2023.02.06-08. – Teaching, lesson planning, and long hours at the embassy - a general chaos

An eventful few days.

It’s feeling kinda cold out there again. Being out in -25 is no joke. I am not freezing, but it’s still pretty nasty, especially for my face (and my hands when I have to take them out of my pockets to blow my nose – I do not have a cold but when I go outside or arrive somewhere warm, I have a runny nose ofc). However, it does get nice and warm during the early afternoon hours, around -15 or maybe even -10, so I was actually sweating on my walk home from the swimming pool today, under all my layers.

Typical weather in the winter - cold but also very sunny

These past 3 days have been a bit chaotic and pretty exhausting, to be honest. Since I didn’t have any time for work during the weekend, I am trying to get back on top of things now. And today was also the deadline for the application for a grant that we want to get with the embassy, so we’ve been working on that tirelessly too. Last week, we’ve had meetings and agreed on the general direction our proposals would go. Sunday evening (and Monday morning) I drafted both proposals. This Monday, we had a 1.5 hours long meeting to go through the key points and try to finalize the proposals that we would hand in as our (my) pitches to the committee that decides on the grant. I came home and smoothed out some rough edges, edited a few details. On Tuesday, we had another, this time 3 hours long meeting, nit-picking the whole document (well, both of them), and adding more stuff. At the end, we printed it out and I signed and scanned it, then came home and submitted both proposals. I had thought that was it, but I was wrong. They emailed me back a few hours later, saying some lines were hard to read bc they were gray and not black (THEY had made those cells in the original document gray, I just didn’t edit them to black bc I thought they had a REASON for having it in gray??) and that I had to re-submit. So today, on Wednesday, I had another trip to the embassy, third day in a row, to correct this (and the embassy guy also made two small corrections in the content) and after printing, signing, and scanning it again, I submitted all documents again – this time, for good. If we could get the grant, we'd be able to organise two pretty cool cultural events this year here in Mongolia, but I don’t have high hopes for getting it; many people would have applied and most have better connections than me – and it’s often not the quality that counts in these situations, rather who you know.

Ulaanbaatar got some new buses in January - good for them!

As for my classes, on Monday there were only 6 students in my group (out of the 11), and on Tuesday I had 6 students again in group 2 – but out of those 6, only 2 were ones I recognised from last week, the other 4 just came for the first time, so they had no idea about anything I’d taught the week before. This way, it was quite a challenge to teach that class, conjugating their first verbs and learning a new suffix, when 2/3 of the group hadn’t even seen the Hungarian alphabet before. But I can honestly not be expected to teach the very first lesson’s material again, when I have 2 students who had already learned that AND a syllabus to stick to AND it’s not my fault they skipped the first week. I can’t just keep teaching the first lesson every time a new student decides to drop in. Today, I had a better turnout for group 1 than on Monday, and they were – as usual – a delight. They like to joke around and derail the class, but are always quick to be back on track and answer questions when I stop their Mongolian rumbling, and their Hungarian is improving class by class.

What is NOT at all delightful is the chaos that I just can’t seem to flee from at this university. Last Friday, Otgontuya told me that I would have a few afternoon classes from now on (two, to be exact) and that she would talk to my students. She didn’t. On Tuesday, I asked her if she had asked them and she said no but I could just email them about the changes. Also, she had lost the document she’d edited so she had to ask me where and when she moved my classes… So anyway, I quickly emailed my students (both groups) about the changes, and accordingly, we had a class at 16:00 instead of 11:00 today with group 1.

