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?”

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?

Lagging

I’ve been back in the US a little more than a week. Honestly, I’m not feeling any reverse culture shock at all. What I have been feeling, however, is jetlag. I think I’m mostly over it at this point, although obviously not completely as I woke up before 9am today without an alarm. Trust me, that only ever happens when I’m jetlagged. While it’s not as bad as jetlag from Korea to the US, it’s still rough. It took several days before I could make it through the day without passing out mid-afternoon or waking up around 3:30am. Unfortunately, I’ve a lot that I need to be doing, which makes the fact that my brain has been so time-scrambled for the past week or so kind of a pain.

For those of you interested in my Kyrgyzstan adventures, I have indeed been posting them over on my Kyrgyzstan blog, so go check it out!

My post-Kyrgyzstan adventures haven’t been quite as interesting. I’ve written a syllabus and put together a course calendar for the undergrad course I’ll be teaching starting in a little more than a week. I’ve also started putting together the course website. Yawn. I also have to take several hours of boring online modules, as well as a full day of face-to-face training to “qualify” me to be a TA. Like I’d never taught before or something. Hah. I also have a very part time job (happens only a few days a year, but hey it pays well) which will be taking up pretty much all of next week… meaning I need to get my course stuff and online modules and whatever taken care of before Monday rolls around. In other words, this weekend is going to be pretty much the opposite of exciting.

I drove up to Georgia on Sunday and came back yesterday. Mom and I then drove back down to Florida – albeit to a different part of the state than where I live – in order to help her boyfriend, F, move his sailboat from his dock in Steinhatchee to his new house in Dekle Beach. I’d like to say that we were successful, but alas, the boat never left the dock. We essentially did a lot of driving, a lot of sweating, and accomplished a whole lotta nothing. But hey, the scenery was great. We also celebrated my mom’s birthday. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MOM! Back in Georgia, I helped my mom with the mowing (and the towing of the mower from one property to the next), which also involved a lot of sweating. The southeastern US will do that to you this time of year.

Mom and F and the sailboat...
Mom on the boat. Her hand is bleeding, having been thwacked by the centerboard crank.
And this would be the reason we didn't move the boat - we needed to motor it down to the ramp, but alas...
But hey, the view was nice.
F's new house
The view from F's new house
We went for a walk in the marshy area along Yates Creek
Happy Birthday!
Back in GA, Honey and Merlin anxiously await dinner.

Of course, by the time I made it back to Orlando on Thursday and was still sweating, I realized that I needed to have my AC looked at. I’d gotten a new compressor (up in GA) back in April, so there was no reason for me to be sweating in the car. Well, either the guy who installed the compressor forgot to add freon, or the system has a leak. I guess I’ll find out which if my car either remains cool or goes back to being a sweatbox.

In addition to the kinda pricey freon + oil change, I gave in and went to LensCrafters to get an eye exam and some new glasses. I don’t even want to think about the amount of money I had to shell out. And I won’t even get my glasses til next week, as they have to special order my lenses (as I bloody well can’t see) – although at least I made it through one more checkup without needing bifocals. Hah. The doctor said I’ll probably need to get them the next time I get a prescription. Since I’m going from having four pairs of glasses (black, brown, pink, and green) plus prescription sunglasses to just having one pair plus sunglasses, I went with tortoiseshell lenses as those are both black and brown. They’re super cute, but I don’t get to post pictures until next week or whenever they arrive.

So yeah. This post has been disjointed and probably not the  most interesting. Go visit my Kyrgyzstan blog – it’s far more coherent and definitely far more interesting.

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:

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.

Summer Kyrgyzstan Update!

As I mentioned before, I will be spending the upcoming summer in Kyrgyzstan. I will spend two weeks traveling around the country, one week in Bishkek, and two months teaching English in rural villages. I knew that I would be spending the month of June in a small village called Kultor... and today I learned that I would be spending July in an even smaller village called Bar-Bulak (which has the advantage of being located less than two miles from the southern shore of Lake Issyk Kul). Anyway, here are some graphics to illustrate pretty much everything I know about Bar-Bulak, which admittedly is not very much.

