The 4 Times I Almost Cried During PST

So far, I have not cried, which I think is a big accomplishment. I thought there would be at least one break down by now. However, I did have my weak moments when I almost cried. And the surprising thing is that for all but one time, I almost cried over something I didn’t think would make me cry.

1. It was during the first week of Practice School (7 weeks into my time here in Moldova) when I was teaching by myself. I had been working until 11:30 every night for 3 nights now, and I was not yet feeling particularly proud of my lessons. It was 6:00 and I had at least 5 hours of work ahead of me. I was walking my 40-minute walk home and feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work we have to do and what is expected of us. I was starting to cry as I was walking, but I still had 10 minutes before I got home and no sunglasses. I did not want everyone in my neighborhood to see me cry as I walked into my host family’s home.

2. My host family was having a masă. I was noticing my host mom and sister interacting, and they reminded me of my mom and me. I was suddenly overwhelmed with missing my mom, which grew into me missing my family and friends. I started to get teary-eyed, but there were 15 people around me and I did not feel like explaining why the American is crying when everyone was being very hospitable.

3. It was 3 days before I was leaving Cojușna. I was walking home when one of the neighbor kids has said hello to me. I had recently learned her name, Mihaela (Cute story: she always says hello to me, and her cuteness stands out compared to the others. One day, she said “hello, Maggie” to me and I said hello back. Her brother was with her and tried to tell her how to say “my name is Mihaela” in English, but she just ended up saying “hello Mihaela” instead. It was very cute. I understood well enough, and now I knew her name). It was very dark, and I could barely make out shapes. But when Mihaela said hello to me, I could easily tell it was her. She giggled when I said “hello, Mihaela”, and I could hear her talking about me once I left. All the sudden I realized that I would not be seeing her or any of the neighborhood kids any more. It took me 2 months to make friends with them, and I walk through a neighborhood everyday. In Criuleni, my house is practically on the main road. I was very upset at the thought of not making friends with neighborhood kids. But I was almost home, and I didn’t want to explain to my host family why I showed up in tears. So I held the tears back.

4. It was the last night in Cojușna, and I was spending it with Holly, Jim, Matt, Lauren, and Cassie at the Cojușna winery. On our way out, I said something about how I was going to miss them. And then it hit me that I was going to be the only American in a 30 kilometer radius, and that I was going to see these guys for several months. My eyes started to water, but Cassie demanded that I stopped because she would start to cry as well. So I did.

Pre-Service Training Summary By The Numbers

Today I will be sworn in as an English Education Peace Corps volunteer for a 2-year commitment. With this coming up, I have thought about all I have learned and experienced during my time in PST. I have summed it up below.

10 ½ hour plane ride here
5029 miles between Richmond and Moldova
10 weeks of language and technical training to prepare me for working in Moldova
40 minutes twice a day walk to school
156 hours of language training 

12 ½ hours of cultural training
11 hours of health and safety training
139 hours of technical training 150 lei for new pair of sunglasses
9 lei for a Coka Cola Light
7,000 people living in Cojusna
0 number of times I have cried
4 number of times I almost started to cry but I was able to hold back the tears because other people were around
13 sixth grade students in my class during practice school
7 eleventh grade students in my class during practice school
8,000 people living in Criuleni
40 kilometers from Criuleni to Chisinau
588 photos taken
1 shirt ripped while doing laundry
2 pieces of luggage and 1 backpack packed to move to Moldova
3 pieces of luggage, 1 backpack, 2 boxes, and 1 guitar to move from Cojusna to Cruileni
1 language proficiency interview
1 wine tasting at Cojusna’s winery
Countless memories

Practice School Complete

Wow, I have never been so exhausted in my life. But practice school is finished. I just taught 11th grade for 1½ weeks. I liked it more than I expected. I already know that I like teaching, but I’m used to teachings the young ones. So teaching students who are taller than me is a little intimidating. But I liked it. The material was more fun to teach because it was a higher level of thinking and the conversations were more fun. I think I’m going to be able to do this. 

