This is why I didn't want to teach English in Yemen

My first day of teaching was intense. I arrived at school expecting to watch a Georgian teacher do a few English lessons, but instead found that the usual English teacher was sick with a nasty fever and I was to teach all three of his classes. Oh boy!

He ended up being out all week, so I taught 15+ English classes on my own the first week. How did it go, you ask? Imagine the usual disorder and shenanigans of having a substitute teacher, then throw in the twist that he doesn't know your native language.

That makes it sound much worse than it was. I actually had some really excellent classes this week, with students following along or and being engaged in my lessons. If nothing else, I think needing to teach to a group of students only fleetingly familiar with English will cure my tendency to speak unintelligibly once and for all. Either that, or northwest Georgia will become known for its mumbly English.

Classes are somewhat hurt by the books, which are fraught with mistakes and typos. I have had to correct them many times in four days (and not just because they use British spellings). Some are grammatical errors, some are just weird typos, and some are just factually wrong. Part of the problem is that the students and teacher have to buy their own books, and since the students at this (public) school generally come from families that aren't too well off, the teacher has to choose a book all her students can afford. This results in a reduction in quality, but choosing a better, more expensive book would leave many students without the ability to get class materials. I think the Ministry of Education should invest in those, so everyone has the same, higher quality book, and maybe cut back a little on the expensive task of flying in so many native English speakers (still bring some). But that's just a few days in one school speaking, and I'm far from an expert on what ails American education after 13 years in that system.

I'm also doing one 3rd grade class a week in TsatsPPkhvi, a town about a mile down the road from here. I've only had one class with that teacher so far, but the two teachers I partner with in TsaiPPshi are well-prepared, speak very good English, and are easy to work with. The students are generally interested in working on their English (the 12th graders do have severe senioritis), though their abilities vary greatly.

Also, apparently my host family has a mother. She just returned for a few days, as (from my understanding) she works most of each month at a store in Khopa, Turkey, not too far from Georgia's southern border.

The TV available to my family tends to be Russian or Georgian satellite, which translates to a lot of American movies and TV shows (and telenovelas!) dubbed in either language. Because of this, my impression of Americans from the TV I've seen here boils down to a few things:
-No job is more exciting than working at an electronics store.
-We are high rollers.
-American police are almost entirely corrupt and shoot with reckless abandon. The only exceptions are two men on each force: a hard-as-nails veteran with nothing to lose, and a hotheaded, but idealistic, rookie cop. These two are always partnered.
-America's high health care costs have one cause: unnecessary procedures caused by doctors not listening to the seemingly outrageous, yet unfailingly accurate, diagnoses of one cantankerous limping doctor.

Obscure pre-existing conditions are covered

Georgia's President is Mikheil Saakashvili, commonly referred to as "Misha" (or, in my brother's parlance, "Mickey Socks"). The news tends to be Saakashvili-heavy, though I guess our news is similarly Obama-heavy. (I do feel I see Obama more on news show promos here than in the US.) Recently, the hour-long news featured a good ten minutes of Saakashvili talking with his economic advisers without additional commentary. From the looks of it, his advisers were telling him things, then he would disagree and propose something else, which they would soon agree with. Another night started with "Saakashvili visits a ski resort" followed by "Saakashvili answers questions at a new business" followed by "Saakashvili visits another new business and talks to people as they work the phones" followed by "Saakashvili prepares for tonight's 3-hour national question time". He sat in a chair for three hours and fielded questions from folks across the country. He took 4 or 5 in a row, wrote down notes, and then answered all of them, presumably one after another. Otherwise it would have made for some very garbled sentences.
If my limited understanding of Georgian is correct, I understood 3 answers: one on South Ossetia and Abkhazia, one on the decline of corruption within Georgian society and government (though he acknowledged it's still a problem), and one on Georgia's identity as a multicultural, multi-ethnic state. In Georgian, "qartveli" means an ethnic Georgian person, while "qartuli" is the adjective for "Georgian". He kept saying (at least, I think he did) that though most Georgians are "qartveli", there are many other ethnicities (Russians, Maghreli, Turks, Muslim Georgians) who are "qartuli", and in the end, being a citizen of Georgia is about being "qartuli", not just "qartveli". It's quite a progressive viewpoint, and I hope I understood his point correctly, because it was a great thing to think I heard.
This week, Mr. Saakashvili has been pushed aside on the news by Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, but I think President Mubarak would probably prefer not to have earned that honor.

Possibly Georgia Governor Mikheil Saakashvili

I've also seen Georgia's version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, though the grand prize is 20,000 Georgian Lari (GEL), or about $11,000. I'm sure that's a lot more than it would have been 10 years ago. The top prize in the lottery this week was 410,000 GEL (about $228,000). The advertising/revenue base for Georgia, though, is only about 4.6 million, so that also has to be taken into account. As rich as Liechtenstein is, I doubt they have too big of a lottery either. (If they have one at all. This requires more research.)

The phone they gave me here appears at first to be a no frills Nokia, but upon closer inspection, it's a vital survival tool. It has a radio, a converter for everything (metric, Celsius to Fahrenheit, currency), a flashlight (!), and is as of yet indestructible. Oh those Finns.

Stats:
1 - Canadians who are going to help me watch the Super Bowl by letting me stay in their apartment and commandeer their internet at 3:30 in the morning this coming Monday.
1 - So far, the number of US shows I've seen broadcast in English with Georgian/Russian subtitles, rather than being dubbed. I see why most shows are dubbed in Georgian or Russian, as I don't think the subtitles really capture how truly desperate Wisteria Lane's housewives are.

Georgian language:
ori - two
ati - ten
otsi - twenty
samotsdateqvsmeti - seventy-six (literally translated, it's "three times twenty plus sixteen". All numbers kind of follow this pattern, making learning your numbers very easy, but requiring a bit of basic math when you want to say 95.)
orshabati - Monday ("Shabati" is, as you may have guessed, Saturday, and "orshabati" means "two days from Saturday". Math is also required for Tuesday-Thursday.)
dghes - today


Phrases the authors thought were important to include in my Georgian-English phrase book:
"I'm four months pregnant."
"You should get on the bus by the back or middle door, get a ticket by inserting change into a special slot machine and get off via the front door at your bus stop."
"Are there any witnesses?"
"You have to make a statement at the station."