My English lessons
I am from a tiny village called Chumlaki. It is located in Eastern Georgia. It is a typical village in the former communist country with a high poverty rate and lack of resources. Everyone farms there, life is boring, and there is nothing to do for teenagers besides schoolwork and helping your parents with farming. School is not fun and exciting. Most of the teachers are very old and strict; we all were afraid of them. If we did not behave the way these teachers wanted to, they would yell at us or sometimes slap us. I had also experienced physical assault from my teacher when I was a fourth-grader. There is also a small village called Kitaani, and all the people who live there are an ethnical minority from Ossetia. I remember growing up, my Ossetian classmates were always bullied by Georgian students and sometimes physically assaulted at school. The environment was terrible for children, and it had a significant influence on students’ psychology and development. This was the time when my school, students, and teachers needed help.
During the critical time, my school hired a new English teacher. Everyone was very excited because she was young and we were expecting fun classes with her. When we had the first English class with her, I got hope, hope that there were still some teachers who wanted to make changes in the community. I remember everyone loved her, they would bring flowers from home or some fruit, to please her. Her teaching approaches were very new and weird for other teachers. She got a lot of critiques from elder teachers saying she had to be strict in order to make students listen. She brought a new life to my school.
I am nominating this person because she made my (not only mine) school experience special. I am a strong, independent, and successful woman because she gave me motivation. I think it is essential to provide more opportunities to underprivileged teachers who change lives with minimum resources.
She showed us the world from a different perspective. If we thought all of us would end up working in the fields and be peasants after meeting her, we realized that there were a lot of opportunities waiting for us. She gave us hope, which was very important at that time and did not let us have negative ideas about our future.
At that time, Georgia was not a popular country, and tourists would not visit us, especially my small village. We had not seen foreigners properly. She heard about the Peace Corps and started gathering some documents to apply for that program. Luckily we got an American volunteer that summer. She was closely collaborating with Peace Corps and our new volunteer. They applied to one of the programs, and the American Embassy financed our English classroom. They provided it with a projector, fancy desks, and chairs, a lot of books and posters. In my opinion, it was one of the most significant achievements our school has had.
After the English classroom, we founded different clubs at school, and students were in charge of those. She taught us how to use a projector and basic programming, such as how to create a slideshow, infographic, poster, etc.
As I already mentioned at that time, students from South Ossetia were bullied in my school; she also decided to address that issue. She believed that people could not understand one another if they do not know each other. She organized a project and took us to their village, where we could talk to older people and share their culture and traditions. We learned more about their history, why they moved to this village. We got to talk to these people and their families outside of the classroom. We had dinner together; they taught us how to cook Ossetian food. I think it was a great approach to make students less aggressive and more supportive of each other. In my experience, after this project, bullying and discrimination of these students decreased radically.
She was the first teacher who told us about Peace Corps camps, exchange programs, and study abroad opportunities. I was one of the first students who applied to the PC camp and got into there with my classmate. It gave us a piece of vast knowledge and experience which we shared after going back to our school. She was the one who told us about the FLEX (Future Leaders Exchange Program), which allows students to live in the US for a year and get a cultural experience. A couple of people from my school went to the US with this program. She told us about UWC, and I participated in myself and spent two incredible years in Norway. Last year one of my schoolmates also participated and how he is in Singapore. She motivated and engaged us to apply; she gave us confidence that we could do whatever we wanted to.
She helps students who want to go to university. Every year she takes high school students to different universities so they can talk to the people and make reasonable decisions where they want to continue studying. She provides tutorials (for free) to students who need to get the highest grades in English in order to get a good scholarship. If their scholarship is not enough, she sends students to local government and other organizations to ask for help. She tries everything to show us possible things we could do and organizations we could get help from. For example, the local government paid for my ticket for Norway, which was a great help for my family.
I want her to get into this program because she deserves that. I think she has a lot of stories to share with other teachers, motivate them, and give them some advice. I hope I can give her back all the effort and energy she spent on my personal development and success.