3/4 Done!

My third semester in the MA TESOL program has just come to a close. I have just one more semester and I will have my MA and be done with school for a while.

This semester I taught my first university level classes: mainly juniors and seniors; mainly education majors; all native or fluent English speakers. I had worried that while I loved teaching EFL/ESL, I wouldn’t enjoy teaching future teachers about second language acquisition and how to teach ESOL students. I needn’t have worried; I loved it. I had a really great time with my classes, and I hope I have students next semester who are as fun to teach as these guys were. I should also have a much lighter workload next semester, as I won’t be making PowerPoints from scratch for every single lesson; I’ll just be tweaking the ones I made this semester.

My experiences teaching this semester have changed my outlook on the future a bit. I used to think, ‘Why bother getting a PhD? I don’t want to be a university professor.’ Except that now I kind of do. And I didn’t go the thesis track. It seems that everybody says, ‘Oh, if you want a PhD, you absolutely must write a thesis for your MA’ and maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s not. The thing is, I don’t want to get my PhD in TESOL. If I were to shoot for a PhD, it would be in Sociolinguistics – and it would be at a different school. I didn’t want to write a thesis for the MA because I came to this program wanting to learn more about how to become a better ESOL teacher, not to conduct research. Oddly enough, this semester I took a sociolinguistics course, and ended up getting really into my research on language policy in Kyrgyzstan – and I’m hoping to get my paper published. Here’s hoping that if I do apply for any PhD programs and I get dinged for not having written a thesis, a published article will suffice. You know, assuming it gets published. I guess we’ll see what the future brings. Were I to apply to a PhD program, it wouldn’t be for a year or so anyway.

I’m heading up to GA for the next three weeks. I’m actually going to be pretty busy designing a curriculum for a baseball-themed EFL program for a major league baseball team’s training center in the Caribbean. Which should be interesting, given my general lack of knowledge of baseball. I’m also taking a fairly large dog up to GA with me, in addition to Mochi and Charlie, as I’ll be pet-sitting her over the break. That’s going to make for an interesting car ride there and back, let me tell you. Sigh.

Lastly, vimeo seems to be letting me keep my Kyrgyzstan-is-Middle-Earth video online, so check it out:

All of the K-stan adventures are online!

In case you haven't been following my posts from my summer adventures in Kyrgyzstan, they are now ALL online, and you can check them out by clicking here. Or, if you don't wish to wade through all of my posts from this summer, at the very least check out Rural Kyrgyzstan's Water Woes and Religion in Kyrgyzstan, as they provide a look into some aspects of life in Kyrgyzstan that are very different from the lives of most of you who read this blog. And, in honor of the next installment of The Hobbit (which will be out in just a few days!!!), I've thrown together a video showcasing how Kyrgyzstan really is, in fact, Middle Earth, no matter what New Zealand says. YouTube won't let me host it, as apparently it's a copyright infringement, so click here to download it directly. Enjoy!

Six surprising things I learned/realized while living abroad.

After reading these really interesting things that non-Americans couldn’t believe about the US until they actually came here and experienced life in the US for themselves, I felt inspired to write about some of the surprising things that I learned/realized while living overseas.

The US does not have the best healthcare in the world. Nor does it have the worst. With the debate about healthcare that’s been in the news over the past several years, I’ve heard tons of people say things like ‘the US has the best healthcare in the world’ (often followed by ‘and we don’t want Obamacare to ruin it’). I’ve heard tons of people going on about how countries with nationalized healthcare plans have awful healthcare, while what we have is The Best in the World. It’s not.

I haven’t been to every country in the world, and a lot of the places I’ve been to do have worse healthcare systems than the US – often far worse. But not all of them.

South Korea’s national healthcare plan is wonderful. Everyone is on it. If you’re living in South Korea and working legally, you will have access to health insurance. If you don’t have health insurance, the costs are actually still quite affordable. Access to same-day healthcare (for things both minor and major) is easily available without having to go to an ER, and the technology and medical treatments available are state of the art. Koreans simply do not understand why healthcare costs so much in the US, even with health insurance. The cost of healthcare here for uninsured folks in the US is simply inexplicable to them.

On the other hand, if you’ve ever spent time in a developing country, you’ll know that we here in the US are very lucky that at the very least we can go to a clean and competent ER if we fall ill, and the hospital will be obligated to stabilize you at the very least (if you lack insurance). In many countries, this option is unavailable, as the money for modern facilities and trained medical professionals is lacking. We don’t have the best in the world, but we are far from the bottom.

