Accentuate the Positive

Rivers of Ulaanbaatar

I've been in Ulaanbaatar full time for over a month now and it's come to my attention that perhaps this blog has been a little negative about the experience of living and teaching in Mongolia.  I didn't think so, but a quick perusal of previous episodes showed me emphasising negative aspects for laughs.  It's been that way because, well, I find it ore interesting for me to write about the challenging parts of my experience here, rather than the mostly happy, fun times that can be had in UB.  So, let's accentuate the positive like General Westmoreland and count down some of things that I've enjoyed here:

1. The people (for the most part).  Every society has its assholes of course but Mongolians are pretty damn nice and friendly ... especially after spending 6 months in Beijing.   The feeling on the streets in UB is less circumspect, and more friendly, even if some of the dudes are thinking about robbing you.

2. Having a home base again is great.  Ever since moving out of Seddon in late December, Tess and I have been basically homeless, living in a series of temporary situations in successively more surreal spots (like the serviced apartment in the 5 star hotel while they were renovating the hotel's shopping mall).  Our new apartment has begun to feel like home.

3. The pathetic state of shopping markets as detailed below has led to a type of self reliance that lands of plenty suppress.  For the past couple weeks, I've made giant loafs of jewish rye, delicious no knead pizzas, funky as hell kimchi and yet to be tasted dill pickles from scratch.  We are growing (or trying to) our own herbs.  

4. Shipping costs to Mongolia are surprisingly (and randomly) low.  We got our friends Andy Croome and Amy Espeseth's new books flown up from Australia for 10 bucks.  I've ordered the new Flying Lotus LP with shipping from the UK for $7.  I just bought a portable turntable for little more than what it would have cost in Chicago when I saw it in June.  I'm not sure why costs are so low (perhaps miscalculation).

5. Aside from administrative minutiae (more on this soon), teaching has been good and endlessly engaging professionally.  Despite coming from completely different backgrounds and contexts, I'm seeing a lot of the same issues in terms of literacy skills as I did last year at Brimbank (without the behaviour issues though thankfully).   Teaching geography almost exclusively has its ups and downs but teaching outside my comfort areas has also meant that I've been trying new things for varying degrees of success.  One of the most interesting things has been the students' general lack of skills at doing activities and engaging in critical thinking.  Inquiry projects are also completely unknown here, as the pedagogical method of preference seems to be teacher centered lectures and rote learning, so far from the ideals of UniMelb's MTeach.  I'm trying to bring in those elements class by class but it's slow going from some classes.

Debate 2012

6. I've got another debate team under my wing to coach.  Last year, I guided the VUSC Debate Mighty Ducks to a landmark 4th place finish in the Essendon region, narrowly missing state finals.  The path to nationals in Mongolia is much more direct.  Basically, there's just one tournament (which we want to host) and, if you win, you're on your way to Asia region finals.  This year, I've been told they're in Tajikistan.  My school didn't win the national title but I think we're a chance due to the quality of the students and the relative lack of competition.  If we win, there's no way we could be worse than last year's Mongolian representatives (they came 50th out of a field of 50 in the Asian championships).

7.  Last week, I battled a bad case of food poisoning (it won).  I started to feel sick on Thursday morning but I went into school anyways, mainly because I had no idea how to take a sick day (another essential thing to know as a teacher).  It was OK for the first couple periods of the day (I was just preparing a lesson on Louis XIV) but then I took a turn for the worse and ended up barfing in the toilets literally minutes before I had to teach a double.  Somehow, I picked myself up and taught some grade 8 history and led the kids through a day in the life of the Sun King, assigned some work and then collapsed into my chair and held on until the bell rang.  At that point, I went home (the school was very good about that actually) for the day and the day after and finally felt better late on the weekend (thus delaying this episode).  It's not actually a very positive story but I was thinking about how teaching puts you into ridiculous scenarios and you generally just have to gut it out and perform.  There's no time to hide (when you're in front of a class) unless of course you're educational dead weight (teachers will know what I mean).

