9.30pm last night, when I angrily threw my books aside, cursed my boss for allowing me to agree to such a head-wrecking task, and watched a DVD of ‘Snakes on a Plane’ (accompanied by a few vodka and cokes) in rebellion. I dreamt of exam questions all night. When I set a reading piece in the classroom, I have no problem coming up with a half dozen thoughtful and engaging questions that manage to both test the students’ abilities and enable them to learn from the process. Multiple choice, fill in the blanks (which is what are preferred for exam papers here) I find it takes me half an hour to come up with one facetiously worded question, ie - (from my first paper) Complete the following sentence using a gerund:
It is very annoying for me ________(deal) with sudden changes in my schedule.
I didn’t even know what a gerund was until a few weeks ago. And I spelled sentence ‘sentance.’
Of course, I took the correct approach to informing my boss that I hadn’t done the work I’d agreed to do: I went to her office first thing this morning and complained at great length about my incompetence in the area of test writing. I’ve been given a week’s reprieve.
It is very refreshing being in a job where, owing to a complete absence of any other suitable candidates, I can be honest about my failings. There is no need to lie and claim to be punctual, hard-working, competent, etc. Today I went to visit the Turkish teacher’s language school. He very much wants me to start working for him. At present his courses are indeed taught by “100% foreign English teachers” as his literature boasts, but he has not attempted to hide from me that he really, really needs to hire a native speaker. We discussed terms. “I have to tell you,” I said, “I’ve no previous experience teaching English, am extremely lazy and not at all drawn to the idea of hard work.” I start next Monday, teaching 2 hours in the evening Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.
I’m promised that I’ll be paid a decent salary - I’ll check exactly how much tomorrow (if it’s T10,000, ie £4 an hour then that buys a decent meal at a restaurant). After talking terms though (and me further saying that the salary is very important to me regardless of my ability) my new boss then told me that one of my students will be a member of the Mongolian group Guys666! That’s the fellers who are currently pictured on the back of Hite beer cans, and who I previously mentioned in the blog here.If I’d known that I’d be teaching Guys666 then I would have agreed to work for nothing.
In all serious, though, although I am congenitally lazy, I think I may enjoy the tutoring job, and it should be an interesting change to teach students who are all motivated to learn.
Yesterday, other than spending a few weary hours in the evening attempting to work, I spent the day out hiking in the Bogdkhaan Uul again - this time dragging two young french travellers, Mathieu and Francois, along with me, so as not to be trespassing on my own. There was fresh snow on the ground, creating a pleasant contrast with my previous hike; the sun, of course, shone as brightly as ever and again there was barely a breath of wind. Crossed the path of many more people out gathering firewood. At the top of a mountain pass Francois found two camel heads and two horse heads left at the foot of a pile of stones (an ‘ovobo’ I think the word is) presumably for shamanic reasons.Unfortunately the powdery fresh snow was not as good for sledging on the plastic sack I’d saved from my previous trip. Mathieu and Francois are travelling on the Trans-Mongolian, with the aim of eventually heading to Kazakhstan and driving back to France. They keep a blog of their travels at onetrip-onenoise.over-blog.com (written in French for some reason)
Saturday I went to the Museum of Natural History. The Gobi desert has been the location of some of the most important finds in palaentology, and Ulaanbaatar has some of the most significant finds in this splendid and very soviet era museum. I was most excited to see the fossil of two dinosaurs who died locked in (assuredly) mortal combat: the only such dinosaur remains in the world. I don’t know what dinosaurologists say, but my 2 minute inspection led me to conclude that the smaller dinosaur, which looks in a pretty bad shape, managed, with a kick of its sharply clawed feet, to rip the stomach out of the more powerful-looking one in its death-throes. There are also about half a dozen dinosaur egg nests, and (ah!) a fossilized nest of deceased newly hatched dinosaurs.
