Experience Fulbright

We returned to regular classes on Wednesday, April 26th but the 2nd year students have practicum on Wednesdays and no classes so our first day of week was Thursday. We had a few students who were missing the pretest data because they were absent the previous week so before starting the intervention phase of the study, we collected any missing data that we could.

That took about 30 minutes of class time and then I moved into the treatment phase for each class. In one class I spent 15 minutes introducing mindfulness. In a second class we covered an introduction to study skills. The third class is a control control group so I spent the same amount of time just speaking in English with them about the topic for the day, which was health and fitness.

Friday of this week was a very busy day for me. At 10am in the morning, before going to the univeristy for my research, I went to a private school that a friend of my now teaches at to conduct a fculty training in socio-emotional learning with the teachers. This was actually the highlight of the day for me. The teachers were so engaged and interactive. We had a great discussion about stress and relaxation and how to handle various emotional difficulties in the classroom. It was a wonderful group and reminded me of why I love teaching so much. While I truly do enjoy working directly with students, over the years I’ve realized that I find working with faculty is even more rewarding for me.

Immediately after this workshop I headed over to Westminster University to present a survey that I conducted here last year as part of a project for one of my graduate courses. I collaborated on it with a local English professor from Djizak Pedagogical Institute, Azizbek, my dissertation advisor, Ximena, and my friend and research assistant here in Tahskent, Tullo. Azizbek submitted a proposal to present our research at the 4th International Conference on Education and Linguistics (ICEL) which was accepted. Our presentaiton time was Noon-1pm. I was happy to be in Tashkent and able to present for this conference with him but it did make for a hectic day.

While I was presenting, Tullo was talking with the teachers of the Speaking & Listening classes that we were working with that afternoon. Apparently one of the teacher’s mother was ill and in the hospital so she couldn’t come teach her classes today and the other teacher was busy planning her son’s wedding and wasn’t sure she could cover both of the classes. The teachers asked if I could teach the three 80-minute speaking courses by myself that afternoon. Oh, and they also said that the first class was starting today at 12:50 instead of 2:20 as is the regular schedule for Fridays.

Now, I may be an experienced faculty member, but I do NOT teach English. Just before I had to go into my presentation, Tullo called to tell me what was going on and ask how I wanted to handle it. If we couldn’t teach the full classes, the only other option was to cancel classes and I would lose a day of data collection. Lucky for me, Tullo is an experienced English teacher, so he came up with a plan while I went ahead with my presentaion. Immediately after I finished presenting, he picked me up in a taxi and we headed to the university. It turns out that they were not starting early so we actually arrived about an hour early instead of 15 minutes late so that helped take some of the pressure off. We got through the day but we were both understandably exhausted by the time we fininshed. Still, I was able to meet with all three of my groups and didn’t have to miss a day of the intervention so it was worth it.

Saturday was basically the same as neither teacher was able to be there to teach. This time Tullo and I had more time to prepare for it so we had a lesson planned. Attendance was lower than normal but those who were there for class seemed more engaged. We did decide to end each class early. We only kept them for about 60 of the scheduled 80 minute block but we made sure to cover the same content in each class (with the exception of my research portion that is different for each group) and end after the same amount of time. We also made the decision to let the teachers know that we would not be able to cover classes for them again. Hopefully this won’t happen any more.