Phone Call

The phone woke me this morning. Rousing from sleep is almost as difficult as falling into slumber. At night I take a sleeping pill because it is the only way to overcome the anxiety that is slowly disappearing from the bed bug infestation. I knew it would be only a matter of time and that only a series of mornings not followed by bug bites would ensure that the problem was really gone. It has been a week and I have not found a single bite. Perhaps tonight I will be able to break the cycle; sleeping pill at night, coffee in the morning.

The phone call was a teacher at my school. My first thought was that my free day was shot and that I was coming in. This was not the case.





On Friday I show up for one class that I will be teaching by myself. The kids of Ukraine do a better job at making me feel like a child than my own estranged father. I am tall, bearded and speak in a deep voice while wearing a button up shirt and pants that are not jeans. This should make me look like a figure in a position of authority. I am a teacher and they are students.

This is not the case in Ukraine. As I said before the kids do not have any real motivation or incentive to do well aside from the few that have parents with strong morale encouragement. Teaching alone in Ukraine can be a nightmare unto itself because if a student does not clearly understand what is being said they will rebel and it only takes one, like a dominoes, to upset the whole class. When a Ukrainian teacher is present they are able to quickly snap the class back into attention with various threats and sharp words. When I try to do this in English they laugh. When I try to do it in Russian they laugh even harder.

Today I have my second Drama Club. It was suppose to just be with University kids but the Lyceum kids caught wind of it and some of them are going to arrive. The ones that are coming are smart and can speak pretty good English.

I want to perform the Christmas Carol play in December. If I do this though it will require a lot of work on my part. I will quite literally rewrite the entire play, cutting out all the useless sentences and rephrasing other sentences to make them simple English. Even though it is University level students performing the play it will be mostly young Lyceum children watching and their grasp of English will be very, very poor.

Today I have a few improve comedy games to play that I hope they enjoy. Either way it will give me something to talk about for tomorrow’s post that isn’t filled with any potential disaster from the solitary class.



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