I'm back!

I am back in Orlando, and thoroughly jetlagged. How I'm going to recover in time to write a syllabus and plan a course in the next two and a half weeks is beyond me. Oi. Anyway, for those of you interested in Kyrgyzstan and the time I spent there, please check the Cat Lady in Kyrgyzstan site every day, as I have tons of blog-posts from my travel journal that will be going online. The first post, Back in Bishkek, is already online, and more will be coming. I won't be linking them all here, so for those of you interested in my K-stan adventures, be sure to bookmark that site and check it regularly. I'll try to start blogging back here fairly regularly as soon as the jetlag wears off and I catch up on everything, haha.

Hiatus!

Well, I'm off to Kyrgyzstan tomorrow, and this blog will be closed while I'm gone. When I return at the beginning of August, I'll be posting all about my trip over on my Kyrgyzstan blog as well as resuming posting over here. In the interim, please enjoy the absurdly obnoxious Returning to the Former Soviet Union Playlist:

Native vs. Non-Native English Speaking Teachers

Do you remember back in January when I asked anyone who had ever taught English in Asia to help me out by participating in a survey? Well, our proposal to present our research project at the 2013 Sunshine State TESOL was accepted... unfortunately, the conference is May 16-18 and I leave for Kyrgyzstan on May 9th. Ooops. The other two members of our group are actually presenting at the conference, and I'll be participating via youtube video. Haha. Since some of our survey's participants expressed interest in our results, here's my absurd youtube video and our results. The results of the survey were divided up between native speaking English teachers and non-native speaking teachers.

Question 1: What are the STRENGTHS of native-speaking English teachers?

Question 2: What are the WEAKNESSES of native-speaking English teachers?

Question 3: What are the STRENGTHS of non-native speaking English teachers?

Question 4: What are the WEAKNESSES of non-native speaking English teachers?

Family, Birds, and Party Time!

The spring semester has ended, and the countdown is on for Kyrgyzstan! As I write it is 12:30 in the morning on Monday, May 6th. I will be leaving on May 9th. Yeah. That's really, very soon. I've written two posts about my upcoming trip over on my Kyrgyzstan blog (here and here), so please check them out! Meanwhile, with the end of the semester and the upcoming country-leaving, I've had rather a whirlwind of graduation parties, end of semester parties, and last-visits-before-I-leave.

I went up to Georgia for a week to visit my mom. We found a nearly full grown juvenile wren that couldn't fly and was demanding to be fed (and attempting to commit suicide by throwing itself to the nearest cat). We took it in and tried to take care of it, but unfortunately it didn't make it through the night :-(

Mom and wren
On a more positive note, we found an adorable, sweet, lovable stray dog - and we were able to reunite him with his family. Here he is with me:
And here's my mom, having a chicken quesadilla at the best Mexican place in town:
Then it was back to Orlando for two nights of parties. Party #1 was Korean-style karaoke (noraebang/노래방) at an externally sketchy looking joint located down even more sketchy looking Orange Blossom Trail. (I counted at least five definite hookers on my drive home - yay OBT.) Inside this place was actually quite nice, and EXACTLY like any 노래방 back in Korea. They definitely cater to the Korean ex-pat and Korean-American crowd, and the staff were probably wondering how the hell they ended up with a group of obnoxious 미국 사람 (Americans) packed into one of their rooms.


The next night was the Party Train. My friends M, H, and I hit three parties in six hours or something along those lines. The first stop was a graduation party for one of our classmates in the MA TESOL program:

Then it was on to another classmate's end of the semester bash. This isn't the best photo, but Left-Right-Center isn't the most photogenic of games. I think the house might've had it rigged, as the hostess won ;)

And lastly, an end of the semester /slash/ birthday party:


Then Sunday: off to Tampa to visit my dad. Here he is with his second rescued duck: (Duck #1 is now full grown and lives outside. They've had Duck #2 about two weeks.)
And then there's me with the duck - it's super friendly.
My brother just got a brand new drum kit, which he totally rocks.
Three days until I leave the country! I still have some work-related stuff and some research-related stuff to wrap up, but I'm pretty much done :-) I'll post once more before I head out!

animated idiots

Marlee and Brin, two of my mom's dogs

Some lessons in geography - and why they are IRRELEVANT

Part I: Lessons in Geography

It seems that the United States is populated by people who couldn't identify a country if it jumped up and down on a map, waving its flag and shouting its name. Well, okay. Perhaps the majority of my compatriots are not quite so foolish, but watching today's coverage of the events in Boston sure have made it seem that way.

