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ESL & The Peace Corps

- By Mike Dunphy -

Part 2: Training

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There are countless adventures I could tell you about and others that I couldn't about the cultural aspects of training, but since this is a site devoted to ESL, I won’t discuss Estonian White Snake cover bands and leaping over bon-fires on Midsummer’s day. I’ll focus on the ESL aspect of it.

Peace Corps training consists of three main areas: Cultural, Linguistic, and Academic. We went to a school, an actual high school, five days a week. It was just like being in first grade again. My mom woke me up, made me breakfast, drove me to school where I learned how to count and say, “This is an apple.” The teacher training classes were in the afternoon.

They told us we were going to be trained by one of the foremost teachers in Estonia. I entered the classroom on the first day carrying that same feeling I'd had since I found out I was leaving and watched it all dashed to pieces within the first ten minutes.

The renowned professor began the class this way. She made us all trace our hands on sheets of white a black paper, cut them out and tape them all over the walls. Afterwards, she gathered us and said,

“The black hands represent the bad negative energy around us. Nobody wants to have a black hand. The white hands are a positive force that we want to cultivate and transfer to our students.”

I had heard enough of that BS back in Vermont from the hippies that lived above and on either side of me. She was a sensitive new-age girl.

It never got any better and we spent the subsequent months learning mostly about creating good karma in the classroom. Every sentence she uttered was full of crystals, tarot and raiki. We listened to soothing music and wrote our feelings down and learned how to trust by falling into each others arms backwards.

 

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