[Editor’s note: Jeff Bailey, a 24-year-old Coos Bay native, is in Azerbaijan, where he is serving in the Peace Corps as an English education volunteer. This is the fifth in a series of columns Bailey plans to write for The World about his experiences there.]

Teaching is a difficult task in itself. Teachers are generally underappreciated, overworked and are the face of “The Man” to all the students who are less than thrilled to be at school every day. I expected much of this when I came here because of the time I spent teaching English in Seoul, Korea. Only now, as a Peace Corps volunteer, I teach at a public school and am involved with their education system that was refined during the Soviet era. Not only do I face the challenge of teaching my classes, but I also receive a first-hand education in the complexities of teaching in a culture that has different values and traditions than what I’m used to as an American.

Some of the difficulties are on par with the rest of my life abroad. There are communication issues, misunderstandings and frustrations that come with working with people who grew up in a different system than I did (and I’m sure this frustration is felt by the Azerbaijanis that I work with, as well). I work with Azerbaijani English teachers, and we co-teach fifth- through eighth-grade classes. It ends up being about 15 hours a week.

I came to Ujar in September after three months of language and technical training in Sumgayit and began by observing different classes so I could choose which ones I would teach. It was just assumed that I would wow the students by showing them an education unlike anything they’ve ever seen before. I think this kind of optimism was shared by my fellow volunteers as we began our service.

The thing about new volunteers is that we come into our Peace Corps experience with a lot of hopes and ideas about how everything will magically work out. We ignore the expressed difficulties of other, more experienced volunteers, and think that somehow we will be able to overcome them through sheer determination. This occasionally does happen, but volunteers quickly learn that they are stacked against well-practiced and highly refined traditions.

The realities of my situation came rushing at me when I began to observe the English teachers in their classes. When I started at my school, instead of jumping right in to teaching in a new environment, I spent the first couple of weeks observing classes, rather than teaching them. There were two basic problems: The students couldn’t speak English and neither could their teachers. I quickly realized that I could speak better Azerbaijani after three months of classes than some of the English teachers could speak English, despite some of them having been an English teacher for the better part of 30 years (to be fair, they probably know more about English grammar than I do, despite growing up in an English-speaking country). The students were shockingly poor speakers, too. Some of them had memorized a few basic phrases, but that was only a quarter of the students at best. The same percentage couldn’t rise to the occasion when I asked them to simply say five English words. The rest fell somewhere in the middle of the bell curve. I didn’t come across a single student that I would dub an English speaker.

I realized that it could be a really long and difficult two years. The technique that the English teachers seemed to prefer was to give a question to the students in English, and then repeat the question into Azerbaijani. The students would then answer in Azerbaijani, only to have their responses translated into English. This process would be repeated until the 45-minute class was up. My notebook was filled with observations like “English was spoken for about five minutes of the class today,” and “Only three students in the whole class seem to listen to the teacher. I can’t say I blame them.” My thought process quickly jumped from my initially optimistic, “How soon can I get these kids speaking English?” to “How can I stay sane in this environment for two years?” Fortunately, both of those questions were a little extreme.

One of the reasons that I still feel like I’ll be able to help the school and won’t be constantly butting heads with their classroom culture is that I ended up finding three great counterparts (the teachers I co-teach with). The first thing that I noticed about them is that they spoke English well, which instantly set them apart from everyone else in the school. I wanted to be able to communicate easily with my counterparts, because I would be working with them every day for the next year, and most likely for the next two. Additionally, I wanted them to be receptive to what I was trying to do, which they were. They all understand that there are major gaps in the education system here, and they expressed an interest in trying to make it better. My counterparts and I co-teach our English classes together, but my focus isn’t strictly on teaching the students.

Part of what volunteers do while they’re in the Peace Corps is raise the capacity of the citizens of their host country to develop their own communities. It goes along with the old saying of teaching someone to fish rather than simply giving them a fish. It’s what we to do to make our efforts sustainable. So while I’m teaching my students English, I’m also working with my counterparts to help them improve their teaching methods. Some of the concepts that I’ve been working on with my counterparts are lesson planning and increasing student participation. I try to show them how to critically examine the textbook and new teaching methods that lean toward student involvement rather than the heavy lecturing that is currently favored. The idea is that not only will the students of our school learn English while I’m here for two years, but also that I can show my counterparts modern pedagogy, and then their efforts will reach many more students for a longer period of time than I ever could in my time as a volunteer. And even though it sounds like a great idea and everyone says they are on board, change is a difficult and often scary thing. Fighting through heavily reinforced traditions and practices for the next two years is going to be just as much, if not more of a challenge than teaching my students English. But if it wasn’t, I suppose I wouldn’t need to be here.

Jeff Bailey graduated from Marshfield High School in 2002. He writes further about teaching, cultural experiences and his beloved Portland Trail Blazers on his Web log, www.northwestjeff.wordpress.com.