a typical (?) day

Mom wanted an example of a "typical" day for me here in Ukraine, so I thought I'd give it a try. There's a fair amount of variance, depending on research/socializing/etc., but roughly, weekdays go something like this:

Sometime between 5 and 7 a.m.: I wake up due to a combination of sun and roosters, roll over, and endeavor to go back to sleep until my alarm goes off, usually at 7 or 7:30. I'm fairly successful at this.

7-8:30ish: My alarm (on my cell phone) goes off. I make my bed, get dressed in nice clothes (if I'm going somewhere) or old clothes (if I'll be around the house for a bit), wash up (there's a sink with hot water on the third floor, where I sleep!), and head downstairs for breakfast. Downstairs is barely organized chaos, with 11 out of 12 children getting ready for school. If I'm going to school that morning, I'm part of the chaos...otherwise, I sit on the couch and keep out of everyone's way until the kids are off to school and then have breakfast. The Y kids are not cheerful early risers, and they are not necessarily on time to school on a regular basis.

Remainder of morning/early afternoon: This varies a lot. I may be around the house, doing my own thing there, or I may be at my old school guest lecturing to some classes. Alternatively, I may go into the center of town to run errands/make more copies of my questionnaires and consent forms/pass out aforementioned documents. This sometimes happens after I've been at school. Hopefully this next week interviews will become a regular part of this segment of the day or the one following it.

Mid-afternoon: Kids come home from school. We have lunch, which took some getting used to, as I think of lunch as something that happens at noon, whereas at the Y house, it's sometime between 2 and 4 p.m. It may or may not involve people actually all eating at the same time.

Mid-afternoon to early evening: A lot of my social visits tend to occur at this time. Alternatively, it's "Big Sister" time, which can involve anything from helping Vlada with English to teaching Vitaly how to play chords with his left hand on the piano to watching the little kids play outside to answering any and all of Valera's innumerable questions. Seriously, he looks at me as a fount of information and I'm never sure what he's going to ask next. If I've reached my limit of big sister-ness, I head up to the 3rd floor (which I and I alone have a key to), watch Battlestar Galactica (thanks to Carl, the Cylon...I've already finished Season 1), and contemplate never having children. Which at times, almost sounds appealing. (And I'm not having 12, regardless, as much as I love them all.)

7:45?: Carmelita, the older kids' serial (i.e., evening soap opera) comes on. It's about a Roma (gypsy) tribe living in Russia, and it has catacombs and guns and affairs and convoluded, improbable plot lines. The kids love it. I'm sort of surprised that they're allowed to watch it, but it appears to be a battle that Viktor and Nadia decided to let the kids win. It's mostly interesting to me for how the Other, in the form of the Roma, is portrayed. Carmelita, the main character, really only looks Roma due to her curly hair and flowing skirts, and her love interest is non-Roma.

After that: The little kids often watch Scooby-Doo dubbed into Ukrainian, and we have supper. Or, if Nadia's been in the garden all day, we eat whatever happens to be cooked at that time. For the first week or so I was here, the younger kids wanted me to play the piano while we sang, but we've gotten out of that habit lately.

9ish: I go upstairs and watch more Battlestar Galactica or read Les Miserables, and sometimes use the Internet.

Sometime between 11 and 12: Devotions and bed.

And there you have it: the fledgling researcher and her typical life. Right now, it's a bit kid-heavy, but I'm hoping that interviews will pick up this coming week. I've got a lot of questionnaires and consent forms passed out, and I'm waiting to hear back on those.

Literature Map

This one's primarily for Lisa: the Literature Map. You type in the name of an author, and it shows you what authors are the most similar, thereby giving you (hopefully) recommendations for new authors.

So Charlotte Bronte shows up the closest to Jane Austen. I'll accept that, even if Bronte had a low regard for Austen's work. However, how on earth did Daphne Du Maurier (author of Rebecca) end up the closest to L. M. Montgomery? Granted, Wilder, Alcott, and L'Engle are close by, but still...

I'd love to know the criteria they're using. For example, Madeleine L'Engle and Dorothy L. Sayers show up next to each other. Okay, I get it. They both deal with theological issues in their fiction (which is often genre fiction, although different genres), and they both have a good grasp of diction. But L'Engle also shows up near Edna St. Vincent Millay, and the only thing I know that they have in common is that I like them both. Probably not what it's based on.

ETA:

So "God" showed up on the map, and I clicked on it, just to see who would be on His map. The list had Jesus next to Him (so far so good), and then a baffling variety of names around them. They included Drew Carey, Joseph Smith, the Holy Spirit, Arthur C. Clarke (of 2001: A Space Odessey fame), Tim LaHaye, Gary Paulsen (Hatchet), Saint Paul, Satan, and Einstein. Wow...

ETA2: Apparently the point is not so much that the authors are similar as that people who will like one will also like the other. It still seems massively flawed to me.

ah-choo!

I think I'm getting sick, if a stuffed-up nose, lots of sneezing, and general weariness without cause are any indications. This probably means that I've got whatever my dad's had for the last week, so I may have the pleasure of being sick and nonproductive for quite some time, as it seems to stick with you. I certainly hope not.