An irresistable appeal to me of the Museum of Natural History is the building itself, which is as soviet-era forbidding and run-down as you could hope to imagine. I will return someday soon and pay the T5000 photography fee to take pictures of the walls and dimly lit corridors. This is a real Natural History museum, with stuffed birds and insects pinned to cards. No high falutin’ interactive displays - unless you count iron meteorites that you can rub or try to pick up (heavy) when the attendants aren’t watching.
As I didn’t bring my notebook with me I couldn’t jot down any of the gems of asian English from the display labels. To compensate, here’s the label from the back of a chinese packet of salted peanuts:
THIS PRODUCT IS MADE OF SELECTED SHANDONG GREAT PEANUT KERNELS AND PROCESSED WITH ADVANCED EQUIPMENT AND TECHNOLOGY OF THE WORLD. IT IS TASTY AND CRISP, NOT OILY, AND IS A KIND OF CONVENIENT TOURING FOOD AS WELL. YOU MAY CHOOSE IT AS A PRESENT OR ENTERTAIN GUESTS WITH IT. IF IT GOES WITH TEA AND WINE, A NICE FLAVOUR COULD BE ENJOYED.
Thursday, 4 January 2007
Television, Inertia
Thursday 4th January 2007
I’m told that we’ve been having an exceptionally mild winter. There were only a handful of days it snowed through December, and the temperature usually remained above -20c during the day. It has snowed all day today - a very light and powdery snow, as previously, but the constant fall has led now to a little over a half inch on the ground; for what may be the first time in my month here there are irregular little gusts of wind. Winter may be coming on.
School continues fine, ups and downs, but continues, and behaviour has improved immensely. Sadly, the students are starting to make salient criticisms of my teaching methods and pertinent suggestions, forcing me to pay more attention to them and their needs. Sigh.
Today we had fish for lunch! Rather than adapting to the diet I’ve been getting fussier and fussier over my eating at school. I just can’t work up an appetite for a mound of meat and rice, in very much a natural gravy, accompanied by three or four slices of carrot - day in and day out. The dinner ladies don’t seem to be able to overcome the instinct to give me manly-sized servings - possibly because I always do my best to prevent them from seeing how much I am throwing away at the end of every lunch
I continue to face unanticipated requests to do additional work: this week, to produce 6 exam papers by Monday (so far managed to do about a quarter of one), which I agreed to without any thought about how difficult it is to write a balanced test paper. I suppose I will have to write six deeply unbalanced papers instead. What I did whinge about was being asked to teach 4 additional hours of lessons for a month to coach 6 leading students for an upcoming inter-school English ‘Olympiad’. A - I need those four hours to prepare for (and, more importantly, recover from) my scheduled lessons. B - If the students did a fraction of the work expected of them, maybe they wouldn’t need additional coaching? And if they do need coaching then why don’t their wealthy parents pay for it? Graciously, I agreed to do it.
Later in the day a Turkish part-time teacher asked whether I might be interested in any work at his English language school - so I’ll be meeting with him after school Monday. Which reminds me that I’d promised to volunteer my greatly-in-demand teaching abilities to the CNCF this week - must give them a call again tomorrow.
The question now is whether I can fit all these commitments into my busy schedule. I have become a bit of a TV addict since finding my way about the schedules. Other than The Simpsons, Arrested Development, The Office (American version - which, dare I say, is fresher and funnier than the original -sorry) and Seinfeld, the Korean KBS World channel usually has English subtitles has some great soap operas and historical dramas; there’s a Japanese channel which doesn’t have subtitles but an excellent sci-fi kung-fu series which seems to be on all the time, and is maybe about a group of hot young women and cool dudes half of whom have been brainwashed into hunting down the others (I think); Russian TV has a lot of slapstick comedy programs which are pretty easy to follow - the main comedian in a sketch show bears an uncanny resemblance to Vic Reeves, with blond hair and a tash. Sadly the dozens of Mongolian channels are less than compelling on the whole - although there’s always a music video worth catching on some time - I saw the ‘Beer Band’ on one channel recently, with my good friend Lhagvaa (or Ganko, I’m still unclear on the name) on vocals. Unfortunately I don’t get the Knowledge Channel - a Mongolian channel which shows BBC DVDs (‘Life of Plants’, ‘Walking With Dinosaurs’, etc) all day (at the end of the program a blue ‘DVD Eject’ screen comes up, followed by ‘DVD Loading’ and ‘Play’). I can always catch a Premiership game if I want to see the footy - pirated from Sky Sports or Setanta. I don’t think much attention is paid to international copyright here yet. It doesn’t appear to be possible anywhere in the country to buy CDs or DVDs that aren’t Chinese copies (and on the whole very high quality copies too, except of latest releases, which are usually video-cammed).
