Puh

There are millions of them. Little white fluffs with tiny specks of black at their centers. They're in the air, everywhere you go.  Light, floating, barely even there. You want to be annoyed, but they are just so soft and pretty that you can't be. Instead you want to dance and twirl through them as they brush your face and arms and filter the sunlight into fuzzy little blobs and texturize the breeze like feathery warm snowflakes, but you contain the urge because you are a grown-up and don't want the other grown-ups passing you on the street to think you are crazy.

After six years of dense powdery itchy and invasive South Carolina pollen, they are a welcome change. Unlike pollen, they are light, and big, and cling together in clusters, and float away from your every motion, and only make you sneeze about once or twice per hour, instead of sixty times per minute. And if you keep your windows shut, they don't creep in where they are not wanted. I think they are cottonwood seeds of some Eastern species, but I'm not sure. Google in English is surprisingly sparse when it comes to information on the flora of Central Asia. They are colloquially sometimes referred to as пух (pronounced "poohh"), the Russian word for feather down or fluff. And so, since there really couldn't be a more perfect-sounding word for them, that is what they are. Puh.

The most notable thing about this week has been the weather. It has caught my attention multiple times per day, every day.

One noteworthy thing about it has been the drastic change. A week ago, it rained a lot. A week ago, it was still dropping to almost freezing temperatures at night. A week ago, the city was gray. Now it's like the opposite. In like four days, the city turned from grey to brown to green. A few days ago I was hanging my laundry to dry on my enclosed balcony and noticed that the tree outside the balcony window had suddenly, practically overnight, blossomed into a white and yellow craze, made all the more radiant by the backdrop of a blue sky and sunshine; but by the time I took down my dried laundry two days later, the petals from my postcard-worthy tree were already falling to the ground and leaving robust, pale-green leaflets behind them. I'm sad that I didn't get a picture of my tree to commemorate the spring of 2016, but I haven't lost hope completely. Almaty is full of trees. The city is actually famous for it. Surely there is one out there that still has its flowers.

The other noteworthy thing is how unbelievably comfortable it is. I don't know what it is about the climate here, but it's just so... agreeable. It's still chilly at night, but somehow even in the day during sunny, breezy 80-degree afternoons, wearing a light jacket or sweater is fine, especially if you leave it unzipped. Then at night, you can just zip it shut and pull on a scarf for the 48-degree evening walk home. I think it's the lack of humidity that makes the temperature variations so manageable. At any rate, I'm not discussing the weather just because life as a teacher was uneventful this week. The spring weather has actually been noteworthy on its own merit. At least to me it has.

Teaching has been easier, though. I'm not sure what happened last week, but it suddenly didn't seem like such a big deal anymore to be "prepared," in whatever vague unachievable sense I had previously reached for. The new defining goal of each lesson is to meet my students with the same amount of energy that they have, and to feed their curiosity. So come early to enjoy the peace and quiet, spend ten minutes brainstorming whiteboard explanations and games on the topic at hand, and five minutes printing worksheets and queuing a Youtube video, and we're ready for class. The downside of this basically-wing-it phase is that it's a mild rebellion against preparedness, a reaction to my caring too much and stressing out in previous weeks, which will hopefully balance itself out into a healthy medium somewhere down the road. The upside is that I'm finding it much easier to prioritize, and let the little things go, and be flexible-- I'm learning how to teach kids. I mean, this isn't Oxford English, this is an after-school program. So what my first class didn't get to the vocabulary section of the lesson today: we'll get to it next class. They needed that extra speaking activity to get the quiet ones talking as confidently as the rest. So what my second class didn't get to anything I had planned for this week: five minutes into the lesson, their blank expressions told me that we weren't ready to learn new stuff, we needed a reinforcement of the last 4 lessons instead because half of them were sick last week and missed it. It's fine. I can save today's plan for next week, and just review vocabulary today. My last five weeks of intensive lesson plans, half of which were so ambitious that I didn't have enough class time to use all of them, has given me a whole mental toolbox of teaching ideas I can improvise at a moment's notice, I can just pull from that. And they're kids. They need to play in English, not just write and speak it. So skip that third grammar exercise, and play Simon Says instead. Oddly, with this seemingly haphazard approach, I end up still hitting 19 out of the 20 essential lesson elements on my boss's list, without the headache of painstakingly planning it. They're learning. Steadily. There is a significant, measurable improvement between the beginning and the end of each class period. That's what matters. As long as I meet that goal, I can always be a perfectionist about it later, when I have the energy again. Which will probably be Wednesday.

This is me ten minutes into my first skating lesson--- momentarily forgetting to concentrate, but still gliding in rhythm and balance without thinking about it. Only in this case, my left skate is games and my right is whiteboard illustrations, my rink is a circle of eager little minds, and my loudspeaker music is the squeals and laughter of little kids. And on my way walking to and from the "rink," I'm surrounded by pixie wings.

Puh!