School and society

My Earth Day Concert was typical chaos; I couldn’t find the key to the auditorium, students were piling up in the stairwell, girls were changing into their garbage bag skirts in the bathroom when they were supposed to be onstage reading their essays, none of the 5th formers understood anything the 6th formers were saying…but at least a handful of kids at School #5 can tell you now that Den Zemli is on April 22nd. The tech teacher came after school to fix my electricity, and joked that if he shocked himself I should give him mouth to mouth. Haha—awkward laughter—pretend to be confused.

I arrived at school one Wednesday to find out that all the students were leaving after 4th period to travel en masse to an “aesthetics lesson” in town, meaning an excursion to hear the Vinnytsia Symphony Orchestra. So I taught 2 lessons, had two tutoring lessons, went home for lunch and headed off to enrich my aesthetic. It turned out to be perfect for me since it was geared toward young children: a woman onstage introduced the instruments and partially narrated the fairy tale, and then the music told the story, so I was able to follow along better. After the concert, Pasha came over to watch “Moulin Rouge,” but the quality was bad so we started a Russian version of “The Others” before I went to dinner at Larissa’s, the youngest English teacher at my school—she lives down the street from me but I had yet to go to her house. I had invited her to lunch but she couldn’t come, so kind of by default she invited me to dinner. I baked an awesome poppy-seed cake because I remembered she likes poppy-seeds, and I sat in her kitchen while she got dinner ready. I felt rude speaking in English in front of her husband at the table, but she always prefers to speak English with me so I oblige. She cracked each egg onto a plate before adding it to the syrnikiy mix to check if it was spoiled. I also learned that the domashniy syr that I love can be made by leaving fresh milk on the counter for a few days until it turns into kefir and then heating it on a low flame until magically it morphs further into delicious homemade cheese. I will have to try it, but I don’t know where I can get milk straight from a cow in the U.S. We did the obligatory first visit photo album inventory, and I didn’t get home till 11 pm.

Last week has been taken up with exams at school; for the oral they must memorize and recite a text, so I helped grade those. Today I got to school for my first lesson at noon, showed “School of Rock” to the 8th formers, and was then informed that I was going to a concert at the Music School in town. Ironic. So my 7A class and 11th form club were canceled and I headed back into town with the only 3 other teachers who were invited. I was still confused as to why I was there if not everyone was, but I had a vague idea it might have been envisioned as an honor/special treat for me, so I rolled with it. Open Heart had organized a blood-testing tent on the square in town, with health professionals from the HIV center in Vinnytsia, so I stopped by after the concert to see how it went, and then had peach juice and vareniky with liver (why do I like these things?) with Andriy and Pasha. They reported that 40 people came to get tested, and not just former drug users, but average adults and some young people too, which is a big step forward because very few people in Ukraine get tested, due to the stigma surrounding HIV as a drug-users’ problem, which is unfortunately long out-dated. The biggest risk group now is people aged 15-25, and the most common path of infection is through unprotected sex, so the fact that so few people know their status contributes to the spiraling epidemic.

I also recently found out that it’s alarmingly common for kids to try cigarettes or alcohol between the tender ages of 5-7, since I asked my friends about it after one 5th former told me another 5th former smoked. Two days later that was confirmed when I decided to take a walk to the island and read. I had just pulled my book out of my bag when some 6th formers from my school came up to say hello. I talked with them for a while—mostly in Ukrainian but a little in English—and we even played a few rounds of cards. But then one pulled out a cigarette and lit up in front of me! He was 14 and still in 6th grade, but his friend from another school who was only 10 was smoking with him. I asked them if they knew smoking was bad and what it could do to them; I tried the scare tactics, saying my grandfather was a smoker who died of lung cancer, and asking if their parents knew (his did, but didn’t care), and finally I said I couldn’t play with them if they were smoking, so I took my leave, shaken by the experience but also thinking about what I could do at school to shake them up as well.

The only reason anyone is still in school the last week of May is so that it can be properly recorded in the class journals, the sacred texts of the Ukrainian school system. I sit in fascination in the teachers’ room, watching my colleagues chase each other down for the different class books. Grades, absences, lesson plans, and homework must be recorded for each school day, and no cross-outs are tolerated. Conditioned from Soviet times, it is hard to erase from the national mentality, so that official documentation bears little resemblance to reality, and no one thinks anything of it. This is why many volunteers have a hard time cooperating on grant projects, because it is the norm to write was is needed and then do whatever you want. Lena didn’t show up for our lesson, and Natasha sat in the back frantically entering grades into the journal for our two lessons together; another teacher asked Larissa if she could excuse our 6th formers from their lesson to return books to the library, and our 7th form was still reciting their oral exams, but the class was so noisy Larissa called in their class mistress to yell at them and then sent everyone who hadn’t studied home (half the class does no work and shamelessly accepts 2s—graded on a 12 point scale—but they will still progress to the 8th form). At the teachers’ meeting during break we learned that the students would have two hours of lessons with their class mistresses on Thursday, then we would have another meeting and the kids would go home. Friday we just have the Last Bell concert at 9. Monday we had off for Pentecost. Then for almost all of June there are no real classes, but both teachers and students alike must come to school.

Compare/Contrast: What do you think are the biggest problems facing schools and society in America today?