I am ashamed to admit that I have so far made no attempt to find out where I can catch some traditional Mongolian music, which I hope to rectify soon. Not that I’m not getting enough culture, as you can well see. Fortunately, I have run out of the delicious bubble-and-squeak type concoction that my cleaner knocked up for me from the odds and ends in my fridge, and which I’ve been living off for a week (supplemented by a more than adequate carrot and potato soup which I cooked myself) - so I may possibly be able to save ‘Snakes on a Plane’ for another evening, and to brave the elements and get myself out of my cosy apartment to a restaurant to eat this evening. Damn, Seinfeld’s started, and I’ve only seen this episode a few times before - I’ll head out to Los Bandidos curry house just as soon as it’s over. And if I’m not back in time for The Office, well, so be it. I can buy the whole season from the video store for about a fiver anyhow.
I’m told that we’ve been having an exceptionally mild winter. There were only a handful of days it snowed through December, and the temperature usually remained above -20c during the day. It has snowed all day today - a very light and powdery snow, as previously, but the constant fall has led now to a little over a half inch on the ground; for what may be the first time in my month here there are irregular little gusts of wind. Winter may be coming on.
School continues fine, ups and downs, but continues, and behaviour has improved immensely. Sadly, the students are starting to make salient criticisms of my teaching methods and pertinent suggestions, forcing me to pay more attention to them and their needs. Sigh.
Today we had fish for lunch! Rather than adapting to the diet I’ve been getting fussier and fussier over my eating at school. I just can’t work up an appetite for a mound of meat and rice, in very much a natural gravy, accompanied by three or four slices of carrot - day in and day out. The dinner ladies don’t seem to be able to overcome the instinct to give me manly-sized servings - possibly because I always do my best to prevent them from seeing how much I am throwing away at the end of every lunch
I continue to face unanticipated requests to do additional work: this week, to produce 6 exam papers by Monday (so far managed to do about a quarter of one), which I agreed to without any thought about how difficult it is to write a balanced test paper. I suppose I will have to write six deeply unbalanced papers instead. What I did whinge about was being asked to teach 4 additional hours of lessons for a month to coach 6 leading students for an upcoming inter-school English ‘Olympiad’. A - I need those four hours to prepare for (and, more importantly, recover from) my scheduled lessons. B - If the students did a fraction of the work expected of them, maybe they wouldn’t need additional coaching? And if they do need coaching then why don’t their wealthy parents pay for it? Graciously, I agreed to do it.
Later in the day a Turkish part-time teacher asked whether I might be interested in any work at his English language school - so I’ll be meeting with him after school Monday. Which reminds me that I’d promised to volunteer my greatly-in-demand teaching abilities to the CNCF this week - must give them a call again tomorrow.