After class today, we stayed after for youth activities with the students. Jim taught a group of boys how to play American football. My favorite moment was when one of the boys wanted to intercept a pass, he decided to kick the ball away from the receiver. I guess that’s what happens when you teach soccer players a game called “football”. 

We also had a dance room. Here, some of the students tried to teach us the hora. But no one ever really showed us what to do with our feet. There is something about kicking and doing the grapevine. Anyways, I couldn’t figure it out, so I ended up just running around in the circle.

Practice School With 6th Form

So my first half of practice school is complete. What a fun time! I taught 14 lessons (2 lessons a day for 7 days) to the 6th form (grade) over the last week. Overall, it went really well. The girls liked the way I dressed and wanted me to stay in Cojusna to teach. And on several days, at the end of the lessons, the students wanted another lesson. It was really nice to get such compliments from the students. 

My 6th form students and their certificates.

Ms. Magge is Teacher gud, and beautiful.

Overall, I would say the students I taught in practice school weren’t very different than American students. There were many levels of English knowledge among the students. Those who struggled were quieter and less willing to participate. Those who excelled would get impatient with the pace being a little too slow for them, and I would need to provide them with extra work. Sometimes a student would be apathetic towards learning, and I had to work very hard to motivate them to participate.

These students signed up voluntarily to take this class during their summer vacation, so I would guess that most of them want to learn English. I’m interested to see how the dynamics change once I’m working in the school.

Thursday I will begin the second half of practice school. I will be working with the 11th form, and I will be team teaching with my partner teacher from my school in Criuleni. This last week was long and hard, but I’m excited about starting team teaching. Bring it on, Moldova.

Practice School

Practice School started on Monday. Practice school is a 3-week program where the EE trainees teach Moldovan students English. The Moldovan students volunteered, so it’s not 100% accurate to what a really classroom will be like since all of these students want to learn. But it’s good practice. And we teach from the textbooks that are used in all schools, so we start to get familiar with to how to use them.

Each day, we have language class for 2 hours in the morning. And then we teach 2 lessons back-to-back. I’m teaching to 6th grade the first half and 11th grade the second half. After our lessons, we plan with a resource teacher for 3 hours. Then I go home around 5 (remember, I have a 40 minute walk home) with about 5 hours of work to do to prepare for the 2 lessons.

It is proven to be a very busy week, leaving me with practically no time to myself. Who ever told me that being in the PC would involve a lot of free time was obviously not talking about EEs. I may not be able to write very much over the next 3 weeks because of how time consuming planning is. Or perhaps I’ll write more often than ever because when is there a better time to write in a blog than when you have 5 hours of work ahead of you at 6:00 at night?

I Am A Wet Sponge

So I think it’s starting to get to the point where the amount of work put on us is starting to get to us. The amount of information thrown at us each day can be a little overwhelming sometimes. Every time more information is given to me, I feel like I lose some piece of information I learned before.

Yesterday, I noticed a couple trainees getting annoyed with small things that would not normally bother them (or at least, they wouldn’t react to it so much). I felt like I had to really tread carefully yesterday. It was not fun, especially since I already have to pay such close attention to how my actions are read by Moldovans. I don’t like having to change my behavior because a couple people are in bad moods. But seeing as I have had my harder days, I can understand how they might feel. Besides, we are a team. We need to be able to lean on each other, and I will need extra patience from them on my harder days.

Having 4 hours of language class is proving difficult. My LTIs are incredible, and they have a great amount of patience with us (particularly with me and my terrible Romanian). Whenever I mess up (which is a lot), they seem to blame themselves when it is not their fault at all. I probably should explain to them how often I mess up with the English language!

Some of my Romanian mess-ups:
I was trying to conjugate the verb “can” to say “he can” and ended up saying “he smells.”
I wanted to say “I worked in a school” but ended up saying “I lived in a school.”
And my favorite, I was trying to say “In 2010, I decided to join the Peace Corps” but I ended up saying “in 2010, I died.”

