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.

Induction

Not the school handbook

Here are a few things that you might need and expect when you start work at a new school:

1. Your teaching allotment (what subjects, year levels you will teach)
2. Your timetable
3. The school's rules
4. The structure of the school's management with useful tips about who do you as a classroom teacher contact in various situations (discipline, welfare, curricular, administrative)
5. Perhaps a school handbook with helpful stuff about how and when you get paid, leave conditions, your responsibilities, etc.
6. The curriculum for the subjects you are teaching, or at least some resources
7. An office or at least a desk in an office.

In the first week of my new job, I have received only 1 or 2 of these essentials and I only got them in the past couple days.   

The new school has been surprisingly disorganized, chaotic and lacking clear leadership, especially in terms of new teacher induction.  In an organizational move straight out of the "how to not manage a school" playbook, we were told that we needed to produce a year's worth of planning for each of our subjects, with no idea of what the students can do (in terms of English skills, especially) or what they've done previously.  As the only English speaking geography teacher (more on this absurdity soon), this meant that I would have to produce 5 of these yearly plans in roughly a day and a half.   Needless to say, I hummed and hawed about this task before concluding that it was perhaps one of the most stupid tasks ever put to me in my brief educational career (which is saying something).  Even worse, we learnt today that they will dock you 3% of your pay for not doing this (which isn't in the contract that I signed).   I dutifully went about scouring the web for possible resources and curricula, before sketching out 3 years of comprehensive geography for the middle years based on curricula from Ontario and Victoria.  And then, just this afternoon, I was called into a meeting where the school's geography year plans for all levels were handed to me like a sack of potatoes.  "Oh yes, sorry, here they are after all.".  

One of the absolute worst things about teaching is its administrative minutae in the form of endless and relatively pointless meetings that teachers are subjected to on a weekly, fortnightly or (if they're lucky) monthly basis.  In the past week, I've had to sit through 2 of these meetings which have lasted between 2 to 3 hours each and have consisted of probably about 90% Mongolian, a language that I do not understand beyond "hello," "ok" and "thank you" yet.  In the meeting this morning, we were lectured at about personal appearances, the results of past years' cohorts, the Mongolian Teachers' Code of Ethics ("don't take bribes"), our future use of water bottles, the election of a committee whose purpose I did not gather, the introduction of a Mongolian civics class and how much you can be fined for being late to class or missing future meetings (7000 tugrics or maybe $5.50).  The meeting started at 9 and went straight through without a break (or any perfunctory snacks or jugs of water on the table) to lunch.  

Next month, I might take the fine.

Arrival in Ulaanbaatar

Ulaanbaatar From Above 2012

On Wednesday, my wife and I arrived in Ulaanbaatar (hereafter UB) where we'll live for the next 1 to 2 years (1 definite, 1 to be determined).  My wife is a lawyer here working with a foreign firm (Mongolia is in the midst of a triple pronged resource boom, that started a couple years ago, which makes UB like San Francisco in 1849 or Dawson City in 1898 or Ballarat in the 1850s).  I've signed up to teach geography and history at a local elite Mongolian private school for the next year, which will be one the struggles that I will likely be writing about in the future.

The flight from Beijing to UB is always a forgettable 2 to 4 hours, depending on how long Beijing makes your plane wait on the tarmac for no apparent reason.  What's more memorable is the trip from Chinggis Khan International to the city center.  The "road" from the airport is perhaps the most remarkably shabby and ugly approach to a downtown core that I've ever seen (and I grew up in Edmonton).  At one point, the road breaks down into what should be 2 lanes but Mongolian drivers somehow manage to wedge 4 lanes of traffic going both ways, which leads of course to another iteration of the all too familiar UB traffic jam.  At one point in this stand still, our driver stopped to have a chat with another taxi driver and that taxi's passenger was Tess' work colleague who was heading back to Hong Kong that afternoon: it's a small town.

By the time, you snake around one of the 4 Soviet era coal burning power plants, you're finally on your way into town and the decaying industrial landscape modulates into decaying Soviet era apartments and random structures built decades ago that no longer have a purpose.  The Soviet influence on the city is profound.  They built the city's power stations, infrastructure and a vast proportion of the residential dwellings from before the resource boom.  Of course, the Wall fell down and the Soviet Union disintegrated over 20 years ago and so did said infrastructure, power plants and housing.  Almost all roads in UB are basically impassable due to crater sized potholes, crumbling pavement or combinations there of, which makes driving into an obstacle course where you need to swerve around potholes often into incoming traffic who of course are also swerving to avoid their own apocalyptic potholes.

When you finally arrive in the central district of UB, you find a mix of Soviet era architecture, complete with a pink opera house on the main square which wouldn't be out of place in Eastern Europe, development from the post Soviet era (generally in much worse condition than the Soviet concrete blocks), shiny, new resource driven buildings and the concrete frames of new building projects being hastily thrown up before winter hits.

Sukhbaatar Square serves as the very center of the city, which spreads out mostly on an east to west axis from there due to the mountains that line UB's northerly and southerly outskirts.  There you will find the parliament building (another Soviet era structure) with its enormous Chinggis Khan statue (he's everywhere), the Stock Exchange (smallest and fastest growing in the world!), the central statue of Sukhbaatar (bad ass Mongolian dude who took Mongolia back from crazy Csarist von Stenberg in 1921 with help from the communists!), the opera house and art gallery (which seems to be closed), Blue Sky Building (new skyscraper shaped like a blue sail) and Central Tower (the city's best tower for business, and where I'm writing this from).

Explorations beyond the square find yourself hiking through gravel, ruined buildings, half finished new apartments, little shops that sell nothing but terrible Russian chocolates and/or vodka, and so forth.  These were the conditions that faced us when looking at apartments.  We looked at one in the former apartment complex of the secret police, another in a suspiciously American style suburban complex right next to my school, and final one in what used to be the apartment complex that the communist ministers and other high ranking governmental officials used to live in.

The latter was a great apartment  which had retained its 1960s design features (crazy orange cupboards! psychedelic tiles in the foyer! ridiculous 15 feet ceilings!) through a combination of owner neglect and soviet indestructibility.  Unfortunately, the toilets didn't work, it didn't have internet set up and it was a bit too far for a comfortable walk in minus 30C winter mornings.

The secret police apartment is tucked in behind the stock exchange, and a mere 5 minute walk to Central Tower and maybe 18 minutes to school.  Unfortunately, from the outside, it looks like a block of concrete dropped into place and then eroded for 30+ years (it's only from 1997). Inside is nicely and oddly tastefully renovated with no velvet couches or giant leather Chinggis portraits, which seem to be de rigeur in UB.  Its location and generally unassuming nature means it'll probably be the apartment we'll take.

I'll leave it at that for now but will try to write every few days or soon what I'm up to, commentary on important issues and likely, as per previous mid 00s blogging career, emo rants about new music and postinternet culture.  OK, maybe not emo anymore.  I'm not that earnest anymore.