certification

Friday 23 August: Day 43

We have a lot of work ahead of us.

Today we gave a presentation outlining the goals we have as an organization.  Most of the staff were present and engaged – some Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats [SWOT] analysis (from college), some discussions on Community of Practice (from the Peace Corps) and some critical discussions about our future made the presentation feel like the culmination of a short lifetime of leadership experience while keeping everyone engaged.  In brief:

Goal 1: The most pressing goal is to make EAI “automatic” – to streamline and standardize what we do in the office.  This means creating a procedure for intaking new students that’s objective and fair.  This also means writing lesson plans for every class and every level, all in all about 250 lesson plans together.  That’s going to take a minute.  We want EAI to be as approachable and scalable as possible, but up until now, the systems we have in place haven’t grown with the size of the organization.  We’re going to change that.

Goal 2: We’re also going to increase EAI’s name recognition by putting together a killer marketing strategy while building our relationships with the community.  We’re partnering with the Ministry of Education to lead teacher training clinics (a la Peace Corps) and plan to set our school apart by delivering quality marketing content.  In the near future we’re putting together a series of student testimonials which can be re-used for every course cycle while demonstrating the level of proficiency students can expect to gain by taking our courses.

Goal 3: In the classroom, our major goal is developing a student-centered teaching approach that prioritizes creative learning over from-the-book rote memorization.  Whereas most Kurds have an extensive (if flawed) understanding of English grammar, this focus is often at the expense of learning the “art” of the language, as traditional Kurdish teachers don’t allow students to practice speaking English in conversations or group activities.  We can change that both by creating student centric lesson plans and by giving students avenues to provide feedback on classes, thus empowering students to have a role in how EAI is run.

Goal 4: Among the teaching staff – which will be growing dramatically in the coming months – we want to lay the foundation for a Community of Practice (COP).  We’re stealing this straight from the Peace Corps; they taught us that building a culture of professional cooperation and administrator-faculty harmony was the key to large-scale behavior change at site, and our fourth goal is to bring that approach to Kalar.  We’re excited to write a curriculum for a teacher training course to introduce new staff to our program and lead a week of training sessions that will help break the usual habits of rote memorization and authoritarian instruction. 

Goal 5: Our first four goals are all in service to our principle goal: starting the best English-language primary and secondary school in Iraqi Kurdistan.  There’s a lot of groundwork to be done – buying and renovating the property, navigating a regulatory labyrinth – but if we focus and work as a team, our timeline is as follows:

• Next May: open the building, begin remodeling, and finalize our enrollment
• Next Summer: test the systems we’re currently developing, put COP and student-centered learning in practice and succeed in the busiest summer of private tutoring EAI will have to date
• Next September: open the school for its inaugural year

After we finished our presentation, we got back to work.  I think it’s pretty cut out for us.

“xwendnga” (when-din-ga) – school

Sunday 25 August: Day 45

 It’s about noon and the temperature cracks 120 degrees F.  There’s no shade in sight, not under the trees or the awnings or the bellies of cars parked in the street.  All air is hot and stagnant, like walking on an oven rack.  At this time of day people are praying and napping and escaping the sun.  A few cars slide by, undoubtedly with their ACs blasting, and their exhaust hits my back like hot burps almost mocking my heat-stoked exhaustion. 

There are still smells, but they are lost in the heat, almost like the flavor of a meal doused in hot sauce.  When we first arrived in Kalar the only discernable sensory input was the temperature, a range of “flavors” have intermittently revealed themselves to us.  There’s the oily perfume worn by men that radiates in the dry air and the delectable smell of cooked meat in the last home before we leave our apartment and townhome complex that makes us stop and turn our heads and remember charcoal grills in June.  There’s diesel and kerosene burning with that lurid smell of hot glue and the fresh smell of watered grass at sunset that welcomes us as we walk across the small playground in front of our home. 