Reliable, fast, frequent, and cheap public transportation is a wonderful thing. We have a terrible public transportation infrastructure in the US. Unless you live in one of a handful of big cities in the US, you are not going to have access to decent public transport. Many large cities (such as Orlando, where I currently reside) do have a semi-decent bus system, but buses come roughly once an hour, are incredibly slow, and you may very well have to walk a long way to reach the nearest stop. This makes life really difficult for people without cars. If you don’t live in a large city, you must have a car, because your only other option is a taxi or bumming a ride off a friend. I never really considered this a problem until I went overseas – specifically to South Korea. I have traveled all over the Korean peninsula by means of bus and train. It’s cheap, it’s fast, it’s easy, and you can do it even if you speak very little Korean. I wish I could hop a train for the cost of a tank of gas and get to my mom’s in a fraction of the time it would take me to drive there, but that’s not an option here. Once, when I was in college, I looked into taking Greyhound home (from TN to FL) for Christmas. It would have taken 25 hours, and it would have cost more than a plane ticket. That’s absurd! Meanwhile, I can get from one end of South Korea to the other in just a few hours (by train) for under $50, and I can do it for far less if I go by bus (although then travel time can be affected by traffic).

American toilets are wonderful. Our toilets enable us to sit down. They have bowls filled with water. I’d never really thought about this before my first trip to Russia, but when you poop into that water, the water covers the smell. In Russia (and in many parts of the former Soviet Union), many of the sit-down toilets in people’s homes, in dorms, and in businesses have a ledge inside the bowl. You poop, and your shit sits on this ledge until you flush, at which point a stream of water washes your poop off the ledge and down the drain. There is no nice covering of water over your poop, which makes the whole experience much stinkier.

However, sit-down toilets are not a world-wide thing. They’re not even a Russia-wide thing. I encountered my first squatter in Moscow at VDNKh. I walked into the only open stall and saw a hole in the floor. Not a ceramic squatter of the kind common in many countries, but a hole in the floor in the center of the stall. I thought that the toilet in that stall was missing (and this may well have been the case), so I retreated and waited for another stall to open. Imagine my surprise when the next woman to enter the bathroom went into that stall and used the hole! Then the next stall opened, and it, too, had only a hole. I have since used squatters ranging from holes in the floor to fancy, gleaming porcelain basins, to holes in a concrete slab over a large sewage pit, to wooden squatters over hand-dug pits. I’m really good at squatting now, but trust me, I much prefer to be able to sit.

Voice mail is not a universal phenomenon. Here in the US, when someone calls your phone it will ring 4-6 times, and then the caller will be shunted off to your voice mail where they can leave a message. In Kyrgyzstan, and South Korea (and, from what I’ve heard, in many other places as well), voice mail does not exist. If someone calls you on your cell, it will ring and ring and ring until they give up and hang up. Not only is there no way to leave a voice message, but there is no limit to the number of rings – there is only a limit to the caller’s patience. And to yours, if you’re trying to avoid answering a call from a certain persistent individual. In both of these countries, it also seems perfectly acceptable to let the phone ring and ring and ring until the person answers it. When I worked for the computer company in Seoul, this was so unbelievably annoying. Someone would be away from their desk, but would have left their phone behind. Someone else would call and it would ring for five minutes. Or more. It’s not like the phones didn’t have caller ID (they did), or like they didn’t accept texts (they did). The caller could have texted a message or simply assumed that the person they were calling would see the missed call and call them back…. But no. Letting the phone ring incessantly seemed to be the thing to do. It drove me nuts.

All Asian kids are not super-studious and well-behaved. The myth that all Asian students are studious and well behaved has been around all of my life, and it’s just not true – at least not in Korea at any rate. Now, granted, Korean children and teens spend far more time in school (both in public school and in private ‘extracurricular’ schools) than their American counterparts; however, for the most part this is due to their parents’ desires, not to theirs. If it were up to them, they’d be at home playing computer games, not shuffling from private school to private school. And well-behaved? Hah. Kids will be kids, and if you put a group of them together, they are going to act like kids. I’ve certainly taught well-behaved Korean children and teens. I’ve also taught some who were total hell-raisers, and many that just wanted to gossip with their friends.

A lot of people in other countries think that there is no poverty in the US. I don’t mean that they think there is less poverty here than in their home country; I’ve met many people who truly believe that there is NO poverty in the US at all. Some people believe me when I explain to them that yes, poverty exists in the US, but some don’t. Below are two examples of conversations I’ve had about this – although I’ve certainly had more than two.

