Haskovo Chapter 2: Learning How to Teach.

Hi all, Stu here to guide you through our first week in Haskovo!

I guess the activity we spent the most time on this week was observing Aydin’s home-schooling Monday to Friday. It’s generally 9:30am-12:30pm for us, but David and Kathryn knock off some things before we arrive. Elly and I were observing (and will soon be in charge of) the English and Maths sections of his study.

Aydin is 5 (nearly 6) and would be in Kinder were he in Australia. The curriculum is the Dep. Education (NSW) distance education course and it seems very good – and anyone we’ve talked to who knows anything about education speaks of the NSW DET’s good reputation.

Our first impression was “whoa, we don’t remember having to learn any of this stuff in Kinder!”… Seriously, my (vague) memory of Kinder is that we just played games! My second epiphany was that the material Aydin has to work through involves some REALLY fundamental and difficult concepts – which we take for granted. To give a few examples, he’s learning how to put a series of pictures in order then describing why they should go in that order, why we write from left to right (a kid’s brain hasn’t learned this and is still capable of ordering things in whatever way takes their fancy – which I think is amazing!), and recognising and differentiating between different sounds at the beginning of words and relating them to letters of the alphabet… It’s kinda mind-blowing stuff for me because it involves teaching him concepts that we (adults) have learned to do subconsciously.

The other fairly intense thing about school is that Aydin is a major pocket-rocket! [Idiom warning: "pocket-rocket" means someone small in stature who makes up for it in energy level...] He is a very bright, happy, good-natured kid with heaps of energy and a formidable ability to wangle his way out of doing his work! Part of his reason for doing so is because sitting down for 3 hours at a time is not his (or any 5-year-old’s) idea of fun, and part of it is that Aydin finds it quite hard to keep focused. On the other hand, he’s capable of amazing feats of concentration when it comes to his educational computer games or the “I’m going to see how many questions I can ask until X gets angry” game. We’re very encouraged that he also finds some of the regular elements of the cirruculum quite entertaining enough. Our goal now is to discover the secret to keeping his attention – one which many more experienced people than us haven’t been able to reach, however!

Personally, I think I’m enjoying the challenge of it – though really it’s a bit masochistic to say that!

Our first week was mainly observation; now we have next fortnight’s material in our possession and we’re (probably) taking over the main teaching role as of Monday. The material is fairly straightforward, I guess. Our main planning tasks will be picking out appropriate modules for each day from those available and deciding on the most attention-grabbing order to do them in. There are lots of non-curriculum things we need to think about too, such as how to deal with misbehaviour, what rewards/incentives to offer (eg. a “star” chart – no, I’m not talking Astrology), and what “fun” things we can do to break up the “serious” stuff (though, obviously, kids of this age learn a lot through playing). We’d love prayer for wisdom as we contemplate these things!

We’ve just had a cool afternoon visiting a Turkish village some 20-30 km out of Haskovo (David wanted to thank a couple of villagers who pulled his car out of a bog a few weeks ago!). It was a nice drive and an interesting experience culturally… but we didn’t understand any of the conversation, which inspired us to get a start on learning Turkish!

Enough for now. We have a completely unplanned weekend planned. How about you?

Stay classy, Tasmania.

Cheers

Stu.