8. While sick, I watched the Breakfast Club on HBO for the first time since like high school.  Damn, what a great film.  I cried.

Nothing To Eat Here

Milk of the Mare (fermented, of course)

In the last few years of my time in Australia, I started to call the place a "land of plenty."  Last year, I could walk down my street in Seddon and grab lemons, kumquats, pomegranates, pears, feijoas and apples from the neighbourhood's trees.  I could go across the road to Footscray and load up on as much cheap produce as possible at the local Viet market, and quality meat at the halal butchers.  If too lazy to make it to the markets, I could go to the ghetto supermarket in Footscray Plaza and find a mostly stocked fruit and vegetable section (albeit at high prices).

A trip to the supermarket in Mongolia, on the other hand, is a sick joke that never fails to make one pine for the markets of, well, anywhere I've ever been aside from here. A typical experience begins, as in most markets, the fresh fruit and vegetable section.  You are confronted with a paltry and pathetic (in the original sense of the word) selection of a few apples, some sad looking (and tasting) bananas, a cabbage or two, strangely triangular carrots, and perhaps a random turnip or kiwi.  Hidden behind this plenitude are an equally lacking assortment of dried fruit and, in what will be a recurring motif of Mongolian supermarket experience, candies that are shaped or flavoured like fruits wrapped up in the same manner that those aforementioned real apples are: plastic wrap, styrofoam tray.

After the produce come the, in all seriousness, a dizzying array of preserved vegetables in jars, mostly from Russia and its former Soviet republics.  For those expecting quality, artisanal pickled shit, look elsewhere as it seems the stuff is bottom of the barrel, eat only when the nuclear apocalypse hits Minsk type rations.  Next row over you can find a quality selection of instant ramen mostly from Korea to appeal to your inner first year uni student.  You may or may not be able to find a really random selection of condiments, mostly sourced from Germany (what the hell is knoblach sauce anyways) or Eastern Europe with cameos from the USA.

The next section is perhaps the largest: the candy aisle(s).  Mongolians evidently have an untameable sweet tooth.  The sheer number and variety of obscure sweets from the former Warsaw Accord members is impressive.  There's the ones with the Russian baby logo, the lobster and prawn logo lollies, the strawberry labelled candies, the camel ones, the ones with horses on them, and so on and so forth.  From limited experience, despite the packaging, they all seem to taste the same in that they are all overly sweet, vaguely chocolatey, translucent hard candies.  Next to all these candies are the prepackaged stale cakes and cookies from China, Korea and Russia. 

You may now come across the extensive dairy section.  Yogurt (watery and very sour) takes up a whole fridge or two, you will probably find an impressive selection of dried cheese curds or dried meat.  If really lucky, you can find airag as well, which is fermented mare's milk.  It's mildly alcoholic (perhaps 3 or 4%) and, by all reports, completely unpalatable to non Mongolian (or central Asian) tastes.  It's supposedly better tasting  when freshly made by nomads.

The last few rows of the store consist of the booze of which vodka is the most conspicuous.  Every store has many many shelves of different forms of the clear liquor, from the very cheap (perhaps the equivalent of $3 for a 24) to the very very expensive (and good).  Beer drinkers will find a selection of local and imported (once again from Eastern Europe) brews, in containers ranging from the normal 300 mL can to 5L plastic bottles.

And so the supermarket remains, despite how many times you visit hoping for a better selection of actual food.  Despite leaving with a full bag, you inevitably feel that you have purchased nothing that you should actually be eating.

Of course, you could have had some initiative and gone to the Mercury Market, an actual vegetable and meat and dry good market with a surprising amount of OK produce shipped up from China, but that would require organisation, will and patience.

So: instant ramen, candy and vodka it is for another week.