In front of me now is one of my favorite smells:  chicken, sticky with lemon and tomato glaze, roasting, the skin breaking as it turns on the spigot in the steel convection oven.  I can’t tell if the meat cooks from the gas burner or simply warms from the sun going through the glass on it’s front, but either way the smell is better than any drive through window in the States and it whips my head like a powered magnet.  We usually ditch whatever other plans we have for food when we pass this little shop.  As we bite in to the dead bird the lemon sticks between our lips and our gums and we can actually tell that the heat of the meal is something different than this ambient energy in the air around us, that there is an array of flavors and smells that are discernable even in the previously unexplored extremes of this environment.  Like every other patron of this tiny little chicken shop, I’m glad we tried to take a bite.

“mamr” – chicken

Tuesday 27 August: Day 47

When enough students express an interest in starting a new class, we set it up, regardless of where we are with our current classes.  That’s how the EAI has handled new classes since its inception and that’s the approach that got us through the very busy summer.  But this approach creates a couple of problems.  For one, its impossible to put together a course schedule farther than a month out, if that.  How can we predict when enough students of a similar English level will be ready for a new class?  When we do have enough students, the most convenient time for their class may be when we’re already teaching, which means we’d have to hire another teacher to fill the gap.  But teachers don’t grow on trees – especially good teachers who can speak fluent English and value a student-centered teaching style – meaning that the quality of our courses suffers as a result.

The solution is to start classes regularly; to have two-month blocks that have a staggered start time, so that one course is halfway completed when the second course starts, and the second course is halfway completed when the third one starts, and so on.  We can have a regular monthly schedule where advertising for a new class happens on the last two weeks of a month, progress interviews happen on weeks 6 and 7 of a course and exams happen the last week, and we can even write this formula down somewhere and advertise it so that students know what to expect and can’t get around our process for “exceptional” circumstances.  Want to start a new class?  Join the one that started last week or wait until the start of next month – it’s not like you didn’t know our timeline here.

The problem with organizing our courses this way?  As one potential student said to us, “I’m motivated to do the class now, but I might not be motivated to start the class in two weeks.”  And being deferential to these students is of the utmost importance for our respect and credibility in the community.  The other problem is that we’re just not ready to start this system on September 1 so we’d need to start on October 1, but since our current classes end in the middle of September we’d have two weeks without course instruction.  Mitsu and I are hoping to use this time to tackle some of the many administrative overhauls we plan on accomplishing.

Let’s see how that goes.

“xshta” – schedule

Thursday 29 August: Day 49

When I ask my students what movies they love, a lot of my students say Inception.  In the movie, a “deeper” dream reveals truths about “upper” realities.  All of the “levels” are real, but diving into a deeper, more abstract level of the subconscious shows truths about someone’s soul.

I’m learning that teaching English has similarities.  Speakers need a basic understanding of grammar and sentence structure, but once they have that, reinforcing textbook skills only goes so far.  Forcing students to stand up and demonstrate a new trick we reviewed in class often freezes a non-native speaker and thus prevents any application of the learned material – but when we talk about talking, to put it plainly, everyone is able to contribute.  It’s actually a really cool pattern to observe; when my students shared advice about our upcoming end-of-course presentations, everyone contributed flawlessly and without hesitation.

Focusing our conversations on a “deeper” level, on the application of English, encourages students to think in English in order to participate.  When speaking our second languages, people usually think in their native language and mentally translate their speech.  Getting students to think and reason in English is the real goal of teaching them how a language works, though.  I only started thinking in Kinyarwanda when I was leaving the Peace Corps and never got close to that level of understanding taking Spanish classes in college, but the full immersion of language learning – using a new language’s grammar and definitions to reason in that language – is the beautiful climax of studying a new language.

In high school, I had a Latin teacher (shout out to Ms. Hoffman!) who said that we’d know we had actually learned the new language when we started dreaming with it.  I hope my students can experience that.

“xaw” – dream