Fun kid moment of the day: For March is Reading Month, I read We're Going on a Bear Hunt to my mom's preschool class. Stuffed-up as I am, I ended up sneezing, and one little girl said, "You can't do that at my school." Well, then...

Other than that, not much is going on. Today's book of choice is A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar about the mathematician John Nash (no, I haven't seen the movie yet, although we have it). The math is going waaay over my head, but Nash's life itself is interesting. Although I think he's better in a book than he would have been in person.

I've updated my resume and sent it off to a couple of places for summer work, one which already told me that they filled all their openings but I could send it anyway in case someone decided not to accept the position, and the other one, a long shot that isn't sure if they'll have a position or not (but wow, would it be a neat place to work!). So we'll see what happens...I keep looking for jobs.

Barack Obama on Ukraine

I've been on a voracious reading kick lately, primarily non-fiction. The last couple of days I've been reading Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, which contains his views on American politics. It's been a good read, and probably deserves its own post with my reactions to it, but that will have to wait until I've processed my thoughts a bit more.

However, there was a hilarious passage about a trip he took to Ukraine as a senator in 2005 that I want to share with you. At least, hilarious to anyone who's been in Ukraine for any length of time... (I should also mention that a meal he had in Russia consisted of borscht, vodka, potato stew, and a "deeply troubling fish Jell-O mold." I didn't know that kholodets had a fish version...)

And in a quiet, residential neighborhood of Kiev, we received a tour of the Ukraine's version of the Centers for Disease Control, a modest three-story facility that looked like a high school science lab. At one point during our tour, after seeing windows open for lack of air-conditioning and metal strips crudely bolted to door jambs to keep out mice, we were guided to a small freezer secured by nothing more than a seal of string. A middle-aged woman in a lab coat and surgical mask pulled a few test tubes from the freezer, waving them around a foot from my face and saying something in Ukrainian.

"That is anthrax," the translator explained, pointing to the vial in the woman's right hand. "That one," he said, pointing to the one in the left hand, "is the plague."

I looked behind me and noticed Lugar [another senator] standing toward the back of the room.

"You don't want a closer look, Dick?" I asked, taking a few steps back myself.

"Been there, done that," he said with a smile.

churchy?

Latest story from Sal's days as a substitute teacher:

Today, I subbed for a high school math teacher. First hour was a class full of students who were all taking Algebra 1. For the second time. So they were rather less than enthused about the subject, and I had to keep getting after them.

Fifteen minutes or so into class, one girl in the front row pipes up, "Do you go to church?"

Me, bewildered: "Yes, why?"

Girl, snottily: "You seem like one of those really churchy people."

Me: ...

Still not sure if it was the cross necklace or the request for polite behavior that did it.

It makes me sad, though, that she associated Christianity with someone telling her to behave. I just finished reading unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity... and Why It Matters by David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons (they're connected to Barna, a group which researches issues connected to Christianity), which talks about some of the assumptions that nonChristians in their teens and twenties think about Christians--that they're judgmental, anti-homosexual, hypocritical, too political and sheltered, among other things. Some of this is because that the Christian message is, in fact, difficult to accept (sin and things like that are never popular), but more of it is because as Christians, we really are acting this way a lot of the time. The book really made me think about how I come across to people, and I would hope that people wouldn't associate those characteristics with me.

So it makes me sad that this girl probably looked at me and thought, "Oh, another one of those Christians" today.

Frank McCourt, Jesse Stuart, and Me

I spent three days this week subbing for a science teacher at the high school I graduated from. It was three days of showing videos five class periods a day, often the same videos for each class. I read a lot of books this week. I also found out the difference between light and dark meat.

Random thoughts from the week:

1. I felt a repeated urge to give many of the boys I taught haircuts. I'm sorry, but the long, shaggy look is not one I particularly care for.
2. It really bothers me to hear the kids say, "Oh, I don't have a big vocabulary. I'm from Lakeview," as if being from Lakeview is an excuse for ignorance. I replied, "Well, I'm also from Lakeview," and they mumbled something about being slackers. Aargh. No, we don't have the best economic situation. No, we don't have all the resources that larger, "better" schools have. But that's no excuse. You can't blame your lack of motivation simply on your location or your resources.
3. I didn't realize how much I enjoy coaching my Quiz Bowl kids until I subbed at the high school level. Part of it is yes, that they are more academic in nature. Another part of it is that, unlike subbing for younger grades, teens are more stand-offish with a sub, and therefore it's a lot harder to connect with the kids I was subbing for than it's been with elementary-age kids, who mostly interact with subs pretty well, or with my Quiz Bowlers, who know me.

Two of the (many) books I read this week were Frank McCourt's memoir Teacher Man, which chronicles his teaching career in New York City during the latter part of the 20th century, and Jesse Stuart's The Thread That Runs So True, about his years as a teacher and administrator in rural Kentucky during the '20s and '30s. Both were good reads and gave me hope that it is possible to teach high schoolers effectively, even though that's not necessarily the easiest age group for me to work with. What really stuck out to me in both of them is that to reach high schoolers (or any age group), you have to be creative, rather than hum-drum. That may sound obvious, but I recommend both books as ways of showing how to be creative effectively.

That's the problem with subbing. There is no way to show 15 class periods of videos effectively!