Another School Year Begins

School has officially begun!  Today I taught my first real classes of the year because last week was mostly going over classroom rules and getting the kids to talk about summer.  I was very proud to see how many kids talked about coming to my summer camp and how they were still excited about it 2 months later.  And then I didn't have to teach on Friday (I was supposed to have Fridays off but today I just added another class so now I have one lesson...of course).  Today Tamilə müəllim (my counterpart) and I also opened the resource room for the first time this year and we already had 4 kids come to borrow books!  At least now they'll have something to read because my school seems to be having an extreme shortage of textbooks (which doesn't seem to be worrying anyone but my counterparts and I) so the vast majority of my kids aren't getting books so far!  As you may suspect, yes, this makes it very difficult to teach!  But my counterparts and I are powering through.  Tamilə müəllim and I have an adorable 5th form class (this is the youngest that Azerbaijani kids start seriously learning English, before that it is only once a week and they start fresh in 5th anyway) that I'm really excited about.  We started the alphabet today!  For some reason the Azerbaijani textbook doesn't teach the letters in order, so today was E, B, D, N, P, and T.  I also found it very interesting that my kids couldn't say the Azerbaijani alphabet.  When we were planning for the lesson I saw that Tamilə müəllim didn't know it because every time she tried to say it she said the Russian alphabet not Azerbaijani (which makes sense as she grew up in Soviet times).  I guess that's what happens when you change your lettering system like a million times, but I hadn't really thought about it.  I knew that my kids were really bad at using dictionaries, but I just thought it was lack of knowledge of the English alphabet.  I guess not!

This weekend I went to two weddings and I believe that I have now officially attended 20 weddings in Azerbaijan (which really just means I remember going to 20 weddings but there could be some less memorable ones in there somewhere haha, by the time you get to 20 that is highly possible).  My host mom is already stressing out about having to go to weddings alone after I go home (I finish here December 14th!) so now I really have to go to all the weddings with her (although it may not seem like it seeing as I have gone to 20, I have managed to get out of several more).