I apologize for not writing in the space for some time, but I mislaid the notebook where my address for this site was and couldn't get in. but I found it. Watch for pictures of the new school year and pictures of my January viait to Jerusalem and the Holy Land.

THE EARTHQUAKE STORY

December 7 is a major commemoration day in Armenia, but not for the same reason it is important to Americans. By December 7, 1939, Armenia, as part of the Soviet Union, had been at war for over two years. There is a tall World War II monument on a hill on the outskirts of Spitak that can be seen from miles in either direction, but it is in a sad state. There is no sign or inscription to say what it is, and the marble cladding has fallen or been stripped off of it. The steps leading up the hill ware so badly deteriorated that it is easier to wak up the pasture, and nobody ever goes up there except those who pasture their cows on the slopes of the hill. No, for Armenians, December 7, 1988, at 11:50 is the day and hour of the great earthquake that destroyed s;pitak and severely damaged Gyumri and Vanadzor, the second and third largest cities, and lwhat was then the industrial heart of Armenia. Last year Armenians commemorated the twentieth anniversary of that disaster.

At that time Spitak was an industrial city, and the old pictures show an entirely different city, with tall Soviet-style apartment blocks that collapsed or were so badly damaged that they had to be taken down. Everybody lost some family member in the disaster. My first counterpart English teacher was eleven at the time, and she and her sister were in class. The teacher had just called her sister to the blackboard when the earthquake struck. The teacher and the sister were killed, and Nuneh spent three days in the rubble until rescued by foreign volunteer rescuers. My second counterpart, Marina’s mother was a teacher, and she had just sent a boy out of the room on some errand when the earthquake struck, and she was killed and the boy was saved. He later married the woman who is my landlady. They had two children, now 9 and 11. When the younger was only eight days old, he died of a heart attack. My English tuto was only 5 and in kindergarten. Her mother taight at the same school, and ordinarily took her daughter home at 11:30, but on that day, the teacher asked if she could stay to practice for the Winter Festival. Fifteen minutes later the earthquake struck and Emilia was buried in the rubble. Her father dug her out with his own hands, and she was the only person in the building to survive. She was badly injured and spent several months in a hospital in Yerevan. The Vice-Principal of our school lost her husband, as did her assistant, who also lost her 14-year-old son, a budding artist. Several of the teachers also lost husbands. Spitak had to build a new cemetery, which is full of huge slabs of black granite with photos of the deceased etched into the stone. (This is the universally accepted practice in Armenia, the picture slab. One particularly poignant plot shows a mother and three small children who died in the earthquake, and next to it the slab of the father who died fifteen years later, still a young man and late victim of the earthquake.

Many countries and Republics of the Soviet Union sent aid, and also sent materials and volunteers to build new housing. The day of the earthquake was unusually warm for December, but the weather turned cold later, while the survivors were still inadequately housed. The initial intention was to build a new Spitak west of the old city, and neighborhoods were built by the Swiss, the Italians, the Uzbeks, and the Chechins, to name those neighborhoods closest to there I live. The are strung out along the base of the mountains west of town, and on the north side of the valley. But most Spitakians preferred to rebuild in The old town where they had property and repairable or refundable houses. So now the center of Spitak has an attractive colonnaded shopping mall around a central fountain, and attractive apartments in the pink local volcanic stone. The new neighborhood were left stranded and isolated, and Swiss village, where I live has large open spaces in the middle where apartments and shopping malls were never built.

The first area built was Italian Village, a village of 180 prefabricated metal homes, each four rooms and bath, about the size of a double mobile home. The Italians are probably surprised and appalled that they are still in use after nearly twenty years. They are rental units, and renters must declare that they cannot afford anything else. Rents are according to income, and the highest is 8000 drams or about #25 a month, or so I’m told. Unlike most of Armenia, they are not supplied with natural gas, and electric heating is expensive, so the inhabitants buy logs brought in from somewhere and chop them up for kindling. It is often a community [project, with whoever owns a power saw bringing it along to cut the logs into choppable pieces. Everybody had a low wood stove that also serves as a cook stove in winter, and it is a wonder there are not more house fires. And every house has a wood pile and considering the conditions of some families, it is a wonder that more woodpiles don’t get raided. Some householders have added stone or concrete block rooms to the original house. There is not much yard space, but some have created an attractive patio in front, and planted flowers. Many have a small potato patch at the side.

