OVERVIEW OF WORK AND DAILY LIFE

As of June 2002

First, let me say that it is only 5:25 in the morning, but it is light out right now. White Nights isn’t just for St. Petersburg, I guess.

Homeward Bound:

According to my work permit, I finished on June 12. According to my contract I finish July 31, but I’m going home early (end of June). The last things I have to do are 1) attend one more IATEFL conference in Kharkiv and 2) get my things for next year to the new city of Khmelnytsky. The second one will be more of an ordeal. I have to get a taxi to the train station, then take a 19-hour overnight train to Khmelnytsky with the things I’ll need for next year (but not for this summer). I have one night in Khmelnytsky, then I take an overnight train to Kyiv for the day, and another night train to Kharkiv. I arrive in Kharkiv and fly out to Vienna the same day. I continue on to Frankfurt, where I have a one-night stopover. Then I fly the next day to Washington. So that’s three trains, two taxis, and three planes in a 5 or 6 day period depending on how you count. Yowsa.

The Work:

The second-to-last week of May I gave the 4^th year students a quasi-exam in which they had to prepare three questions for an American based on what we had talked about in class. The two most popular questions were, “Our teacher told us that in America traditionally the father of the bride pays for the wedding—is it true?” and “Our teacher told us that racial discrimination is still a problem in America—do you agree?” The following week I then arranged for two Peace Corps Volunteers (friends of mine from Kharkiv) to come to the university to answer their questions. The students were supposed to write the answers they heard, and this is how they would get credit. For some of the groups I didn’t know what time they would meet the volunteer, so I gave them three possible times and told them to check with the registrar on Tuesday if it wasn’t on the timetable.

Unfortunately, only three and a half of the seven groups (six groups if you don’t count the group that stopped coming to class in May) got to see the Peace Corps volunteers. Why? I could only get volunteers for three double periods. Two weeks in advance I went to the woman who works the timetable and asked if it would be possible to rearrange the schedule so that all of my 4^th year groups would be placed in one of these three periods. I knew it was a big job and a lot to ask, but the woman who works the timetable said she could get it done. The Friday before the first class (to be held on a Wednesday), I asked the woman if the timetable would be ready on Tuesday. She said yes. I went off to Russia and didn’t call in to check on Tuesday or Wednesday or even Friday when I returned, which I now know was a huge mistake. The registrar never got the changes made. I was told her mother passed away on Wednesday and she had to go home; the assistant dean who heard me talk about it wasn’t responsible for the timetable, and the woman who was didn’t know about the changes that needed to be made. A few students from one group went on their own to one presentation, which I thought was impressive. The rest didn’t bother. I could have asked teachers to let me take their groups out for a special presentation, but I thought it was the last week of class and I didn’t like it when that happened to me so I didn’t want to do it to other people.

The following week the volunteers were in Kyiv all week for a conference, and then students had exams so rescheduling was not a possibility, as I explained to the groups who bothered to show up the following week. I saw no point in getting angry or even bitter about the matter. I had obviously asked too much of the administration and the students, and not done enough of the work myself.

What I did find myself getting bitter about were the scheduling changes I didn’t ask for. I had been told in April or May that the last day of classes before exams would be June 2. When I got back from Russia and had meetings with two classes on the 31^st of May, one group told me that the schedule had been extended by at least a week, if not more. Since Friday, June 7 was graduation and I was not about to miss that, I told students if they wanted to use my double period to come to graduation they could. I couldn’t believe that for the third session in a row the session length was being changed at the end of the semester, and I was only finding out about it from my students and not from the administration. A teacher later told me that the teachers have a certain number of hours to complete for their payment contract, and if they can’t get them done they have to work extra hours. But it wasn’t clear if that applied to me. I showed up for classes on Wednesday the 5^th anyway, and showed videos of American movies and TV shows. My Thursday groups did not show up, but I waited around anyway in case they did.

