Plastic Surgery... that's uhh... a good topic..

In the morning I went to Pushkin library to meet with Alyssa’s third year group. The group is easily some of more hard working students, and they had asked me to give them advice on how to make their club interesting. While in the past, clubs have been run by Peace Corps Volunteers, it was interesting to have a club that was English oriented, but was run by students. They chose the topic of “Plastic Surgery,” at the behest of Sultanat, one of the students in the group, who had seen a documentary a few weeks before on the National Geographic channel on the increasing number of Asian women who were getting eye-widening surgery for want of looking more “western” to be beautiful.

We worked for about 2 hours, as I just went through what they were planning on discussing and tossing around ideas on how to make their club more interesting – it’s a bit difficult to talk about things like plastic surgery when it’s not a huge problem in Kazakhstan, but hopefully they took my advice to get a local plastic surgery to speak, or at least, to find statistics locally on the matter. During the discussion, the students had mentioned how certain girls in the university were plotting to make me their girlfriend – or at least, were interested in me in more than a teacher’s way. Since I had already set a strict no student dating policy, it was strange to hear that, but I asked Sultanat not to tell me who the students were for fear of looking at them strangely.

Around 2, I hung out at the internet room in the library, went online and checked email. Went and grabbed lunch at around 3, hung out there for 2 hours with Dan and Hilary, fellow volunteers, until it was time for me to meet Rashaun and Gulya at Maselynitsa (a restaurant). These two were a pair of 4th year students that I had taught only once when I substituted for a teacher in the interpreter’s department. Again, two beautiful incredibly smart girls that spoke English impeccably – often times, it seems to be the ones that are confident enough with their English that are the ones that invite me out to ‘practice their English,’ which is interesting, but certainly it’s the worse students that really need the practice.