School Smool

           

School, for local teachers and students, is Monday through Saturday, 8:30 am to 3:55 pm. Fortunately for me, the international teachers only have to work Monday through Friday, 8:00 am to 5:00 pm (sometimes until 6). The local teachers also stay later throughout the week for IELTS (English language) training, professional development, extra curricular activities with students, or other various activities with the school. Students also stay late for extra curriculars, IELTS (just 11^th graders), or other activities. 120 of the 500 students actually live at the boarding school attached to the back of the building.

           The Nazarbayev Intellectual School system was created to help support gifted and talented students. Each student is expected to attend university when they graduate – either at home or abroad. Their schooling is paid for as long as they commit to working in Kazkhstan for 5 years after to the earning their degree. All of the students in our school are from the surrounding province known as Southern Kazkhstan and because some students do not live close by there is boarding school provided. Every student is given a FREE breakfast and lunch everyday (even non-boarding school students). The cafeteria is also open between meals so students can pick up some water or a snack in between classes.

            My morning starts off with a taxi ride at 7:30 am to the school, I ride with just one of my co-workers now, but we suspect that as new teachers arrive we may have company. Monday mornings at 8 am, the students assemble in the front courtyard for the national anthem and announcements. Tuesday through Friday the 11^th grade students report to the auditorium at 8 am for English debates (meant to prepare them for IELTS and it helps to make them globally aware of hot topics throughout the world).

Game tables in the hallway.

            Throughout the school day I visit teachers in their classrooms to observe or help teach a class. Since this is just the beginning of my second week I have only been observing. My hope is that this week I’ll get to do some teaching! Right now I’m mainly working with 11^th grade students (as this is the nation-wide focus right now). There are 3 of us international math teachers, and I’m still unsure as to how many local 11^th grade math teachers there are, but if I had to guess I’d say around 5. 11^th graders take math 6 class periods a week and they are in the midst of learning basic calculus. The past few years I’ve been accustomed to teaching middle school math, so I have to brush up on my calculus!

            Right now I’m working in a general teacher’s workroom, but we are hoping for a math workroom soon. It would be nice to be in the same area as math teachers to interact with them more frequently.

           

Between 11:55 am and 12:15 pm, the students have flash mob. The dance teachers have choreographed a 15 minute dance to a mash-up of songs. The students assemble in the court yard (each one standing on a blue dot painted on the ground) and follow along to the dance. I’m a little curious as to how this is going to look when the weather turns too cold to go outside, but for right now I think it’s a great way to break up the school day for students.

            I have been eating my lunch at school everyday. It has never cost me more than $3.50 for a full meal of starches, meat, and sometimes a salad of cucumber and tomatoes or coleslaw, plus a bottle of water. In the morning, if I forget to bring my own water, I will go and pick one up at the cafeteria for $0.50. Last Friday, 4 October, I sat with a co-worker from Malaysia and a local teacher who spoke English very well. We were discussing the price of lunch and they both agreed that lunch is expensive here. I’m concerned about what they are paying the teachers here if that is expensive L My husband and I were discussing how $3.50 is about half or a third of what we were paying for lunch in the US everyday. My one concern with the food at the cafeteria is that it might get old, as in, they pretty much make the same thing everyday. Although there are choices, sometimes potatoes and rice, other times rice and noodles; meatballs or meatloaf lasagna (well, that’s what I’m calling it anyway); there may be two starch choices and then three meat choices, but they don’t seem to vary as to what they are. As I get more comfortable with cooking and buying food at the market, I’ll probably start to vary my lunches a bit.

The Canteen (cafeteria!)

            The classrooms in the building look just like ours in the States – rows of desks, with a teacher desk and whiteboard at the front of the room. The teachers do not have posters up on the walls, but do have one display type of bookshelf that have 3D shapes and a few books on them. Each classroom has a Promethean board. My fellow teachers will know what that is, but in short, it’s a smart board. Teachers can display presentations on it, use it as a whiteboard, or have students write with special markers directly on the presentation or blank Word Doc to be saved for later. I’m sure there are other uses, but I have yet to discover those for myself and it seems the teachers here do too.

 The classes are set for 40 minutes, but the 11^th grade math students sit for back-to-back periods making their math class 80 minutes long. I’ve found that many of the local teachers do not know how to fill the time and therefore tend to give 20 minute tests during the last part of the class. Also, the classes are very teacher-centered, so it is a long, hard task of encouraging more student-centered learning.

Sponsors to the NIS program.

            I’ve been asked several times why Americans were chosen for assisting in improving schools in various countries. I guess it never occurred to us that our schools are doing a good job. The teachers spend 10 hours a day (sometimes more) grading, planning, participating in extra curricular activities, mentoring students, going back to school themselves, etc. etc. and all that work really is paying off. Our students are smart, our classrooms are full but we are managing to relay an education to them. There are always improvements to be made and when we start comparing ourselves to countries that track their students, then of course it looks like we are not doing a good job, those countries send test results for students that have been specially selected to go onto college. Every system is flawed and that is why I have my job today. I think the rest of the world can look up to Western education in general (Western including Australia, UK, New Zealand, Canada, the US, etc.) because we do strive to give our students the best and we never stop!

Mural on the second floor near the math and physics department.

Kazakhstan's constitution and a bust of President Nazarbayev.