I know many respectable families in Italian village, but there are many families without fathers or with fathers absent at work in Russia. The common notion is that the flotsam and jetsam of Spitak has ended up in Italian village, and it is not safe from theft. People don’t steal from each other much, but I was told there wans’t much point in donating anything of much value to the village or school.

There is fairly frequent mini-bus service into Spitak proper, frequent enough that except for Sunday, one does not have to concern oneself with schedules. (The fare is about 25 cents, and has not changed in the two years I have been in Armenia.) But in the village, there are only two grocery and notions stores in the corner of the village to serve it and Swiss and Uzbek villages, and a building that houses the post office and the drug store. By the way, drug stores in Armenia sell only drugs. Doctors write prescriptions, but as far as I can tell, there is no law about one needing a prescription for any drug one feels one needs. And general stores don’t seem to sell and of what we call patent or over-the-counter medicines like headache or cold remedies.

Sunday was Remembrance Day, and many people went ou to the cemetery. I went to church and thought they woud stop to have a moment of speical observance at the exact time of the quake, but they didn't. Bu the time I got out, most people had been to the cemetery and back.

The school held its service on Friday, when it was graced by the attendance of the President's wife, the First Lady of Armenia. She seems to have lots of resources at her disposal and has taken on the school as one of ther projects. Besides clothing, bedding, and a dishwasher and clothes drier, she gave the swchool a van to transport the children coming in from the outlying village. Because Italian Village is a village especially for those displaced, the rembrance has special meaning here.

HOW I WENT TO ARMENIA WITH THE PEACE CORPS AND LOST IT

This is a story of absolute and ignoble failure. I want that understood from the beginning. If you are expecting some uplifting tale about how to achieve success in the Peace Corps or in the field of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TESOL) look elsewhere, because this is not that story. This is MY story.

I may tell you how I got into the field of teaching English in foreign countries some other time, but for now suffice it to say that I was teaching at the Cultural Center in Costa Rica, which had a large and successful program of English instruction, which included lectures and workshops by language experts from the United States. One program I was very impressed by was called Total Physical Response, and I incorporated it into my own teaching with some success.

My later career led me in other directions, but after I retired, I wanted to go out one more time and see what I could achieve using the total physical response method. I wanted to teach in a country where English was relatively new as the Second Language, a country that was economically relatively backward, but had the potential to become a prosperous modern state if integrated into the world economy, which speaks English as the common mode of communication. Armenia came to mind, because I had read about it, and thought of it as a much put-upon Christian nation surrounded by enemies.

So I went on to the internet and punched in Armenia, and TESOL, and up popped “Peace Corps.” I had experience with the Peace Corps. I had gone to Poland in 1990 with the first Peace Corps contingent, but in Poland I taught in a teacher’s college, American Life and Culture to students who were already reasonably adept in Enlish. Very little opportunity in my free time to use the Total Physical Response method. I wanted to teach beginners. I was accepted into candidacy, but because of my age (71 when I started the process) I had trouble satisfying the Medical Department as to my fitness, although all of my physical tests showed someone remarkably fit for his age. But at last I was accepted. I was going as a high school, and as it turned out, primary school teacher. Armenia was a country with an English program mainly directed toward reading/translation, and they wanted to reorganize it along more communicative lines. What a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of th Total Physical Response (TPR) method. TPR is a method that duplicated the way children learn their native language and the way foreigners learn a language if suddenly immersed in the culture. It is best done by someone who does not know the native language of the learner because there is no temptation to lapse into the learner’s language and impede progress. It also works best among a plyglot group of people who do not know each other’s languages, so they are forced to communicate with each other in the target language.

