Peace Corps Volunteers Diane and Dave Phelps write their their work as teachers in Bila Tserkva



"Language training consisted of four to six hours a day of language classes, five days a week. Interspersed with that training, and on every Saturday, we received cross-cultural and technical training. Peace Corps is very interested in volunteers fitting well into the local society and both language and cross-cultural training aid in this integration. During training we also taught at local schools so that we could learn how Ukrainian schools operate and to help us fit in at our final site. This period was an extremely stressful one for us."

Peace Corps Volunteers Diane and Dave Phelps write their their work as teachers in Bila Tserkva

Pocatellans head to Ukraine on Peace Corp Mission

Narrative by Dave Phelps

[Excerpt]

Diane is teaching in School Number Nine, which was about a 35 minute walk from where we lived. School Number Nine has about 1200 students and specializes in language training. The foreign languages offered are English, Spanish, German and French. Diane is scheduled to teach 18 English classes a week to children from the 5th form (5th grade) to 11th form. Grades here are called “forms” not “grades” because Ukrainians follow more of the British terminology in daily life. School Number Nine, because it has so many students and the facility is not large enough to accommodate the children, has morning and evening classes for all forms. The evening classes start at 2:00 PM and end at 8:00 PM.

I teach school at Gymnasium Number Two. The original school was built on this site in 1864, but had to be rebuilt in 1919, after it had been destroyed. Gymnasium Number Two is about a 20-25 minute walk from where we lived. It has about 500 students and has the small school feel to it. I am scheduled to teach 18 English classes a week with children from the 6th form to the 11th form. In all schools in Ukraine, the 11th form is the last form in “high school”. As a side note, the designation “Gymnasium” is given to schools which have met higher standards and thus are awarded that designation for their school. The term has no reference to what we in America call a gym or gymnasium. Both Gymnasium Number Two and School Number Nine conduct Saturday classes for students. So, in both schools, some students go to school six days a week.

Life at school for both of us is very similar. Our responsibility is to interact with the students whenever we are there and to speak as much English to them as possible and to elicit as much English as possible from them. In both schools, we help prepare students for the English Olympiad, which is a country wide competition among high school students. If they win in the local competitions, then they move to regionally competitions. When they win at the higher levels, they are given money for college, so the Olympiads are very important to students. While our Russian language skills are still not very good, we also try to speak as much Russian with adults at the schools to help our language skills and to integrate better into life at the schools.

Ukrainian school systems are changing their language training methods from the Grammar Translation Method to the Communicative Method. One of our responsibilities is to help train Ukrainian teachers in the Communicative Method which focuses on speaking, listening, reading and writing as a way to more effectively learn a foreign (English) language.

When this story was posted in September 2006, this was on the front page of PCOL:




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