I went to Otgontuya’s office at 15:45, bc she’d said she would meet me there and take me to the new classroom. I also wanted to talk to her about Group 2’s class on Thursday, since they’d emailed me today to let me know they cannot possibly come to my class at the new allotted time since they have another class in that timeslot. Thanks, Otgontuya. So anyway, I go to her room, and she’s not there. I text her after waiting for about 10 minutes, she takes a few more minutes to answer, letting me know that she is in a meeting in another part of the building and I should go there. This is 9 minutes before my class is scheduled to start. I go find that room, she comes out, takes me to the new room, and tells me on the way there that we have to move both classes that we’d just moved to the afternoon back to mornings, because it doesn’t work with the students’ timetables. I wonder why she tried to move my classes then in the first place, without checking in with the students first. But since we didn’t have a class at 11, we should have the class at 4pm, only change everything back to how it was originally from tomorrow. Okay. We go to this new room, some other people are there too. They want to go in, Otgontuya sends them away. I enter the room, Otgontuya leaves. Two students come in and sit, and I am about to start my class (at this point it’s 16:01) when another teacher and her bunch of students come in, claiming they have a class in this room and it’s clearly reserved (somewhere, I don’t know where, I do not have access to any kind of system they might use for this – I don’t even have the equivalent of what Neptun is at home. I literally don’t even have a list of my students, ever. They just come and go and I have to ask them to give me their email addresses so that at least I can send them homework and updates. It’s utter chaos.) and since I do not know anything about reservations, we leave. We go up to check if our ‘old’ room is free at this time. There are a few students there, but no teacher, so we ask them to please leave so that we can have a class, and my two students text the others to come to this room instead of the other one. They arrive in a minute, I start teaching my class (at this point about 10 minutes late). We are just starting to warm up when I can see that Otgontuya is calling me. I decline and keep teaching. Then she texts me that room 303 (where we were supposed to be but had gotten kicked out of) is free and we can go back. At this point I just want to teach my damn class, I don’t even care where, and the classroom we are at is as good as any, so I ignore her text and keep teaching. It’s cool, we are learning, having a good time, and about halfway through the lesson Otgontuya comes in, telling me that room 303 is free and we should move the class there. At this point I was kinda fed up and told her I saw her text but I didn’t want to have to hit pause on my class and waste time again, so we’d just like to stay. She seemed surprised (does she not have a syllabus and lesson plans to stick to? I guess not) but left us alone to finish the class. And then I had to apologize to all my students (in both groups) and let them know that the timetable change should be disregarded. It’s frustrating because I feel like this makes me look bad, changing class times all last-minute without consulting my students first, then changing it all back the next day, again, with no warning. I’d have hated this as a student, and now I hate it as a teacher. Not for my own schedule, that can take it (like today, I went to the swimming pool before my class, instead of after), but messing with everyone else’s time is not something I like doing – or am willing to do. But at least now it’ll all be back to ‘normal’ (or how it was last week).

Like I said, I’ve also been to the pool today – had a nice swim, but I had to keep changing lanes bc people kept coming to the lane I was at, even though they usually don’t do that. Most of the time I can have a lane on my own or maybe share it with one person; people see that I am having a proper swim practice and they leave me to it. Not today. At one point I had two man join me in my lane when there were 2 other lanes with only 1 person in them each. Just before that, a man decided to cross my lane when I was doing a turn and as I kicked off the wall and he was (suuuper slowly) swimming across it, I somehow ended up underneath him, his soft stomach and hard knees and sharp elbows and I don’t even know what body parts all pushing me down and knocking into me. It’s lucky I’m a good swimmer and I feel at home in the water, so I just disentangled our body parts and swam to the surface, my goggles full of water, but not too fazed. Why do they not look around before crossing a lane where others swim, honestly? Other than that, it was a good swim, and the lights very pretty.

Oh, and when it comes to pretty things – when I was walking to the pool in the morning, it was very cold and very sunny and it looked like it was snowing (but it definitely wasn’t, it couldn’t have been, there were no clouds, just vibrant blue sky) in tiny flakes or something. I’ve never seen anything like this before, it looked as if glitter or tiny ice shards were falling from the sky, the sun making them glow and glitter. It was magic.

As for magical things, this banana pancake with berries was also pretty awesome.

And when I was not teaching or at the embassy (or swimming), I spent the last three days making lesson plans and working on teaching material for my classes this week. But I’ve done it, I have all my lesson plans and worksheets prepared for the rest of the week – two more classes tomorrow and then a last one on Friday. I’ll still have to prepare my classes for next week to finally be back on schedule but I am getting there! Can’t wait to have some time to chill too, I can feel a slight sore throat coming on – probably bc my body is too tired to fight such a small thing off now – but I cannot get sick so I’ll just have to stick it out until the weekend and then have some rest.