One begins by seating everyone in a circle, so that all are equal. Ideally it is best to have a teacher and an assistant to model the utterances to be learned. But one teacher can manage. The idea is to keep up a barrage of language so rapid and constant that the learner hardly has time to think but must be constantly putting the sounds he hears against that activity he sees gong on around him.

As I say, the group is seated in a circle and the teacher takes out a ball, and throws it to one of the students. “Catch!” he says, then “Throw me the ball.” ”Catch it!” “Catch the ball!” “Throw it to her!” Gradually other words are added to the vocabulary with actions that make clear what the words mean. The students learn on two levels. First they learn to recognize the commands or other sentences and to respond to them. Then gradually at their own pace they begin using the commands just as the teacher did to achieve the same results from the other students and from the teacher. Eventually the faster students are teaching the slower students. Of course, as the teacher adds vocabulary, he does not move away from the original vocabulary until it is thoroughly learned. And it always remains part of the working vocabulary. Balls appear in class for a long time.

It sounds simple, doesn’t it? You seat the students in a circle-- That was the first problem with my Armenian students. For them learning was a matter of the students sitting at desks facing the teacher. I set out the chairs in a circle the way I wanted them to sit, and the first student in grabbed the chair opposite and drew it right up to my knees. It became a battle of wills to get the students to sit in the kind of circle I had in mind. If I finally got them into some semblance of a circle, they would pull in so close they did not have room to move. In Costa Rica, our classes were predicated upon the circle and every chair had a writing arm. In Armenia, predicated upon students sitting two to a desk, when the sat in a circle they had no surface to rest their notebook on if they wanted to take notes.

OK, we got in some semblance of a circle--and I’m not just taking about eight-year-olds. Fourteen-year-olds were just as bad about cooperating in forming a circle. If anything, the eight-year-olds were a little more malleable. So I got out the ball-- Once the ball came out, everything was about getting hold of the ball. Any thought of learning anything related to the ball went out the window, or up the chimney, or wherever. The object was to get hold of that ball. I couldn’t toss a ball to someone without someone else jumping up and grabbing it. But I would keep trying. Eventually some of them would connect the sound pattern: “Throw me the ball” with an activity. Then it was virtually impossible beyond that phrase. One has difficulty maintaining any sort of program with fourteen kids screaming “Throw me the ball!” “Throw me the ball!” without pause.

A CULTURE OF HITTING

I don’t know whether it is a result of being part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union for so long or part of indigenous Armenian culture, but Armenia is a culture of physical intimidation. Parents hit their children, teacher hit their students, and children hit each other. While the children are eating lunch, the teachers assigned to watching over them stand around grim-faced and do not eat with them (except me), and the vice-director stands there with a stout stick in her hand, which she does not hesitate to use, though not with any force in that situation. But the threat isthere. I believe that one o the main causes of my ineffectiveness as a teacher is that they do not expect me to use force on them. On occasion when frustration has gotten the better of me and I lay into a student with visible anger, the rest go into shocked silence and are “good” and cooperative. But not for very long.

After the winter holidays, one of the smallest second graders came to school with a healing bruise under his eye. I asked my counterpart to ask him who had given him the black eye. “My father, was his reply.” he is one of the boarding students, and the first day we had English, he bawled and screamed when led into the classroom, and would not stay. The homeroom teacher took him away. The second class he was again led in crying, but stayed though he sat at his desk and lay on it with his head down the whole period sulking. I visited in the evening and was trying to get him to join in playing with a ball, but he was reluctant. The male physical education teacher was in charge that evening, and he came up and gave the kid a whack for not cooperating, which sent the kid into a crying fit. I felt the kid was still traumatized by being forced to spend his nights with strangers, and he wasn’t being bad, just holding back, so the hit was uncalled for. I put my arms around the kid and comforted him. Not speaking Armenian, I could not discuss it with the teacher, so I’m not sure how he felt about my response. Now the kid is adjusted to school and staying overnight for the week, and is generally a sunny child.

