More thoughts.

I think it has hit me why I am finding it hard to decide what to do next. I think part of me just still wishes I was in the position to retire at 60 and do what I am supposed to do in life. There are two flaws though in this position. I have always been trying to work out what I am supposed to be doing in life, and I still have not worked it out. The other flaw is that it is years since we were warned that the age of retirement was going up and in truth there is a lot to be said for working, but ...yet I do not know what else to do, may be if my marriage had worked but given that it did not I am back on my Jack Jones.  Here there is a lot of community spirit which is nice for someone on my own, home there is my family and I love being with Nathan even now he is OOOMMMMMM and miss him lots.

Anyway enough of that.  Another extract from today.

One of the reasons my colleague and I were brought from England to teach English here was to "help" modernise teaching here.  There are a number of flaws or issues with this. Help modernise is often seen as end Soviet ways.  Yet everyone in Kyrgyzstan says education has gone down since Soviet days

I am not sure if my colleague uses soviet methods or not, but today's event certainly had rather negative overtones for me, I found the children singing and saluting like that (see previous video) a bit of a shock as I have never seen that before and the whole idea of an Olympiad just because the children have learned their alphabet that too seemed a bit crazy, but .... but..... although I did not like the overtones, what is great about such a system - the Americans use it too of course, is that people really do want to make an effort for something bigger than themselves at times and one of the best ways of improving education is to bring the family in and these special days do that very well. This one because it was just one class we were really able to focus and interact with the family, so although a lot was the usual performance stuff (my colleagues really do put a lot of work into these things and I am useless really in terms of assisting with the management of these things which is why I am asked to do and happy to do an official video but the consequence is that no English element is included which on this occasion I am very sad about) there was also a chance both in English and Maths to show the parents, grandparents etc, how we work with their kids. I like the year 1 teacher. in fact I like them all and I like a lot about their methods, here you can see how interactive she is. In fact for me it is too active, I cannot cope with the kids running up like this so in my class discourage it and I worry it excludes kids, but my method of having them all sit and congratulating those who know the answers is probably no more inclusive though I do insist everyone answers at least once for each element of the class.  I am very sad though today that I do not have a video of what we did to demonstrate the English element because the children helped spell out Friday 11th April on the board and then I like and demonstrated whether they liked a food or not by coming to the front and saying I like whatever was on their flashcard and those who did not like the food on their flashcard stayed seated.  However the best bit was after when the families were invited to join their child with a little book that they had each been given which also had I like and a food, I could hear people all around softly reading with me including some of the children who do not always participate in class. I know at the present my suggestion to parents that they come and have an English to help their child class is unlikely to get a response, (some do have some English to build on), but just having the chance to do something like this with everyone was brilliant.  I just wish I could share it with you.  Everyone seemed sing the anthem again at the end, and I will put yet another video together as soon as I can showing the whole event, but now I think everyone knows the kind of all singing all dancing all shouting extravaganzas that we do.  So I guess our events are a bit of a mishmash really I suppose old Soviet style show, that has a supportive liberal element to it too. Most important really is how much the children enjoy it, and how much their families value their education. So well done to all.