Pepper season has passed without me getting any canned (sealed in jars to save for the long dark months when all fresh fruit and vegetables are out of my budget) but cabbage season is still going roaring. Last night I had my first experience with a big grater grating huge amounts of cabbage and carrots to mix with salt and spices which will now sit for 3 days before being brought to a boil and sealed in jars. Now that I know exactly how to do this, I may try a few kilos myself, though I sure wish it was with peppers or pickles rather than cabbage. The 3 days does not even approach sauerkraut stink and I have come to like the taste of cabbage, especially with all that salt.
I have a lot left to learn about teaching. Last week I had the assistant principle sit in on a class and this week the principle sat in. Both women had useful suggestions on how to improve my lessons. I need to stop making excuses for various shortcomings and work within the system that exists here. Difficult printer access sucks because getting each kid things that he can hold and touch becomes too much work. Kids pay so much more attention if there is some material besides chalkboard and book. I don't understand why, but I think it appeals to the way our species actually learns, easily apparent in any baby. Pick something up, look at it, smell it, taste it, figure out how to use it. I don't know why these instincts must be called upon to learn past continuous tense but even just making flash cards helps immensely.
I still have social/lingual trouble with the difference between thy and you (informal vs. formal personal pronouns). Verbs also conjugate according to this distinction. It is largely a matter of age, and if someone is considerably older than me (+>10) then I use formal. But then sometimes older people call me by the formal out of respect, or because I'm American. When a certain familiarity is reached then informal can be used regardless of the age. The most difficult has been enforcing my students calling me by the formal, because that where some of my control comes from, the difference between them and me. It rubs the wrong way against my quakerness and also against how I remember my best teachers, who treated me as an equal. It's amazing how foreign this built in inequality feels, and how recently it left our own language. I hope we can get rid of capitalization soon, but I'm not too confident. I wonder silently if this is one of those connections between culture and language which might explain certain major differences like parenting authoritarianism.
Planning a camping/cabin trip with other teachers for fall break next week. I will go to longest cave in Europe before that this weekend with my friends from training. My language has gotten rusty as I've been lazy about studying this last month. I never really got back into my routine after summer ended. Ok, time for one more class, a difficult one because nobody, including these 10th graders still want to be in school at 3pm. Then my ecological club of 6-8th graders which is lots of fun will do activities concerning "Leave no Trace". Then Ukrainian tutoring before dinner, studying, reading, violin, writing and bed. Not that much time left in the day.