Okay, Maybe I’m A Little Slow, But…

Okay, maybe I’m a little slow but I’m finally starting to understand things here. For the past 3 weeks (yes, I have been in Moldova for 3 whole weeks!), so much information has been thrown at me and I’m busy trying to figure things out. But I think things are really starting to stick. Let me explain some of the successes I have had over the past week.

Success 1: I successfully told my host family the other day that I was going to my friend’s home for dinner that night at 4:00…in Romanian! I’m sure I just completely butchered the language, but they understood the overall message. Language, by far, is not my strong suit, so this was a giant step for me.

Success 2: We did a peer-teaching lesson this week. Basically, each of us in the EE program planned a 45-minute lesson for a particular grade. Then we taught the lesson to a small group of our peers in 20 minutes. Not only was my lesson well received, but today the EE leaders used my lesson (along with another guy’s) as an example lesson for the rest of the class. Mind you, he and I are the only ones with past teaching experience, so it’s not completely fair to compare our lessons with those who have never written a lesson plan before. But I hadn’t taught English language before, so it was still nice to hear I had a good lesson. But don’t worry; I won’t get too cocky about this. I came home to an email from my dad correcting my grammar in my blog. I can take comfort in the fact that I know I have parents that won’t let me get a big head.

Success 3: I was able to drink Italian vodka and not pass out. If you don’t remember from me saying this before, Moldovans drink wine like shots. So I can have several “glasses” of wine and be fine. Consequently, I think my host father has gotten used to me accepting my wine glass being refilled. So he automatically poured me a shot of Italian vodka the other night. I had my one shot, and I learned that “vodka” in Moldovan means a slightly sweet-tasting paint-thinner. By the time I got to my room and sat down at my computer, the words were spinning on the screen. It was a good thing I had finished my homework.

Things to come: Fourth of July celebrations Moldovan style (I’m going to two celebrations this weekend), my permanent site placement (I find out Tuesday), and food in Moldova (I’m putting together a list of common foods eaten here).

When Will Schooling Be Done?

So here’s a break down of my week. I get up every morning at 7 to get ready. I get ready, and then I eat breakfast with my host family and get my lunch for the day. I leave no later than 7:50 because I’m kind of far from where my classes take place. It’s about a 35 minute walk to class, sometimes longer on really hot or rainy days.

I have classes from 8:30am to 5pm Monday through Friday, and then 8:30am to 12:30pm on Saturdays. From 8:30-12:30 is language class (Romanian for those who don’t know what language I’m learning, or at least attempting to learn).

I have technical training from 2:00 to 5:00, but it’s in another village, so the break is used to travel to the village and lunch. The PC drives us to the other village, we finish class at 5pm (sometimes later if the teachers talk a lot), and drive back to my village at the school where we take our language classes. We don’t get back until about 5:30, so I don’t get home until 6.

One day a week, every PCT travels into Chisinau for hub site day. This is when we get general training for the PC, such as safety issues, gender roles, and anything else the PC wants us to know to integrate well. These are particularly long days. My training group has to leave Cojusna at 7:30 to be in Chisinau by 8:30, and we usually don’t get back until 6ish.

Weeks are very long, especially since I only get one day off. I miss the days of weekend being two days. Sigh. And technical training can be kind of hard to sit through sometimes. This training is teaching us how to teach. And while I know it’s necessary and all since I will be teaching, it can be kind of repetitive since I went to grad school for this and I taught. But I’m trying to keep an open mind. Afterall, I have never taught a foreign language. And I have gotten a lot of activity/game ideas to use in the classroom. And with all the talk about different strategies and activities, I have been remembering more things I learned in grad school that I can use as well.

We are also learning a new format for our lesson plans. And it requires a lot more details than I’m use to including in my lessons. For example, in addition to include an outline for the lesson (which is all I needed when I taught before), we need to include the names of the methods and approaches we use in the lesson. It can be hard stay motivated to do something that I never really needed to do when I was teaching last year.