A marks Bar-bulak, B marks Kultor. The black area at the top is Lake Issyk Kul. According to Google Maps, it should take 23 minutes to drive from one to the other; however, given the state of the roads and the fact that there's a mountain range in between them, it's actually more like an hour and a half.
This is as resolved as Google Earth gets over Bar-bulak.

What will you be doing this summer?

It feels almost like summer already down here in central Florida, which makes it hard for me to grasp the fact that it is, in reality, several months away. I am very ready for summer to get here. Not - like much of the rest of the world - because I'm looking forward to warmer temperatures, but because I will be going back to Kyrgyzstan.

As many of you know, I spent most of 2008 in Kyrgyzstan, and it was a wonderful, life-changing experience. I often wonder why I left, especially considering the shit-spiral my life fell into upon returning to the US.

(While my old blog, where I faithfully posted about my life in Kyrgyzstan back in the day is no longer online, I am working on pulling out the Kyrgyzstan posts, editing them for anonymity, and uploading them to Cat Lady in Kyrgyzstan. So far I've only uploaded posts covering January through mid-April 2008; I'm incredibly busy this semester, so I'm not sure when I'll get the rest of the posts online, but I'll do my best.) Feel free to watch this rather absurd video I compiled to get an idea of what my life in Kyrgyzstan was like:

The last time I was in Kyrgyzstan, I worked as an EFL teacher at The London School in Bishkek. (If you look closely at their website, you can see a lovely picture of me, wearing leopard print pajamas and stuffing my face.) This trip will be a little different.

The first part of my trip, several of us from Desolation Travel are meeting up for a two week jaunt around the country. We plan to start from Bishkek (the capital) and make our way through the nature reserve at Sary Chelek, the nuclear waste dumps at Mailuu-suu, the walnut forests of Arslanbob, the southern 'capital' of Osh, the town of Kazarman (about which we know essentially nothing), the lake Song Kol (if we have time), the wonderful village of Kochkor (one of my favorite places), and the fabulously desolate fishing village of Balykchy. After our two week whirlwind tour around the country, my travel companions will return home, and I will get to work.

I'll be spending June and July volunteering (arranged through The London School) in two different villages, where I will be teaching English. One of these villages will be Kultor (which is too small to rate a link on wikipedia), located about an hour's drive south of Lake Issyk Kul (the big lake you can see on every map of Kyrgyzstan). I'm not sure yet which village the second one will be. I am incredibly excited!

For those of you who don't know where Kyrgyzstan is located.

Our destination goals

Google Earth's view of Kultor.

Low-Tech and No-Tech TESOL Solutions

Today I gave a presentation at the Central Florida TESOL fall conference. I know a lot of you who read this blog are also English teachers, so I thought I'd share some of the information from my presentation with you here as well.

As many of you know, I spent 2008 in Kyrgyzstan teaching English. (While the blog that I kept while I was there is no longer online, I am working on getting part of it back online, and I will certainly link to it from here when I do.) In 2008, I taught at The London School, located in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. (If you know me, you might notice a picture of me in my pjs on their website!) Now, since I know when I typically mention Kyrgyzstan, most people look at me in confusion, here are some helpful maps:

That red arrow points to Bishkek.
This is The London School. The classrooms were in the tall grey-blue building, and the teachers lived in the grey building on the right.
This was my classroom as I saw it on my very first day in Bishkek. As you see from this picture, we have electricity. And a TV and a VCR. I also was given a stereo/CD/tape player. I had electric-powered speakers that allowed me to use my ipod in class, and I could use my laptop in class if I needed to as well...
It wasn't the most high-tech classroom in the world, but it wasn't the least high-tech... right? Well, I arrived in January. In about February, things began to change. 
Kyrgyzstan doesn't have much in terms of natural resources. While its neighbors Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan make their money selling oil and natural gas, Kyrgyzstan doesn't have much to offer. The one resource that it does have is water. Due to its location - and its high mountain ranges - Kyrgyzstan has a lot more water than its neighbors. As such, the Kyrgyz government contracted to sell water to both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Additionally, most of their power grid runs off of hydroelectric power. Unfortunately, 2007 was a very dry year for Kyrgyzstan. The water reservoirs became very low, and the country began having rolling blackouts in February 2008. These blackouts continued throughout my stay in Kyrgyzstan.
The first time it happened, we thought it was a fluke. We taught our last class of the day by candlelight, and made the best of it. Soon we learned that the blackouts would be a regular thing. Sometimes they occurred only once or twice a week. Sometimes they happened several days in a row. Sometimes we knew when the power would go out and how long it would be out. Other times it was a surprise. I taught from 2pm to 9pm (roughly). My night classes were often taught by candlelight, and I knew that if I planned a lesson involving tapes, cds, film, ipod (with its electric powered external speakers), or laptop (with its short-lived battery), there was a good chance that things would not work out as planned.
This was how my evening classes looked on many occasions: students studying by candlelight. This was a little problematic with a couple of my younger students, who liked to play with fire...