Back in 2000 when I was studying abroad in Russia, I met a young man whose father was, shall we say, connected to the Russian mafia. This kid (and he was 20 or so) wore designer clothes, had a cell phone (back when no one but Russia’s elite had cells), lived in a huge and recently remodeled apartment in the center of St. Petersburg, and drove a Mercedes. He told me one night that his goal in life was to become an American citizen because all Americans were wealthy. I pointed out that he was already wealthy, and that most Americans – myself included – were unable to afford his kind of lifestyle. He continued to state his belief that all Americans were rich, so I explained about how I was only able to go to college (and to Russia) because I had received a full scholarship, and that I lived with my mom, who was working part-time and making very little money. He became furious and began shouting at me that I was lying. He claimed that I was just saying that because I didn’t want foreigners coming to the US and becoming rich.

One day this summer, while I was in Kyrgyzstan, my host mother offhandedly said, “Well, there aren’t any poor people in America.” She was really, genuinely surprised when I said that actually yes, there are. She said, “But I never see poor people in any American TV shows or movies!” She was really amazed when I explained to her that we do have a poverty problem, that there are many people who are homeless or struggling to make ends meet. While she was far more accepting of this than the Russian guy I met back in 2000, I did hear her tell several of her friends in an incredulous voice, “Did you know that [Annie] says there are actually poor people in America?”

Cat litter I DON'T recommend

This stuff is TERRIBLE. I normally buy WalMart's Special Kitty clumping cat litter, as it's the cheapest clumping litter out there. And it actually works pretty well. The day I ran out of my last box of Special Kitty clumping litter, WalMart was out of it as well. This was the next cheapest available, and it's Arm & Hammer, folks you'd think would know what they're doing as far as odor control goes. Plus the whole damn box is covered with statements about how superfantastic it is at removing odor from the litter box. I call bullshit. This stuff does NOTHING to remove or reduce odor, plus it is scented. HEAVILY scented. With something that smells rather strongly like that granulated stuff they used to pour on kids' vomit back when I was in elementary school. I have the litter box in my bedroom, meaning that my bedroom now reeks. Charlie goes into the litter box and comes out smelling like this stuff. I'd rather she came out smelling like cat shit, because it would be an improvement. Plus, it does not do a damn thing to cover up the smell of cat pee. It just smells like cat pee mixed with this god awful excuse for a "fragrance." At least it does clump. I've been trying to save money, so I figure I should use the box up before buying something else, but I'm not sure how much more of this I can take. Buy at your own peril!

Of sunsets, kittens, euthanasia, and head colds

I went up to GA for the Thanksgiving holiday break. In some ways it was not what you’d call a happy holiday, although I’ve certainly had worse. Two of our elderly cats – Tuffy and Grey – had to be euthanized. Both of them had chronic illnesses that had plagued them for years (and for which they had been treated for years), but they had finally reached that point. Tuffy was 13, and we’d had her since she was a kitten. Grey showed up, fully grown, on my doorstep in the fall of 2009 and had been part of our lives ever since. We have a lot of animals, my mom and I, and as a result, we experience animal deaths more frequently than people who only have one or two pets. I’d like to say that it gets better with experience, but it never does. It’s been five days since we buried Grey and Tuffy, and I’m crying typing about it. They will be missed.

Grey and Tuffy

But there’s never a shortage of homeless pets.

This is Sunshine. My aunt (who lives in an assisted living facility not far from my mom) found her in the woods by her home, and brought her to my mom. Our home is not the best place for her, as we do have several cats with feline leukemia, but when the only other option is tossing her out on the street (don’t even get me started on the local animal control situation…) I guess it’s the best chance she’s got. She’s been vaccinated against feline leukemia already, although she’s also developed a head cold, which we’re keeping an eye on.

For Thanksgiving proper we drove down to F’s house at Dekle Beach. The weather was beautiful: chilly (for Florida), but with bright sunshine and crystal clear skies. The sunset was pretty spectacular. I promptly developed a rather nasty head cold and spent the time feeling rather wretched.

I’m back in Orlando now for the tail-end of the semester. I have one presentation left to give and I’ll be done. I don’t even have any finals. (I know; it confuses me, too. Don’t get me wrong, I like not having to take finals, but not having finals just seems wrong somehow.) And speaking of finals, I can’t leave Orlando for a few more weeks because my students most definitely do have finals. I don’t control their official exam schedule, and the school has decreed that one of my sections will take their final on the very last day of finals… and I can’t leave until they’re done. I’m hoping that the extra free time I’ll have before going back up to GA will enable me to get a head start on my Christmas vacation project: designing the ESL curriculum for a major league baseball team’s training program in a Caribbean country. I should probably point out that I know sweet fuck all about baseball, but hey – I did order both Baseball for Dummies and the Idiot’s Guide to Baseball. I have to have this done by the beginning of January, so it’s definitely going to be my project for the break – unless I can get a good chunk of it knocked out beforehand.