I have noticed that in Armenia boys cry a lot later than they are permitted to in America. I noticed one boy of about twelve, the son of the local provisions shop owner, crying a couple of times as I walked past, and thought he must be mentally retarded, but have decided he is just a little behind times emotionally. I have found that the boy in the household where I live, who just turned eleven, will start crying out of frustration when forced to come to the table to eat or other itmes, will start to cry. His sister, who is eight, cries at any emotional tension, for instance when her mother makes her take a piano lesson, which she hates. But nobody pays any attention, and she is almost immediately over it. It does not seem to be an attention-getting device, but simply a nervous response which American children learn to get over earlier. I haven’t seen her cry at school

The other day, right in the middle of class, one of the boys in the Fifth grade (properly the fourth) jumped up and started hitting and kicking a quite, innofensive little girl, I pulled him off and almost immeridatly the assistant vice principal came in and after taking to the boy, started berating the girl, who started to cry. My countrpart was not there that day and I was tring to handle the class alone. The next class I asked my counterpart to ask why he had started hitting the girl. Most of the class immediately started butting in. It seemed the little girl had made a reference to his parentage, and i learned for the first time that he didn't have a father and had never had one. (But everyone apparently knows who the father is.) I tried to impress on him that boys his age shouldn't hit girls no matter the provocation, but I don't think I was able to make much of an impression.

THE NEW SCHOOL YEAR, 2008-2009

It's a new school year and that deserves a new web page. Considerable changes have been made in the school and in my work this year. In the first place, the school is reorganized, and we no longer have the high school years. This is part of a governmental decision to create distinct high schools--I suppose in towns large enough to accommodate them. This means our top class now is a combined eighth and ninth. I don't understand the combined business except that in English we now have kids in that class who were in both seventh and eighth before. The class is not excessively large because some ninth graders have transferred to the closest high school, and some elementary students left because of the reorganization.

Our school is, I understand, to be more vocationally oriented. I don't know what that means, exactly, for boys especially, since we do have a home economics room with a sewing machine and a couple of looms. As I said, some of our former students transferred to general schools, but we have about the same number of students because we now have 29 boarding students who are brought in from outlying villages on Monday morning and are bussed home Saturday after school. That is about 1/4 of our student population. I have visited them in the evening, and they are getting a pretty good meal (so far) but otherwise the situation looks a little like something out of Oliver Twist. This being a school, the place has to be kept in reasonably good order, which means a restricted regimine. Some of our teachers are rotating evening duty, and I hope they are getting paid for it.

Two classrooms have been converted into bedrooms, one for girls and one for boys. I counted the beds and there are only 22, so some brothers and sisters are bunking together. I think some of the youngers boys are bunking with older sisters. I don't know about vice-versa. There is a TV and DVD in each room. The evening I went in before supper, they were all in one classroom playing some sort of game. Particularly as the days get shorter and the nights colder, I think they will be a captive audience for English-learning games. And just bored enough to go along.

Though the regular schools begin English instruction in the third grade, my school is beginning it in the second. I like to think that they are taking advantage of me while I'm here, but it may simply be to give my counterpart another two hours of class time. There is also a special class of "troubled" students, eight of them, who are getting communicative instruction without a textbook. I'm not sure why they are "troubled," but they are all boarding students, sweet and cooperative, with a wide variety of ages, one a first-grader. So far they are picking up the verbal instructions pretty well.

Last year we did not have a third grade, and this year we do not have a fourth. Because they upped everybody a year, we used the books numbered a year earlier. This year, some of the years have new texts, but not all. The first year text (third grade, so numbered 3) is quite an improvement over last years, with oral conversation introduced first and the letters introduced later and more rapidly. The new editions take the renumbering into account, but where there is no new textbook, the classes were handed the old books with their grade number on them willy-nilly. which means the kids skip a whole book--and the old book was way too advanced for them. We are struggling with some years, but my counterpart nd I put our foot down and insisted that the fifth grade be taught in the old fourth grade book, and we got our way. That is the only class having three hours of English this year, and they had three last year, so I am hopeful of getting them up to speed. My intention is to go into every classroom once or twice a week and help them with their homework or have a communicative session. Since their teachers don't know English, they can only give limited help.

