Clubs helped save me here. As you know, if you’ve been reading my blog from the very beginning, I was supposed to be a teacher trainer, working in a university with college students. But that didn’t happen and instead I was sent to Balkanabat to do the same work recently graduated philosophy majors were sent to do. I tried working in the classrooms with teachers but it was too frustrating. Teachers have no motivation to be good here and even if they wanted to radically alter their teaching, they can’t stray from the prescribed lesson plans and terrible textbooks provided by the Ministry of Education. Their go-to method of discipline is screaming, so I ended each day with a headache and hating life.
The smartest thing I did here was to say ‘screw that, I’m building a work schedule I can live with.’ So I stopped going to school classes and created an entire schedule of after school clubs. Here, I had only students who were dedicated, I had control over the curriculum and methodology, and there was no screaming. Here, I met students who proved not all Turkmen are lazy and fall for the propaganda. Here, I met friends. Here, I could lose myself for a few hours and escape my sometimes nearly debilitating depression while I was caught up in explaining Mohs scale or why Alexander was called Great.
I created many clubs over my time here: beginning English, advanced English, essay writing, America club, world club, arts club, girls’dance and fitness, science club, TOEFL and SAT prep, even a short lived teachers’ club. For the most part, they were fun to teach, and I learned a lot while teaching them. For example, in my America club, I
eventually taught about each state, so I had to do research on them. As a result I learned new things even about my own home state of Michigan. Did you know we rank second in the country in diversity of agriculture? We’re the leading producer of cherries, blueberries, pickling cucumbers, red beans, and petunias. We also have the longest freshwater coastline in the world, and a person in Michigan is never more than 6 miles from a natural water source.
Anyway, my final club was fun and relaxed. My students and I just hung out and talked. And they took all of the books from my library, which means those books will get read rather than sit in that room collecting dust. My favorite club is walking club, which is just my students walking home with me after the day’s lessons. Yesterday we walked and talked one last time.