I only have one semester left before I AM YOUR MASTER. Er, before I have my MA in TESOL. I’m still feeling fairly ambivalent about whether I stay in the US or go back overseas. I’ve applied for a pretty prestigious and rather competitive position which would definitely involve going back overseas (most likely to somewhere in the former Soviet Union), and if I am offered said position, I will most definitely accept. (There’s more than one ‘position,’ BTW, and chances are good – especially as they have a hard time filling their positions in the ‘stans.) Unfortunately, even though I submitted my application last month, I won’t hear from them until sometime ‘between early April and late June.’ Great. Meaning that if I don’t get it, I’ll be in a bit of a bind. June is a bit late in the year to be applying for teaching positions. However, I really do not want to be in a position where I am telling others that I cannot accept their job offer as I am waiting to hear from someone better, so I’ve simply decided to hold off on the job search until I find out one way or the other. However, I do think I will be confining said job search to the southeastern US – maybe even to FL – if ‘the position’ falls through. I guess we shall see.

It's calendar time!

As much as I deplore the 'holiday shopping season' and all of the attendant nightmarishness surrounding it, the holiday shopping season is also calendar buying time. I know that with all of our smart phones and tablets and various gadgets sporting electronic calendar apps, the traditional wall calendar is not as popular as it once was... but I still can't handle not having one. And since it's that calendar buying time of the year, I'm offering you three to choose from! Surely there's a calendar option for all tastes here, right? And you're probably going to be buying a calendar, so you may as well buy one of these, hint, hint... Anyhow:

For those of you who are Charlie and Mochi fans, I bring you twelve months of mustaches and underbites with the Charlie and Mochi Calendar! Click here or on the images below (which are, as you might have guessed, the ones featured in the calendar.)

Or, if you prefer, how about twelve months featuring the stunning beauty
of Kyrgyzstan? Click here or on the images below!
And lastly, if you're a fan of Desolation Travel, the last calendar I have on offer was put together my me and my DT companions, and it's filled with photos from our various trips to desolate locations throughout the past year - and the pictures it contains were selected by DT fans. Click here or on the images below.

Rocky Horror! Halloween! Grammar! The Inhumane Society!

It's been a busy couple of weeks around here, mainly because it was Halloween season - which, in my opinion, is the best time of the year. This year I was able to rock three different costumes, which made me incredibly happy. I do love a good opportunity to dress up.

On Friday, October 25th, a group of us went to go see the Rocky Horror Picture Show film and interactive performance put on by The Rich Weirdoes. 

Security made M. take off his "FBI" jacket, because "someone might think he was a real agent." Um, OK. The show itself was pretty fantastic though. I've seen RHPS put on in smaller venues, but this was definitely the largest and most interactive version I've ever been to.

Saturday one of my classmates threw a kickass Halloween party.

I went as a flapper.

Mr. Green and Miss Scarlet from Clue, if you were wondering.

And then of course, I taught class on Thursday dressed as a Dalek. As you do. I'd say about half of my students knew what I was immediately. The others were like, "What's a Dalek?"

ED-U-CATE!

Thursday I also finished up my fifth and final lesson to my students on teaching English grammar to EFL/ESL students. Yes, we spent five days on grammar. You want someone to talk for six and a half hours (thirteen if you consider that I teach two sections) on English grammar, I am apparently your girl. The PowerPoint by itself isn't quite as great. For one thing, SlideShare has mucked up my formatting, and you can't see my animations. Plus, as I've mentioned before, I do NOT write every word I say on my slides - I hate it when teachers do that. As a result, reading the slides won't give you as much information as sitting through my class would have. However, if you're an EFL/ESL teacher new to teaching grammar, it should give you some useful pointers.

And lastly, due to the combination of some really horrific animal-shelter related news that I read on Facebook and all these people posting about NaNoWriMo, I've become inspired to get back to work on The Inhumane Society. I started by editing the existing 140 pages - you can read the edited first part here - and by finally picking up where I left off. Once you're all caught up, you can read the latest installment of The Inhumane Society here.

Oh, and you know I'm still posting about my summer's adventures over at Cat Lady in Kyrgyzstan, right?