The second grade was given the old third grade book, since the third graders have the new beginning book. With the extra year, I don't think they need much writing in English, so I hope to emphasize speaking.

One thing I'm trying to start is a Pen Pal club. I've asked friends and relatives back home to find me 100 pen pals spread out between 2nd and 9th grades. Since Our kids don't have access to the internet, I'll scan their letters and send them as attachments, and copy off the letters that come for them. I intend to make that a graded part of their work, and believe they will become more communicative when they see English is actually a communicative experience. If you would like to participate and get a pen pal for a younger relative or friend, write to me at spitakpals@live.co.uk.

Since I speak little Armenian and understand almost none (at least what my students say to me) I could not teach without a counterpart. It was my counterpart last year who requested the Peace Corps to send somebody to her. But this year, the Friday before school started, she walke into the teacher's room and was told, "Your services are no longer required." So I have a new counterpart, who in fact had the job before the dismissed teacher. She took time out to get married and have two children. She came back to Spitak and reclaimed the job. Of course her getting it had nothing to do with the fact that she is the director's sister's daughter-in-law. It was explained to the Peace Corps that the earlier teacher was just a substitute, but she wasn't aware of that. I don't think anybody local reads my web-site. If they do, I apologize if I seem sarcastic, but i call them as I see them.

Having some free time to devote to the community, I went over to the public school next door and invited myself to sit in on a couple of classes. There the director, an older woman, is also the English teacher. I must compliment her on being very good. She teaches the class in English, only resorting to Armenian when explanations are necessary. The students are thereby encouraged, even forced, to learn the English of ordinary classroom activity. I volunteered to start and English Club in the afternoon, and she agreed to have the school open for that purpose. The first session was six students, four of whom were serious about it. I think more will be. We confined it to the eightn and ninth grades. I am hoping to encourage some of the students we had last year who went off to the reguar high school. They are behind the students in the regular schools, so I hope they take advantage of the oportunnity. We will be meeting for an hour twice a week.

I learned a bit more than I intended form the Director of the Public School. she insisted on telling me why the Special School should not exist. She said there is provision in the Public school program for Special Schools for children with learing problems, but special Schools were not intended for children with social problem. I told her it was not business of mine, but she wanted to tell me anyway. The school I am assigned to is a sore point with her. I don't entirely bleame her. I was glad to know older kids now go to public high school where they will have much better facilities. And a good half of the kids in special school do not come from homes any more deprived than any other kid. And many are children of the teachers. I gathered the real issue is poaching. The special school takes kids (and I suppose school revenue) from the public school. I'm all in favor of a school lunch program, but think it should be provided to all children. With the declining birth rate, schools are competing heavily to maintain population. I get the impression that the district school administration does not have the power or the will to take a firm stand. The Special school has 15 first graders, and I hear the pubic school has only 3. What should happen is that the district should take a firm hand to see that classes are maintained at aout 25 students each, and schools closed where they are not needed. Except for the wto schools in Italacan District and a very nice high school within walking district, the schools in Spitak proper are all within an easy walk of each other. Assuming the same school budget, the schools could be more efficienly and economically run, and nobody would have to lose ther job, though some would have to have other duties within the system. If anybody involved is reading this, I'm just telling it like it is, and you know it. (The director of the public school and the assistant director of the special School are former friends and colleagues who are now hard competitors. The director of our Special School is involved with fund-raising and I don't know what else and is not involved with the day-to-day running of the school.)

Last year I lived with a family that cinsisted of a mother and 18-year old-son. The father and older son are working in Russia. This summer they decided to all go to Russia, and the youger boy was procured a job. So they kindly sought out a new family for me to live with. they are nieghbors just three doors away, and the mother is a teacher in my school, and the two children are students of mine. So it is a situation more closely related to my work, and a very congenial family. I am trying to get the children to spend a little time each day just learning more English. Maybe inviting some local friends in. Since kids around here go to both the Special School and the local public school, I don't know who all their friends are. In general I'm happy with my situation and look forward to a profitable year.