Hajde Pranvera Hajde

COME ON, SPRING!

Two-thirds of The Eagles, after school Writing Olympics! Perhaps my favorite photo of the season :) We're short a couple of boys here.

Writing prompt: "Be the change you want to see in the world"  What does this mean for you?  Give an example.

Note the hefty dictionary - hard-fought battle

Adult Beginner's Course, braving grammar and relaxing with Memory after school on Thursdays

Head Shoulders Knees - 10th Grade Boys v. Girls in the ultimate anatomy showdown

There was some artistic interpretation of the original choreography

With balletic precision

Valle shqiptare (traditional dance) in the teacher's room :)  OPA!

Niko had just wrapped up a music lesson and was in the mood for a pushim i madhe (long break) hoedown

Class 8 wrapped up a health activity and mugged it up in front of their 2011 New Year's Resolutions

Food vocabulary and nutrition lesson - taught with our lovely and amazing school nurse/life skills teacher/former chemistry teacher, Bruna.  She is a veritable encyclopedia of health in Albania, shines in the classroom, and is also a skilled dressmaker and truly gifted cook

Succulents thrive in third-floor classroom windows

Absolutely NO smiling is permitted in our classroom, NONE!



 

8th Graders, Crayolas and creativity in hand



Babai Sufi, vend i shejnte - Father Sufi, burial ground of three Islamic mystics and now a holy site and good outdoor reading location (view of the entire valley on the road to Gline, a nearby village).  We came to light candles and then circled the tombs three times, kissing their headstones on each turn

Visa's usual order: nje makiato te gjate me shume qumesht (a long espresso pull with extra milk froth on top)

Aaaand, two glasses of water :)  A very well-hydrated young woman

Intellectuals, revolutionaries, and general shaker-upers from our region of Albania.  Many local towns and villages are named for these ladies and gentlemen

Our famous tree in the center of town; a mountain spring is piped up through its roots.  This rendering, which I covet, hangs in the director's office

Waiting for a furgon or handy vehicle to pass so we can catch a lift back to Leskovik after teaching at the village school in Shelegur 

Marinela, the village school teacher

The reservoir (built during Communism) in Shelegur, snowcapped mountains yonder

Prudent student footwear for a muddy day

Our students in Shelegur with home-made speed racer on salvaged string

Gearing up for food vocabulary + nutrition

Diana, school librarian and Albanian lang. and lit. teacher, with her youngest child, Megi

Pavllo, the most senior of senior teachers at Jani Vreto, canceled class on a beautiful day, took all the kids outside, "borrowed" a student's bike and took it for an impromptu spin.  The kids cheered, as did I :)

Seniors, front steps

Senior boys, during a town mapping excursion.  Evidentally they were working on topography at this point

Sweetheart and a half



Seniors, nailing their pose of choice on our 15 mai 1943 (15th of May - day of local liberation from the Nazis) monument

Note how he's about to leap onto the other student's shoulders?  Exactly what I did not want to happen

The seniors are planning to do a hip-hop + breakdancing performance in English for this year's 15th of May outdoor celebrations

Our mountains are still covered in snow

Last load of wood, half-stacked.  I was trying to explain to a friend how much wood is actually stacked in there.  The easiest answer is a pick-up truck bed and a half

Still snowing, but it's beautiful!

This weekend, we made the international news for all the wrong reasons

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12253481

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12253624

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/world/europe/22briefs-Albania.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=albania&st=cse

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/pictures-of-the-day-albania-and-elsewhere/?scp=2&sq=albania&st=cse

December in Photos




Town

 


Najada, Ida, and Vulli in the teachers' room




Obliging cow outside my building




Looking toward the rest of Albania, outside my building




Cows coming in for milking below my building.  They calmly walk back through town without escort, single-file, and sort themselves into their appropriate sheds.




We weren't all ready for snow.




Snowed-in bunker




Domestic violence project with the seniors




Are you paying attention?! :)




The Friends of the Library with Librarian Diana Pasho




Visa's xhaxhi and her mother dried mutton from cousins in Dragot over the stove.  It's called (I'm not 100% on the spelling...) pasternak.




Oresti, the original energy man of the 7th grade




Grading tests with Visa next to the stove in her apartment



How go those wintry nights?

It goes without saying that I am highly appreciative of my dedicated woodstove. She is assured of a healthy raise and front office next season. We are companionably barricaded together in one room most nights … which statement makes me reflect that I sound like a questionably sane individual communing with a cat. I am unhappily aware of a thread of truth in that.



The valiant stove herself, courtesy of Jani Vreto's dormitory


When I’m not sleeping at home, I’m being introduced to Albanian life behind wintry doors by Visa, her family, and friends from work. I show up with wool socks and am unyieldingly ordered into house shoes. The tiles are cold, and the mamas are fierce.

Albanian winters are, for most, the time to flee inside immediately following work, pour flavored roux over përshësh (crumbled bread), twitch the antennas to face a vast sky awash with stars, and pray for Grua e Hekurt (an infinitely popular, and happily subtitled, telenovela) to defy the weather and bless our apartments. Hajde hajde noble Valentina, bursting blouses, evil fake baby mamas, and dastardly, mustachioed vacqueros! Valentina and her many trials are the daily fuel of teacher room conversation.

When the electricity, humbled by ferocious wind storms of biblical proportions, goes out for hours on end, we light candles, drink çaj mali (mountain tea), and engage in battle over dominos. Visa’s mother taught me to say the names of all the tiles, and Visa sent home a set to my parents. Evenings with them, pressing my feet to the side of their generous stove, are comfort. Honestly a lot of fun and entirely untradeable for central heating, generators, and smug cable connections.

If there’s anything I’ve learned thus far this winter, it’s that simple pleasures are doubly gratifying when you have less. And that you ought to always have candles stashed in a place you can grope your way to in the dark.



Miss Visa, the designated Turkish kafe maker




From left to right: Shpresa, Visa's mother; Ilda, neighbor, friend, and village teacher; Mika, Ilda's mother and Shpresa's close friend; Visa



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.