The other thing I got angry about were the students who came to me in May and June from the 3^rd year course (which should have finished in March or April) asking me how they could get their credit. Some had been ill and tried to turn in the original test, which I no longer considered valid because of all the problems with copying. For one student who turned in a perfect sheet, I checked her attendance and saw she had only been to three lectures. I knew it was impossible for her to have gotten the answers from my lectures (since some of the questions were based on seminars), and told her to come back for a retest. She never showed up. I gave three oral exams on the 31^st of May. When a student in June asked me to give her an exam on the day of graduation, I didn’t show up because I was out with my graduating students. I should have offered to give her the exam on Saturday instead but I didn’t think of that until another girl asked me to give her an exam. She showed up an hour late though, and by then I had already filled out the final versions of the credit sheets, so I told her no way. She accepted the news with indifference. The following Monday (June 10^th) I saw a representative of a whole group of students who never took the test and thus failed the course asked for a retest; I said it would have to be the 11^th or 12^th (thinking of my work permit status); she said she would call me but she never did. I don’t know which of my fears is worse: that I was being too rigid and judgmental with these students, or that the students who got no credit may go to the dean later and get credit anyway even though they don’t know the material.

Why Am I Coming Back?

All of the personal and professional problems and frustrations I describe beg the question: why in the world would I want to come back for a second year? First, I should say that I won’t be coming back to Kharkiv; I’ll be in the western city of Khmelnytsky. There I’ll have an opportunity to learn about a different part of Ukraine, and to pick up more of the Ukrainian language. I had a chance to visit the university there in May for a conference. The people there are great—bright, energetic, and talented. The department head is the president of TESOL Ukraine. One teacher was a Muskie Fellow (a very competitive scholarship which provides a free graduate education to citizens of the former Soviet Union). Another had a Partners in Excellence award to study in Arizona for two months. These people are really on the ball. Moreover, the new university is not a state university, so it has some money. There is a teacher’s room with desks set aside for individual teachers. There are two computers there which are hooked up to the Internet and which you can actually use and which don’t take 15 minutes to load one page. There is a resource center with shelves of books you can actually see and touch. There is even a clean bathroom with a sit down toilet, liquid soap, and paper towels. So it’s more like being in Western Europe than Russia. Which in a way is worse because the people in Eastern Ukraine probably need me more. But it will definitely be more comfortable for me for the next year.

On a broader scale, I’m coming back because it’s an honor to be in this program and to have a full-time job, especially straight out of school. Not everybody who is in the English Language Fellow program got invited back by their post (embassy). I’m kind of a big fish here—people appreciate having an American and a native speaker here, and I get lots of opportunities to travel and meet people and give presentations and workshops. One university in Lviv gave me a bouquet of roses after a presentation. At an American Studies conference, all the presenters were given t-shirts of the host academy and a 5-hryvnia souvenir coin (like a silver dollar). That would never happen to me in the States. The university students in Lviv asked difficult questions like “Do you think it was useful that America got attacked on September 11?” and “Why does America impose its violent films on our society?” These questions are another reason to stay—somebody needs to tell Ukrainians that no country no matter how rich or how involved in foreign policy “deserves” to be attacked, and America does not impose its films on foreign governments; rather, foreign agencies choose to purchase cheap, bad, violent movies instead of quality dramas and comedies. Also, I’ve learned a lot of the language and the system and made the necessary adjustments (and found Americans to laugh about it with when I can’t), so I’m hoping in the second year I’ll be more productive. Finally, a professor of mine from the University of Pennsylvania is coming to a conference in September, and there’s a chance a former classmate will come to Crimea in the spring. So I wanna stay around to see them here and welcome them here.

The Weather:

Like much of Europe, spring and summer weather in Kharkiv varies between sunny and warm, warm and humid, and cold and rainy. More difficult is what I call “cold and flea season”—the changes in weather can result in colds, and there are lots of bugs (not necessarily fleas, perhaps mosquitoes) that come in and bite. I don’t know why even the upscale apartments here don’t have screens to keep the bugs out. Perhaps people don’t care if they get a few bites; it’s just an inconvenience that will go away in time. Perhaps it’s a reflection of the Ukrainian “mentality” that encourages indifference to certain conditions. Even after a year I don’t know how to deal with that indifference. Is it worse to express my anger at the indifference, thereby being a cultural imperialist, or to say or do nothing to change the social problems (reasoning that if they are happy with their indifference and don’t want to change, let them be) and thereby allow them to continue to live in what I call “second world” conditions?

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