I awoke this morning to several emails and Facebook messages and posts telling me rather conflictingly that the Boston bombers were from both Chechnya and Kyrgyzstan. A quick search of the news revealed that the Tsarnaev brothers were ethnically Chechen, and that at least one of them was born in Kyrgyzstan. (As I'm leaving for my second trip to Kyrgyzstan in less than a month, you can see why people thought to message me about this.)

As the day went by and more news agencies began reporting on the Tsarnaevs, things got kind of confusing. The ethnically Chechen Tsarnaev family seems to have moved around a bit: from Kyrgyzstan to Dagestan (in southwestern Russia, next door to Chechnya). Before moving to the US, one or both of the brothers may have lived in Kazakhstan - but it's hard to know, as various mainstream media news sources seem to think that Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Chechnya, and Dagestan are interchangeable terms for the same place. AHEM: They're not. Slate put out a nice get-your-geography-straight article on the topic. I'm going to give you what Slate didn't: Maps. Courtesy of Google Maps. You could've looked this up yourself.

Kyrgyzstan is the little country in pink. I'll be there in three weeks.
Kazakhstan is located just to the north of Kyrgyzstan and is a helluva lot bigger.
The Republic of Chechnya is part of the Russian Federation, and is located where the A and the little pink blotch are.
Dagestan is located just to the east of Chechnya, and borders the Caspian Sea.
Just last night in class, one of my professors was telling us that her husband (who is from the Czech Republic) is often annoyed when Americans confuse/conflate the Czech Republic with Chechnya. I found myself thinking surely that doesn't happen too often. I mean, other than the "ch" sound they sound nothing alike! Well, apparently people are idiots: Czechs Aghast as Twitter Users Conflate Them with Boston's Chechen Suspects. Arrrgh. Seriously?? 
So for the geographically challenged among you, this is the Czech Republic.
Part II: Why this is all totally IRRELEVANT
This morning, when there wasn't much information out there on the Tsarnaev brothers, other than that they were from Kyrgyzstan and/or Chechnya, I found myself trying to figure out why Chechens from Kyrgyzstan would be setting off bombs in Boston. It didn't compute. Sure, Chechens have been committing acts of terrorism for years, including taking a theater hostage in Moscow in 2002 (resulting in over 100 dead) and the atrocious crime against the school in Beslan in which nearly 400 people (mostly children) died. These and other acts of terrorism were "justified" by terrorists demanding freedom for the Republic of Chechnya from Russian rule. As the US isn't exactly Russia's staunchest ally, it seemed totally bizarre to me that Chechens would be randomly bombing Americans. 
I haven't met many Chechens in my life, and I've only ever had a lengthy conversation with one - a shopkeeper in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. (There is a large ethnically Chechen population in both Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.) Anyway, the Chechen woman that I met in Bishkek was... well let's just say that she was obsessed with sex, and certainly far more into arranging sexual trysts than terrorist attacks!
The Kyrgyz-Chechen connection kept bugging me; it seemed off somehow. And then I learned what was wrong with this scenario, what makes everything written above completely irrelevant: 
The Tsarnaev brothers, ages 26 and 19, have been living in the US for approximately ten years. Do the math here, people. The elder brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the one killed in the shootout with police this morning, came to the US when he was 16 years old. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the target of the ongoing manhunt in Boston, came here when he was 9. These are not recent immigrants. These are people who grew to adulthood here in the United States. Whatever happened to these two people to radicalize them, to turn them into terrorists, happened to them HERE IN THE U.S. I can only imagine that for "foreign-looking" boys with "foreign sounding" names, growing up in the US in the decade following September 11th was not easy. That gives a bit of context to the quote alleged to Tamerlan Tsarnaev that's been all over the internet today: "I don't have a single American friend. I don't understand them." 
At this point, we don't know what set these fellows off. Were they harassed, growing up, for being foreigners? Were they radicalized by someone they met either in real life or via the internet? Did they have a political agenda or did they just think that bombs were cool? We don't know.
But really. Leave the geography out of it. These guys grew up here, in the United States, in our culture. Chew on that.

Fat Cat Charlie