Frustration at School

I officially have a much larger respect for teachers. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had some bad teachers, but I’m starting to see how hard it is to be a good teacher. The preparation, the discipline, the getting to know your students, it’s all a pain and takes far more time than you would think. Add into that being in a new country and a whole new level of frustration has just been making my life a minor hell. Maybe hell isn’t the right word, but some days you just want to scream.
Part of it is the system here. In America they say that the system fails some kids. In Kazakhstan, I believe this is more apt. This is not to say that I don’t have talented kids. Some of my students are very motivated and being in close proximity to the capital, Astana, I hope they will be able to use there smarts by getting into the government or some business. However, the system over here sometimes tends to rubber stamp kids through. Grades here are done on a five-point scale with 5 being the top and 1 being “you fail at life” and 3 being a passing grade. The problem is you cannot give a kid a 1 or a 2, so there is no fire under the kids rear-end to succeed. You really have to be creative sometimes to actually get kids to come to class. Especially some of the older kids have realized that grades don’t matter, and when that happens the sand castle tumbles all around you.
Now I don’t want to make this seem like a Kazakhstan only problem. This is also a problem in the States too. We are not perfect. This all boils down to the way we keep teachers accountable. It’s a very dicey proposition to tie pay and compensation to student performance because this just breeds a culture of cheating; by the students and by the teachers. If you want to read something interesting about this, read Freakonomics and in the first chapter the authors talk about this concept. The large majority of the people are apathetic.
I chalk all this up to a post-Soviet hangover. During Soviet times, steel and factory workers made more money than doctors. Education was not as important as it is in other countries, even though it is given lip service here. It’s still the case that teachers and doctors are not paid well, still lower than factory workers. Still, I feel it has to be changing a little bit
The general strategy I go with is to key in on the students who want the help. The motivated students will work on their own and the ones who aren’t won’t. Hopefully you can use a little peer pressure through those students and slowly build up confidence.
Don’t get the impression that I want to go home. I’m still interested in staying here, and I have a few things on the docket to do here. I’m going to be doing presentations on how to study foreign languages on your own, and if that gets only a couple students, they’ll be better speakers for it. I also want to start creating a digital English library so that students can do more than just play video games on their computers. That and summer’s just around the corner. This is a long-term project so road bumps are inevitable. In the end, I think it will all go well.