Survival Mode

Teaching is a funny gig.  You're paid (well, underpaid) to spend your week with a bunch of kids, trying your best to educate them about a wide variety of frankly useless ideas or skills, which may or may not be important to their future paths.  It's an emotional and physically draining job that demands a surprisingly flexible approach.  Sometimes, the kids will be completely uninterested in your detailed and perfectly wrought lesson plan.  Other times, they'll get ridiculously excited about half baked activities that you came up a few minutes before (or sometimes during) the lesson in question.

The first week of the year has just passed and, thinking back on Sunday, I can't recall anything nearly as interesting as my first week at Brimbank.  No 20 on 20 brawls.  No "fuck you, sir"s from the kids (or other teachers).  No feelings of utter desperation and depression at lessons gone wrong.  This isn't to say that my lessons have been perfect, but nothing disastrous or soul destroying (yet).

I'm teaching Geography in grades 6, 7, 8, 9 and (wait for it) 10, as well as World History for one Grade 8 class.  Every class between grades 6 and 8 gets to experience Geography once a week for a double period, so I've got a lot of classes (10, I think, total) and a lot of kids named Bolormaa or Amar or Munkh to try to remember.  Teaching grade 6 (like 11 year olds) has been a challenge, as I literally have no experience under Grade 7 (very little at that level too) and no tricks to pull out of my teaching toolkit.  They're so young and I don't really do the "jumping around the classroom like a primary teacher" thing that well.  Tips are appreiciated.

I find it hilarious at times that I'm teaching so much Geography as I'm completely an English teacher at heart and have had perhaps 1 week during the M.Teach on geography and I took a couple courses at UBC on Geography circa 2002 and that's it.  Seeing the kids once a week underlines its marginal presence in the school's patchy curriculum, which makes my job sometimes less pressured than the teachers at school in English who spend upwards of 4 or 5 times a week doing literacy skills with each class.  Geography is also a subject that's basically can be about anything, which is liberating, except when you're supposed to be preparing year 10s for a Cambridge exam about everything (and they know nothing).

Overall, the kids are really well behaved in all grades, especially when I'm speaking to the whole class from the front of the room.  What they have more trouble at is listening to each other, speaking in class, and thinking critically about anything.  It seems like the learning method that they've been exposed to most would be rote learning, and the gaps in their knowledge (and skills) are striking.  For example, my Grade 8 history kids who have had 2 previous years of secondary history, have never heard about sources (primary, secondary or otherwise) and seem to have problems with even thinking through what historical thinking might be, besides memorising dates and names.  Geography students through to year 10 have never been taught BOLTS in relation to creating maps.  In fact, they may have never created a map in 3 to 4 years of Geography in 2 languages!

English skills are highly variable from some students fluent to others who don't understand a word of English.  For the most part, spoken English is good but students rely upon Mongolian when speaking to each other about tasks at hand or ideas.  I don't want to be an asshole but, since the exams and all assessment is in English, I'm thinking about banning most Mongolian in class because if they can't orally work through it it in English, then they'll have no shot at a Year 10 IGCSE exam (let alone year 12 A levels).

On a personal level, Tess and I moved into our Mongolian apartment (see above), a concrete shit box that looks 50 years old but was actually only built in 1997.  It's the secret police's former apartment block.  After you enter the main door, you're confronted with a large pile of garbage (you dump your garbage in the hallway and someone magically takes it away), graf on the walls, and (usually) darkness.  After fumbling for the light, you struggle with the heavy metal door and the odd X shaped key, turning it 4 times to the right to unlock the doon (not 3 or 5 but 4).  Inside, the apartment was just renovated and is very livable.  We're growing herbs (not those ones), and trying to use the modest (more accurately: terrible) produce to cook at home.  We even had a dinner party last week.

Tess is in Beijing right now so I'm in UB alone for the next couple weeks, which makes this Mongolian interlude even more surreal and strange.  My days have mostly consisted of going to work at obscenely early hours, coming home at 4, having a nap, eating out at Millie's (an actually decent American diner), and watching TV for a couple hours.

Survival mode, in other words.