The question now is whether I can fit all these commitments into my busy schedule. I have become a bit of a TV addict since finding my way about the schedules. Other than The Simpsons, Arrested Development, The Office (American version - which, dare I say, is fresher and funnier than the original -sorry) and Seinfeld, the Korean KBS World channel usually has English subtitles has some great soap operas and historical dramas; there’s a Japanese channel which doesn’t have subtitles but an excellent sci-fi kung-fu series which seems to be on all the time, and is maybe about a group of hot young women and cool dudes half of whom have been brainwashed into hunting down the others (I think); Russian TV has a lot of slapstick comedy programs which are pretty easy to follow - the main comedian in a sketch show bears an uncanny resemblance to Vic Reeves, with blond hair and a tash. Sadly the dozens of Mongolian channels are less than compelling on the whole - although there’s always a music video worth catching on some time - I saw the ‘Beer Band’ on one channel recently, with my good friend Lhagvaa (or Ganko, I’m still unclear on the name) on vocals. Unfortunately I don’t get the Knowledge Channel - a Mongolian channel which shows BBC DVDs (‘Life of Plants’, ‘Walking With Dinosaurs’, etc) all day (at the end of the program a blue ‘DVD Eject’ screen comes up, followed by ‘DVD Loading’ and ‘Play’). I can always catch a Premiership game if I want to see the footy - pirated from Sky Sports or Setanta. I don’t think much attention is paid to international copyright here yet. It doesn’t appear to be possible anywhere in the country to buy CDs or DVDs that aren’t Chinese copies (and on the whole very high quality copies too, except of latest releases, which are usually video-cammed).
I am ashamed to admit that I have so far made no attempt to find out where I can catch some traditional Mongolian music, which I hope to rectify soon. Not that I’m not getting enough culture, as you can well see. Fortunately, I have run out of the delicious bubble-and-squeak type concoction that my cleaner knocked up for me from the odds and ends in my fridge, and which I’ve been living off for a week (supplemented by a more than adequate carrot and potato soup which I cooked myself) - so I may possibly be able to save ‘Snakes on a Plane’ for another evening, and to brave the elements and get myself out of my cosy apartment to a restaurant to eat this evening. Damn, Seinfeld’s started, and I’ve only seen this episode a few times before - I’ll head out to Los Bandidos curry house just as soon as it’s over. And if I’m not back in time for The Office, well, so be it. I can buy the whole season from the video store for about a fiver anyhow.
Tuesday, 19 December 2006
China's WTO Membership, Generosity, Serious Discipline Issues
Tuesday 19th December
Yesterday I went for a meal at a Chinese restaurant with one of the school’s Chinese teachers, Yuan Yuan, and her friend. On Friday Yuan Yuan had asked if I could help her friend by checking over her dissertation for her Masters degree. I would be very happy to help, I said, but it might take some time to check through it all. Oh, that was not a problem, her friend had “19 day” before she had to hand the work in. “19 days to do the work?” I asked. “No, 19 day, 12 month,” Yuan replied with a smile. “The 19th of December?” I asked, reluctant to hear the reply. Yuan smiled again and nodded: “Yes, 19 December.” “Next Tuesday, the 19th of December?” although by now the question was purely rhetorical. “Yes.”
The dissertation turned out to be 50 turgid pages of economics; the subject being the advantages and benefits of China’s membership of the WTO. Most of the english was passable, however there was a slight problem with inconsistencies in the text. I made a brief check on the internet and confirmed that China has been a member of the WTO since 2001; all the material that the student had lifted from the internet spoke of China’s future membership: almost the entire paper was written about possible outcomes of something that had already happened. I spent a good four hours of Friday night drinking vodka and orange and changing the tense of what seemed to be every sentence in the paper - and resisting the temptation to spice up the dissertation by turning it into a reckless argument in favour of democracy sprinkled with a few choice phrases about the beloved Chairman Mao or the ideological bankruptcy of the ruling Communist regime.