But I did learn recently that we will leave our lesson plans with our cooperating teacher when we leave PC. So the lesson will be a reference for someone else even after we’re gone, making have more details more important. So I think knowing that the work going into my lessons will be less for me and more for a teacher here will give a greater value to the work I put into it.

Mel Brooks Is My Grandfather

So week 1 is complete. Even though I have been here more than a week, according to the schedule, this was the first week of the 10-week training period. And I have officially completed it.

I was reviewing the Romanian I have learned since I have been here and a lot has been covered. One of which is the names of family members. Nadia made a family tree using pictures of people from magazines to represent the members of a family. So we practiced saying each members name while pointing the members on the family tree. She tried to not use anyone famous, but Mel Brooks was the grandfather. In addition to learning family members, we have learned numbers, months, days of the week, telling time, basic introduction of oneself, describing our family members, and definite and indefinite nouns. I have not mastered everything yet, but I can sometimes pick out a word my host family is saying to each other!

Last night, the Cojusna trainees were invited to a masă with Lauren’s host family. Masă literally means table, but it’s used for feast too. And a feast it was. The food was yummy, and the company was great. My favorite part of the whole experience was despite the fact there was difficulty in understanding each other sometimes due to language, there was still a lot of laughing and fun. For future reference, always say yes to an invitation to a masă.

At dinner today, I was actually starting to understand some of the Moldovan. At the beginning of my time with my host family, I felt awkward sitting at the dinner table with them without being able to contribute anything except if they were looking for an English word. Now, I do not feel that awkwardness. And I listen to what is being said to try to pick out any words I know. Sometimes, I’m very proud of myself cause I can figure out the topic of the conversation. Other times, I doubt my understanding of Moldovan, because there was a point tonight when I thought “monkey” and “aunt” were said in the same sentence. But maybe they have a phrase like “a monkey’s uncle”!

Day 2 Moldova (aka Sarah’s Birthday, Which I Had To Miss And Had No Way Yet To Communicate To Her That I Was Thinking About Her)

Today begins training! Woot! It started with going into Chisinau by public transportation, and meeting at the Peace Corps headquarters. From there, our PCT mentors walked us around Chisinau. They showed us the piazza, where I could find anything I would want (mostly) to buy. We continued to walk around seeing various town sights before returning to the PC headquarters for a lunch with all the trainees, PCV, and PC staff. For the afternoon, we were introduced to Moldova and a little about how our finances work.

Between breaks, I was able to bond with Andrea over some of our anxieties. After talking with members of my training group, I was a little more nervous about things. Many of them speak another language and have study or traveled to other countries. And they were catching on to Romanian fairly quickly after only one night with their families, while I was still trying to figure out how to plug my electronics in. It’s unpleasant feeling like I still need to ask the questions everyone else already knows the answers to and needing to hear new words many times before remembering them, not just once from my host family. Andrea was feeling the same way I was, and it’s nice to not be alone in this feeling.

Afterwards, we had our first language lesson. The focus: the Romanian alphabet. We also practiced a few phrases to communicate with our host families. We were also given some of our immunizations.

When we returned to our village, Holly’s host mom was not home, so my host family invited her over to wait. Holly and I hung out on the families “deck” and related our anxieties (are you beginning to see a pattern in my conversations?). I told her how I wish I had more language experience like her so that learning Romanian would be easier. She told me of her anxieties of teaching since she had never taught before. Overall though, we both know we are going to enjoy our time here and look forward to what’s to come.

I met Daniel today. He speaks English as well as Diana. I enjoy hearing Diana and Daniel converse. It reminds me of my siblings. And it’s amusing hearing them consistently yelling to each other to help find the English word they are looking for.

After today, some worries have disappeared and many have developed. But it’s nice to know I’m not alone in my anxieties, and I have people to relate them to.