Where The Streets Have No Lanes....

There is this odd thing in Tbilisi...the streets are cobblestone and even when there are multiple lanes, there are no lane markers.  Everyone just sort of drives how and where they want to.  We take a minibus to all of our events and it makes me slightly queasy to watch our driver--near accidents are common place (they also seem to have a strange dislike of traffic signals.  I think we have only seen about four during our time here.  There are lots of roundabouts, though.)

I think the lack of street lanes is symbolic of a lot of what happens in Georgia.  Everyone is doing their own thing, independent of what everyone else might be doing and this lack of organization, while it seems to work for them, I think slows things down and makes it more difficult to get efficiently to where you want to go.

We visited a school today called the British-Georgian Academy.  Like the name suggests,  it is a blend of British and Georgian schooling.  

In this private school, there are two tracks, the "British" track, where all schooling is in English  and the "Georgian" track where students learn English but are taught in Georgian for the rest of their education.  Here are the pictures from the classrooms on the British track:

In this kindergarten class, students were using the smart board to access a song about the seasons and choosing which season they thought today was.  It was the end of their daily lesson about weather and current events.  Do you see all of the wonderful student art and color that fills the classroom?

In this classroom, a second grade teacher was using a smart board to review math facts about a science experiment the students had done with water the day before.  Students wrote on erasable white boards and were gathered on a colorful rug in the front of the room.

This is the rest of this classroom.  Nice, new wood floors, colorful wall displays of student work and comfortable chairs for the students to sit on (many of whom are children of business people and diplomats)

Daily Schedule for the second graders.

This Dia de Muertos display was done by some fourth graders as part of a unit on understanding world cultures.  Pretty awesome, eh?

Older students in the British track were explaining on how to write a fantasy story.  I'm not sure but I think these were fifth grade students.

After seeing the student classrooms in the British track, we moved on to seeing the students who  are in the Georgian track.

 Their classroom is just a bit different.  Fewer students, but do you notice anything else?

 They were much like our own students, though.  They loved going to Wendy's after school, played volleyball and wished the passing periods were longer and they had fewer rules.  They also had a house system where if one student was not behaving, points were taken away from the whole "house" (Think Harry Potter)  The kids actually said they liked it because it kept them accountable, but one boy wanted to know how we made kids behave because one boy in his house "just won't do his homework".  They loved the Monster, by the way, so way to go, WMS Free Art!

 They read very similar books to us...aren't some of you reading Wonder?

 Diary of a Wimpy Kid is in the house!  These titles look strangely like our own bookshelves.

They even read Magic Treehouse books!

It interests me that this school exists with two such differing educational philosophies in the same building.  Like the road with no lanes, kids can switch tracks when they need/want to, but most stay in the same track.  According to the school, outcomes are the same for both groups.  I still wonder.

After the school visit, we went to the super secret American Embassy in Tbilisi and met the Ambassador.  I can't show you any pictures because cameras, cell phones and even lip gloss were not allowed inside.  We could only bring a pen/pencil and paper.  Even Monster had to stay back in the van.  The Ambassador was very nice and we also heard from the deputy for cultural affairs about all of the wonderful ways that Georgia is looking to the United States for ways to improve education.  They really think we are pretty awesome at educating students.  Do you agree?

Later this afternoon, we visited with the top deputy in the teacher training division of Georgia's Ministry of Education and Science, Irena.

She was explaining the new teacher training program, involving four levels of teaching from beginning teachers to mentor teachers.  Research was a huge part of how they were going to evaluate teachers, which made my heart a little bit happy.  Part of the problem with teachers is that they make very little money--less than $200/month.  I don't know about you, but I couldn't live on that.  Many of the teachers are older (the average age is almost 50) and learned to teach during the Soviet era which apparently was a time of great confusion, as teachers were trained to explain everything to the chalkboard and not explain it to the actual students.  I'm not sure why teachers felt the need to teach the blackboard, but it was VERY popular, as was sitting in straight rows, never talking other than to recite what the teacher said.  If a class was noisy, the teacher was likely to be fired for not having control of the class. (Reading Workshop students, you would be in so much trouble!)   The new program of teacher recruitment, training and evaluation has the potential to be a game changer...I'm excited to see how it works out!

Tomorrow we head to Batumi.  Land of sea and sun.  For some completely insane reason, they seem to think I'm an expert on teaching (obviously, they never asked my students!) and I have to present on school reform and on how to make literature interesting and exciting.  As I have only taught one book for the last two years (I did teach it 48 times, though), do you think I'm qualified?

I'll post again from Batumi.  Here's a bonus picture of Monster.  Can you identify the symbol he is below?  Where did it come from?

Thought for you to ponder...what track would you want to be on?  Why?