Marching On . . .

It's raining outside, not snowing. It also got up to 47 degrees today (Fahrenheit)! Is spring really here? Oddly, this time of year brings a "quarantine" of school age youth, which in turn, brings a sort of vacation for teachers. Let me explain the best I can... when the medical clinics have come to the conclusion that 30-50 % of the school age youth have the flu, the Health Minister is informed and the schools close down for a two-and-a-half-week quarantine. One teacher told me that although kids don't attend school (all classes are cancelled), teachers show up to "do planning and drink tea." I guess that may be one of the reasons that my workshops had high attendance and new faces this past week - teachers were free from some of their usual responsibilities. Apparently, some 'higher-up' has determined that the flu epidemic quarantine will be lifted next week... which conveniently dove-tails into Women's Day which is next Thursday (day off). So why go to work next week at all? I'm giving a presentation to Pre-Service teachers at the Pedagogical University on Tuesday, so we'll see how many 'students' show up.

And now for a bit of "shop talk" - something I try not to do too much of since my life is practically conSUMED by it! I started teaching a seminar course (every Thursday morning over the next 6 weeks) at the US Embassy. The topic is: Publishing & Presenting in TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language). The first day went great, and I love the group of teachers! They have great ideas, brought me flowers, and are very eager. We talked about submitting articles and presentation proposals, plagiarism, and teachers did demos of pre-writing, including free-writing, techniques - something they had never done but loved! Since we will meet only once a week, and a few of the teachers come from outside of Kyiv, I created an online community on a free website through www.nicenet.org
It's extremely cool and teachers can self enroll, make their own password, etc. It is very low tech, but that only works better for us as some of the computers can be quite slow. So we'll see if we can actually stimulate all to join and discuss online. I can also post homework and summaries of sessions on the webpage. I'm looking forward to my first experience conducting some distance education in conjunction with our traditional classroom activities.

Well, that's about it for now. до свидания! (dah-svidanya): Goodbye!