November 2005
10^th	I have been very busy this week but much of it was very ordinary in the extreme. I met with 20 students on Tuesday at 8 in the morning to teach them about internet searches. I think it went well. They seemed very interested but the teacher had to tell them that they were supposed to be taking notes. For some reason they complained about that because they stated that they could either listen or take notes but not do both at the same time. I did not explore this but I intend to find out more. I get to teach the class again today but to younger students the same age as ninth graders. I have been warned to go slower because they are not as smart. I did about half of the instructions in Russian and while they giggled about my pronunciations they seemed to understand what I said and took notes. It was easier then teaching another subject because search engines do not use proper English or full sentences so y grammar problems did not get in the way. Today I get to go to the train station to buy tickets to Kiev for next week. I do not enjoy dong this because no matter how much I practice what I am going to say they come up with new questions every time. Got to go to work and make the donuts. I will write more later. msp
4^th	Here it is November and Virginia pointed out to me that I have only 19 months left in country and that it is 19 months since we sent in our application forms to PC. It is just a start but it is well started. I do not feel adequate in my language skills yet but I am teaching a computer class that I enjoy and English class I hate. No I love English but I never wanted to teach English and I am forced to work very hard to stay ahead of the class and provide a lesson plan that I can use. We are working on grammar and I have charts but I really do not know how to teach a language so I feel like I am not accomplishing anything. Maybe I should concentrate on conversation which is what I wanted to do in the first place but they asked for grammar help. I feel lost every day that I teach the class. Next week I present my first class to outsiders of the library. This is the first time in the libraries history that it has entered into an agreement with a school to teach a library class. Last week they had two session on how to read a card catalog and work in the library. Next week I have two sessions, with Interpreter, on internet search techniques. This is very important here because it cost by the MB to download anything and that included web search results. The class did an experiment and went to the internet café with instructions to find information on the seven wonders of the world. One group of 5 students came back with some information at a cost of 20 URH. Which is relative to spending 20 dollars in the states to find information. They spent 1.5 hours and had to write down everything because the club they chose did not have a printer. They came to me on Tuesday and I went back and in five minutes copied to my hard drive two different sources a total of 20 pages of information on the seven wonders. One in Russian and one in English. The class will be harder because I will not have computers for them to work on and there are too many of them to crowd around my little laptop. Display board. I need to look for a display board and print up some oversized charts. I do not have much to add this week because I kept a pretty low profile getting ready for my class at PC University. I get to go and teach a class to the new PCV’s and that will be fun for me. The class is on basic web design and I really mean basic just like the class information I used at Emerald and I also get to teach a class on using the Russian version of Microsoft Word. I am a part of the PCUkraine IT team. I look forward to attending this newly designed middle section of training. They have also changed some things about site visit that I find better but I am not sure if It is better or not. Now they get to go to site without meeting the site coordinators first, they get to meet at site for the first time. That could be interesting. Well I will post this have a great week.