Winter Has Most Happily Arrived

December finally ushered in the snow – isha shumë e kënaqur (I was very pleased, like the insufferable cat that got the cream). It became bitterly cold, and then suddenly the sky opened up after days of harsh breath and frozen stillness. I sat up for a while one morning after waking to the first snow fall in the wee hours. Total silence. No teeth-grinding, petulant braying; no mournful howling. Not a single donkey, dog, or Peace Corps volunteer wanted to disturb the fragile, hesitant hush. We were all enchanted. REM cycle blown and resigned to propping eyelids open in class, I dozed with tea on the couch and surveyed the hills on the opposite side of the valley over the cowsheds and woodpiles below. The landscape was a muted, dark proposition palely draped in snow. Could fling yourself off the balcony and swim in the stars and cold!



View over the valley into Greece; the mountains are totally obscured by the low snow clouds.


The following day was an inexorable flurry of snowballs merrily pelted with just this side of playful force in the middle of lessons. Students wiped out in the stairwells, teachers debated taking class outside, and the boys that will be boys stomped our main street into an icy slip-‘n-slide. The latter performed moves with agility that would have put Michael Who-Lives-In-The-Cemetery-Above-Pajovë Jackson to shame. A very good day, indeed :)



Jani Vreto, blanketed in snow during the long school day break


After-school course has become variable. We sort of squint at the sky and calculate the relative worth of an extra hour in a chilled room with shuddering, old-school (and largely ineffective) radiators. Courses often disintegrate into holiday planning, but still discussed in English. I try to indignantly convince my colleagues (here, my students) that I have lingering, albeit struggling, cold-weather standards and so should they! They humor me, tolerant folks that they all are. These informal lessons go down over scalding cups of Turkish kafe or thick salep (orchid root tea) at the lokal across the street. Now that I've wrapped up a grant application, we’re re-introducing a serious grammar regimen this week, I swear. 

Learning in mandatory attendance lessons has also become variable. Having abandoned the creeping drafts by the walls, our students lean on each other, pressed into central rows. They take turns getting up to thrust their hands between the ribs of the radiators. This is where active warm-ups and mobile exercises make a double hit in the classroom. So we aim to keep it fun and kick-off vocabulary reviews with a basic round of Hangman (adapted here into “The Wilting Flower”) and supplement text comprehension with sentence-assembly teamwork and William Tell Overture’s resounding crescendos. Our eighth graders get a mid lesson break to perform interpretive stretching. Anything else that gets our students on their feet finds its way into lesson plans. We also threw a holiday party, which warmed up the seventh graders to an eventual shedding of jackets and swaying of hips. I frowned and Visa laughed. A very tame conga line was duly formed.



Klasa 7a, hamming it up for the camera in their decorated classroom.  I do not recommend getting that book for your students... :)


I salute my students for plowing through work despite temperatures inside often dropping below those outside concrete and brick walls. Take that, American teenagers! I challenge you to A’s with frozen extremities and elbows refused their full range of motion by A Christmas Story-esque layers.