language games et. al.

1. In case you were wondering, I was unable to get on last night. Technical difficulties with the web site.

2. We played a language game yesterday. Our language teachers set up a series of elaborate tasks we had to complete. They had a classroom all set up with four stations: a ticket booth with a train schedule, a bus we had to take to the train station, the actual compartment of the train and a police station. We had to perform a series of tasks: buy the ticket, take the bus to the train station, sit with some local people and converse, buy something from a vendor and finally go to the police station and file a report that we had left something on the train. The language teachers and various friends and children played the various roles, There was one trick where there was someone selling you a ticket before you got to the station, and if you bought the ticket from that person, you had to go back and complete a series of tests before you could start over again. I think they did a pretty good job of simulating the real situation and it was good to see if our language skills had any practical capability.

(I should say this whole thing was quite competitive in a way that simply would not occur in an American classroom. There was a big production made of having to compete against other students by having a sort of jeopardy like competition in order to even be allowed into the simulation. In general the language classroom can be a very competitive environment and I think this says much about the nature of the education system here. In order to get into college students must take a test at the end of their high school and that test essentially determines what college they are going to, and that college to a large part sets the pattern for their life. So they must learn to get good at competition and not crack under pressure because their future success truly depends on it. In America, there is really no equivalent to the test that high school kids must take. The SAT in America simply does not have the finality of the test these students take. Anyway, something really clickeed today. I felt I understood why they have set up so many competitive activities in even our small language classroom. It has always seemed to me to go against the notion that there is nothing worse than losing face because in these competitive classrooms someone will lose face. But competing against the loss of face is the necessity to succeed in a competitive environment. So I think it is a contradiction on the surface, an interesting contradiction, and one worth exploring in more detail)

3. This is all in prepartaion for our big language test which we take nex Thursday. We must achieve a level of what is called intermediat low on the test, or else. . . Or else what I am not exactly sure. Nonetheless, most of us will spend most of next week preparing for this exam. It is all done orally with a couple of testors quizzing you and giving you scenarios and just trying to talk with you to determine your level.

4. The sad news today is that one of the volunteers was involuntarily sent home. The story is still unclear, but he was one of the few volunteers I knew and I am sorry to see him go. This is one thing to keep in mind, though. The three previous people who left from other sites left voluntarily for one reason or another. This was the first person sent home involuntarily. This reminds us that we are still trainees and until we get sworn in the Peace Corps can pretty much send you home for any reason if they don't think you're Peace Corps material or if they think there will be some problem with your service. They are just protecting themselves since if you go out there and screw up, it is the organization that looks bad. I guess back in the old day they used to have a couple of psychologists at the training site to judge your mental fitness for service. And even now our behavior is recorded and it wouldn't surprise me if some people were asked to go home before the swearing in ceremony.

5. Speaking of the swearing-in ceremony, it is Thursday September 7th. We stay at our host families nine more days and then move to a hotel downtown for three days of meetings and our official swearing in ceremony. A week from Friday we will be at site and on our own.

6. Which is just as well, because things are starting to fray at the edges out here. It is a lot of time to be in relatively closed quaterts, and all things considered I think things are going fairly well. But it is a long time together and the strain is starting to show. It was especially apparent at our end of the week meeting yesterday. It is my suggestion--backed up by a volunteer from last year who I was talking to--that the burden should be lightened in the last week or so. We've been going at it pretty hard for over two months and soon will have to hit the ground running with a full teaching schedule. It would be nice to have some calm before the storm. Just a suggestion.