Anyhow, as thanks for my selfless generosity, Yuan and her friend treated me to a meal at one of their favourite restaurants. It was 10 minutes walk from school in the opposite direction from my apartment; just next-door to the Wrestling Palace. Disappointingly, no be-diapered Mongolian wrestlers were catching a quick snack between bouts - maybe next time. The food was very nice - Szechuan, I believe, and a welcome relief from the school meals and my own uninspired cooking ; which are between them now starting to grind me down a little. Not nearly as good as Beijing, of course, but far closer to Beijing than Chinese food in the UK. I have no idea how much it cost because I didn’t make even a token suggestion that I pay anything. During the meal (and very happily after we had already been served) I had the excitement of experiencing my first Ulaanbaatar power-outage. It seems that it was only our building affected as light still came in from the street, and in about 15 minutes the power was back on. Yuan Yuan also kindly taught me essential Mongolian taxi driver speak (if memory serves me correctly): “tsu “(left), “balong”(right) and tchigili (straight on). I now have about a half dozen things I can say, which at this rate I should have the vocabulary of an underachieving dullard by the end of my stay.
While we're on the subject of my selfless generosity, I somehow neglected to boast that after being paid Friday (joy), I took a walk down to the old State Department Store and bought my two very good friends and helpers (whose names I still don’t know - must remember to learn how to ask) from the apartment building a colouring book and pencils each - which I was able to give them when they called round early that evening to see if I needed any chores doing. I took a photograph as evidence of my joy-bringing generosity, which, while it may know bounds, is at any rate now proven.
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Yesterday I went for a meal at a Chinese restaurant with one of the school’s Chinese teachers, Yuan Yuan, and her friend. On Friday Yuan Yuan had asked if I could help her friend by checking over her dissertation for her Masters degree. I would be very happy to help, I said, but it might take some time to check through it all. Oh, that was not a problem, her friend had “19 day” before she had to hand the work in. “19 days to do the work?” I asked. “No, 19 day, 12 month,” Yuan replied with a smile. “The 19th of December?” I asked, reluctant to hear the reply. Yuan smiled again and nodded: “Yes, 19 December.” “Next Tuesday, the 19th of December?” although by now the question was purely rhetorical. “Yes.”
The dissertation turned out to be 50 turgid pages of economics; the subject being the advantages and benefits of China’s membership of the WTO. Most of the english was passable, however there was a slight problem with inconsistencies in the text. I made a brief check on the internet and confirmed that China has been a member of the WTO since 2001; all the material that the student had lifted from the internet spoke of China’s future membership: almost the entire paper was written about possible outcomes of something that had already happened. I spent a good four hours of Friday night drinking vodka and orange and changing the tense of what seemed to be every sentence in the paper - and resisting the temptation to spice up the dissertation by turning it into a reckless argument in favour of democracy sprinkled with a few choice phrases about the beloved Chairman Mao or the ideological bankruptcy of the ruling Communist regime.
Anyhow, as thanks for my selfless generosity, Yuan and her friend treated me to a meal at one of their favourite restaurants. It was 10 minutes walk from school in the opposite direction from my apartment; just next-door to the Wrestling Palace. Disappointingly, no be-diapered Mongolian wrestlers were catching a quick snack between bouts - maybe next time. The food was very nice - Szechuan, I believe, and a welcome relief from the school meals and my own uninspired cooking ; which are between them now starting to grind me down a little. Not nearly as good as Beijing, of course, but far closer to Beijing than Chinese food in the UK. I have no idea how much it cost because I didn’t make even a token suggestion that I pay anything. During the meal (and very happily after we had already been served) I had the excitement of experiencing my first Ulaanbaatar power-outage. It seems that it was only our building affected as light still came in from the street, and in about 15 minutes the power was back on. Yuan Yuan also kindly taught me essential Mongolian taxi driver speak (if memory serves me correctly): “tsu “(left), “balong”(right) and tchigili (straight on). I now have about a half dozen things I can say, which at this rate I should have the vocabulary of an underachieving dullard by the end of my stay.
While we're on the subject of my selfless generosity, I somehow neglected to boast that after being paid Friday (joy), I took a walk down to the old State Department Store and bought my two very good friends and helpers (whose names I still don’t know - must remember to learn how to ask) from the apartment building a colouring book and pencils each - which I was able to give them when they called round early that evening to see if I needed any chores doing. I took a photograph as evidence of my joy-bringing generosity, which, while it may know bounds, is at any rate now proven.
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