Today I spent the day interacting with students in the various classes I observed, meeting teachers and having dinner with a couple of the TLG teachers before calling it a day. The constant sneezing I thought I had escaped in my own state of Georgia has followed me. I cannot stop sneezing, the pollen floating in the air like snow. It is wearing me out.
A couple of things stood out to me in the classes I participated in. Firstly, the children are extremely involved in the lessons, for the most part that is. There are always the one or two that sit in the back and try to avoid doing anything. Students were called on to participate, to respond, to write on the board. One of the classes has two slow students, one who can hardly speak, sitting in the back of the room. I’ve been told that there are no resources dedicated to working with these kinds of students. Often their parents will attend school with them, the more severe, and help out when necessary.
This school goes from first to twelfth grade and has a population of about 600. The classes are comparable to home, between 30 and 35 in a class, even at the elementary level. Kindergarten is held in separate facilities. Sachkhere has a Russian oligarch benefactor who, having made this area his home, has poured money into the region, providing everyone with electricity, running water, a stove, a refrigerator, a huge pool complex here in the main city, and is in the process of refurbishing and in some cases rebuilding every school in the region. Sachkhere scores among the top of all the schools in Georgia outside of Tbilisi, the capital.
In the third grade English class I saw today, the children were fairly jumping out of their seats to answer, yelling for the teacher, raising their hands… it was wonderful to watch.
The ninth grade was doing a lesson on the advantages of joining the EU. Eka gave them seven minutes to read a passage from a two page reading, and then they each stood and recited from memory the paragraph they had read… incredible. I have never seen such prodigious memory. Even I could not have recited word-for-word a paragraph I had just read. The levels of English ranged from fairly fluent to difficulty with a single sentence, but they were all engaged, working with partners and attempting to get their work done.
The three floors of classrooms are airy and spacious, desks built for two with a bench incorporated. There are huge windows that look out on a courtyard and mountains. The concrete walls, empty of adornment for the most part, echo, particularly in the hallways where it is hard to even hear one’s own thoughts with the cacophony of shouts during class change. Walking through the dark high passageways, the children move to the walls to say hello in English. It seems there is an unwritten rule that anytime a student sees a foreigner, they must say “hello.” I see them working up their courage as they approach me in the street or in the market. Sometimes I help them along by saying it first. Occasionally, they make it as far as “How are you?” When asked how they are, they almost invariably say, “so-so.” I asked a teacher why everyone said so-so instead of fine. She said that perhaps out of a superstitious idea that if they say they are fine, they are asking for something bad to happen….
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