Saying No to Human Zoos



Is it easy for you to say "no"? Would you say "yes" to being the head of the parenting committee of your child's kindergarten group? I know I wouldn't. But Irina Krug did and shares her experience in this amusing but true-to-life and relatable post written in my "Write for Real: Blogging in English" course. 

✽✽✽

As an elderly Russian woman, I’m proud to have acquired a number of useful skills over my 38 years - ranging from making 3-ingredient sugar-free cookies to managing 50 teens at a Cambridge mock exam. One skill that I’m still working on though is saying “no”.

When I agreed to become the head of the parenting committee in my daughter’s kindergarten group, I had no clue what I was getting myself into. I thought I had grown enough thick skin throughout my teaching career not to be bothered by occasional rants and heated arguments, but - alas! - it was more than that.

Parents’ chats on social media are a zoo of their own: some crocodiles lurking in the depth snapping at you when your dare to suggest buying more paint for the renovation; some parakeets parroting away the ‘truths’ about municipal funding; some knowledgeable monkeys preaching what the teachers are supposed to do 7AM to 7PM; some snakes slithering from one side of the confrontation to another; some hyenas howling with joy when other animals share their ‘wisdoms’... There’s no constructiveness, no consideration, no positive outcome, especially when it comes to helping out on the playground or allocating our precious funds - an outrageous 1000 RUB per family for the whole academic year. The biggest problem is that all those animals wear their human skin when we meet in person and rarely voice their thoughts and concerns face-to-face.

My husband (who wisely chose to stay out of it at first) keeps losing patience when I share my frustration and worry. An avid hunter, he regularly threatens to go on a safari trip with his rifle and shoot each and every one of those hardly endangered species or at least make sure that most of them crawl back to their dens and remain silent.

I, however, bear the brunt and keep reminding myself: sometimes it’s important to just say ‘no’.

✽✽✽

The group chat of the apartment building where I live is very much like this zoo too, so I can totally relate. Can you?  

PS: Check out three more awesome posts written by my students in this course: 
- "At the risk of incurring the curse from polyglots and other magicians" - a post about the hardships of learnings three languages at the same time;
- "A finger-licking dinner dish. No unicorn tears required." - a recipe of a finger-licking dish out of broccoli or cauliflower told through the lens of the author's sweet personality.
- "Carrot, spinach and ginger juice, anyone?" - a post about the need (or the lack thereof) to "detox" our bodies. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to tame your IELTS pie charts

Image
IELTS line graphs are easy to tame - you just go chronologically, so the description doesn't get out of hand. Information in pie charts, however, can be hard to organize because there are different directions you can go in. In this post, I want to share two IELTS pie chart answers I wrote for the same task. The task is from Cambridge IELTS 11 . The introduction and the overview are the same. As you read, pay attention to the organization and try to decide which description works better. ✼✼✼ Introduction  The pie charts compare the percentage of British students of one English university who knew foreign languages in 2000 and 2010. Main Body Version 1 The percentage of students in three groups grew. Speakers of Spanish formed the largest share in both years, rising by 5% from 30% to 35%. The increase was the same in the “Another language” and “Two other languages” groups. In 2010, the former amounted to 20%, while the latter comprised 15%, making up the second and third largest prop
Read more

Top 8 mistakes Russian learners of English actually make

Image
Due to the nature of my job, every once in a while I stumble upon an article about N most common mistakes that learners of English make. I look at them and go, “Who makes these mistakes? Russians certainly don’t.” (For example, Russians don’t confuse your and you’re .) In this post, I want to talk about 8 common mistakes Russian learners actually make. These mistakes persist on different levels, but are not usually addressed in EFL course books. The list is based on my personal teaching experience. The order is random. 1. I with I often ask students “What did you do at the weekend?” and what I hear is “ I with my friends went to the cinema. ” The right way to say something like this is “ My friends and I went to the cinema ,” or “ I went to the cinema with my friends .” In English, the word order is “subject+verb” and prepositional phrases can’t go in the middle. 2. How to say When students don’t know how to say something, they ask me or murmur to themselves “ How t
Read more

My Fulbright application or a teachable moment on essay writing

Image
I did it one day before the deadline. I submitted my Fulbright application on 30 May 2014. Now, 14 months later, I am going to the USA as a proud Fulbrighter! The program I am participating in is called Foreign Language Teaching Assistant or FLTA for short. As a participant of this program I will be teaching Russian and studying at an American university for an academic year. When my students heard the news, they asked, “What did it take to get this grant?” I replied, “Well, there were several stages. First, I had to write a lot of text. Then, I … .” And one student said, “I am curious to read what you wrote.” I suppose many are, so I am going to let you in on one of my application essays. One of the essays I wrote is called “Objectives and motivations.” What I wrote is too long to upload here (1274 words, no less!), so I am only going to share my introduction and conclusion . Oh, and I see a teachable moment here, which I just can’t help using. Introduction "Albe
Read more

C2 Proficiency. Writing Task 2. Review (of a film I haven’t seen).

Image
I keep writing like crazy because I am preparing for the C2 Proficiency test (fka CPE). In my previous post, I shared my Writing Part 2 article . In this post, I want to share a review I wrote about a movie I haven't seen and give some insights into handling an unfortunate task. Task A film magazine has invited readers to submit reviews of films which are set in the future, but deal with themes relevant to today’s world, such as our relationship with technology or environmental problems. You decide to submit a review briefly describing such a film and explaining why its themes are relevant today. You should also consider how important it is for films set in the future to say something about contemporary society.   ( Cambridge English Proficiency 2 , Test 2, Question 4). This is a really unfortunate task for me because I watch very few movies, maybe 3 a year. But as I read it, I imagined myself sitting in the exam room not wanting to fail, so I had to come up with somethin
Read more