My headlamp was absolutely the BEST thing I brought with me. Not so useful for teaching (I tried it once, and ended up shining a bright light in my students' faces), but WONDERFUL for planning lessons in the dark... which was how I planned most of them!
There were a lot of things that I wished I'd had with me while I was in Kyrgyzstan, things that would have made working in a no-electricity environment a lot easier. I'm planning to go back this coming summer, assuming everything works out. I know that there are still power outages, even in Bishkek (although I'm not sure if they're still occurring with as much frequency as they did back in 2008) - and I'm actually planning on working in a small, rural village (through a volunteer program set up by The London School), where I imagine regular, reliable electricity will be even less likely than in Bishkek. 
Based on my experiences - and the things I wished I'd had - I've gathered a bunch of items to take with me this summer. These things are small and lightweight and would be very useful for anyone planning to teach in an environment where electricity is unreliable or absent altogether. (And to be perfectly honest, these are also useful things to have on hand in general in case of a natural disaster.)
For starters, get a headlamp! I cannot even begin to express how useful my headlamp was. The one that I brought with me to Kyrgyzstan was battery powered, and while the batteries lasted a pretty long time, they would still go dead periodically. Inevitably, this would occur late at night while I was planning lessons. The solution to this is a wind-up headlamp. I recommend the Mitaki-Japan Wind-Up LED Headlamp. The light from this thing is just as bright, if not brighter, than my battery powered headlamp - and you never have to buy batteries! Crank it for about a minute, and it will run for an hour and a half. This thing is wonderful.

Next up: Get a wind-up lantern or two. These things are small, lightweight, and relatively cheap. They're super bright - and unlike with candles, you don't have to worry about some of your younger teenage boys lighting things on fire in the middle of class if you're using them. I recommend the Wind 'N Go Mini LED Lantern. Just like the wind-up headlamp, it lasts for about an hour and a half off of one minute of cranking.
Remember how I mentioned that I had speakers for my ipod, but they were electric powered? Well, I've found some really great (and surprisingly loud) speakers that are battery powered: the Kinivo ZX220 Portable Twin Speakers. They come with a built in rechargeable battery, and can be charged through your USB cord, or a USB-to-power adapter. I'm not sure how long they last on a full charge, but it's at least two hours. (This also requires an ipod or other MP3 player.) You can't tell from this photo, but these are very small (although like I said, they're also very loud).
Now, your MP3 player and the above speakers are both powered by rechargeable batteries. This is great if you have a power source available on occasion - but what if you don't? What if you're working somewhere without any access to electricity? Well, there's a solution to that, too. It's the K-TOR Pocket Socket (which is seriously a wonderful name). Using a USB-to-wall-socket adapter (such as this or this) you can charge any rechargeable device with this thing... although it is a long process. Your item has to be plugged into the charger while you're cranking it, and it can take a good five minutes or so of winding to get enough juice to play one song on your ipod - still, if this is the only way you can bring audio into your class, it's definitely going to be worth it. And you can probably get a student to work the hand crank for you :-)

And lastly... how do you make copies without electricity to power a copy machine? Sadly, by hand. However, some good carbon paper is both reusable and it can allow you to get 3-4 copies from one time of writing. If you have a class of nine students, it's much easier to write a test or a worksheet three times (and get 9 copies using carbon paper) than to hand copy the same thing nine times! Roaring Spring Carbon Paper works really well.