GTL Kazakhstan 🇰🇿 [IAP 2025] by Fiona L. '27

My GTL⁠01 Global Teaching Labs, a program where students can go to schools around the world during January and teach classes started with the warmest welcomes. On the very first day of the program, I walked through the front entrance of the Shoqan School and was serenaded by a melody played by the elementary schoolers on dombra⁠02 a traditional Kazakh stringed instrument . They were all wearing traditional clothing, and seemed to have been eagerly waiting the arrival of me and Colin, a PhD student also teaching at Shoqan.

We went into the principal’s office to find a table filled with different Kazakh desserts, baursak⁠03 a fried dough pastry I would soon come to love , qurt⁠04 salted, condensed milk , and fermented horse milk. The fermented horse milk seemed to be a hit or miss among travelers. While I didn’t enjoy the flavor, Colin drank his entire bowl in one gulp! Bakhadir, the principal of Shoqan, gave us a very warm welcome while introducing our roles at Shoqan.

the feast we were welcomed with!

The next day, on Friday, right near the entrance of the school was a table full of more Kazakh snacks. It turns out it was another one of the school’s unique traditions, alongside the national anthem playing every Monday and the students clapping when somebody dropped a plate in the dining hall. 05 I think this last tradition was created by the students out of a place of amusement, not maliciousness

the modern-looking hallway of shoqan!

the cafe at shoqan

Something I really appreciated about Shoqan was how patriotic the whole school was. Before starting GTL, my vision of private schools in foreign countries was that a lot of them were international schools in an American or British format. Sure, there were plenty of schools like that in Almaty⁠06 the biggest city in Kazakhstan, where I lived in for the duration of the program , but Shoqan stayed close to its Kazakh roots. The bell that sounded the end of each class was a traditional melody played on a dombra, and on a tour of the school, I discovered that the school library was built in the shape of a yurt⁠07 a circular tent-like dwelling, the home of the Kazakh people when they still lived nomadic lives .

the top of the library, which is open to the sky

the bookshelves of the library

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The curriculum of the classes adhered to the Kazakh “national curriculum,” and students were expected to know three languages—Russian, Kazakh, and English—by the time they graduated. Although I grew up bilingual, I was envious of the linguistic capabilities of the students at Shoqan. In high school, most American students study only 2-4 years of a foreign language (typically Spanish), while students in Kazakhstan studied all three of these languages from the time they first start school. When it came to foreign language, I felt like 2-4 years wasn’t enough to really retain information long-term.

The week after that was when my teaching really began. I was in charge of teaching classes ranging from English to Math to Physics to Chemistry.

Kazakhstan calculator that i encountered in AP Calc

I enjoyed explaining the concepts and answering the students’ questions. I was surprised how subjects like AP Chemistry and AP Physics suddenly came back to me after years of not studying them. Teaching in another language was definitely a barrier—sometimes, the students would talk amongst themselves or ask the teacher a question in Russian or Kazakh. It felt… uncomfortable to not be able to understand them, even though I knew that they very likely weren’t talking about me.

During the first week, I confided in Arystanbek, a teacher who taught math from grade school up to AP Calculus, about how I felt.

“I explain something to them in English, and then they ask you in Russian and you explain the exact same thing in Russian.” I complained to him.

“And they still don’t listen to me,” he said, a hint of a smile in his eyes.

He added that if they weren’t listening, I shouldn’t be afraid to just tell them how I felt. His words felt strangely encouraging to me. Even as somebody who spoke the language, he knew that students could sometimes be unfocused.

Overall, I also got somewhat of a feeling that my day-to-day experience of teaching was wildly inconsistent. Some days, I had no trouble explaining everything, and some days I was simply “off my game.” Each class of students varied from focused and well behaved to rowdy and off-topic. Especially with the younger students, I felt that teaching was more about classroom management rather than explaining skills.

I think the real gem of the program 08 and the gem of many parts of life was all the people I got to meet.

I absolutely loved eating lunch with the students and hearing about all their different dreams. I enjoyed their immense interest in my life as an MIT undergrad, and in return, I was very interested in their lives in Kazakhstan. Most of the kids led busy lives and wanted to go abroad for college. Many wanted to come back in order to help Kazakhstan develop further. From Aldiyar, the president of the hiking club who loved collecting fossils; to Mardan; to Ayualym, who wanted to study chemistry and environmental science to help clear up Kazakhstan’s atmosphere, it was a privilege to learn about them, and the many other students I was able to talk to in just three weeks.

In turn, they had a lot of questions for me. Is it hard to study at MIT? How did you get into MIT? What is the best extracurricular I should be doing right now? How do you like Almaty? Have you tried horse meat? [My answers: hard but doable; i dont know :sob: ; whichever one you’re the most interested in; I really like Almaty; yes, it’s pretty good]

the view of almaty from night

My coworkers⁠09 That’s another one of the great things about GTL—the students see you as a friend (as well as a teacher), and the teachers see you as a fellow coworker. also had some interesting stories to share. One of the other college counselors was Robert, an American from Florida who had spent a lot of time working in Russia and Central Asia, and who was also proficient in 10 languages, including Russian and Kazakh.

One of my favorite stories of his was from his time working as an intern for the US Embassy in Cameroon. Somebody had requested a work visa to the US, showing an offer letter for a job at Verizon. To Robert, it looked legit, but his boss rejected it immediately. She later explained to him, taking him to the back office where she compared the offer letter with a bunch of other documents from the embassy. While the other documents were printed in the US, and had the US standard dimension 8.5×11, the offer letter had the global standard dimension A4. If it were a real offer letter from the US, it should’ve been printed in the US. The difference in the dimensions proved it wasn’t.

I was stunned after hearing this story. It convinced me that some people are really just special.

The last week of GTL was the best by far. Although I got sick unexpectedly, and was feeling under the weather the whole week, this was the week when I really put my all into the program, as well as continuing to build the relationships I had been building for the past two weeks, whether I was chatting with teachers during break times or being taken to the pharmacy to get cough drops. In addition, a Kazakh teacher at Shoqan had volunteered to give Colin and me two lessons of Kazakh! The lessons were pretty fast paced, but I was thoroughly grateful for the opportunity to learn.

After having taught with the standard materials for two weeks, I decided that I wanted to try my hand at writing my own problems and assignments for the students. In physics class, I wrote some problems meant to expose misconceptions⁠10 in my AP Physics 1 class, I loved these kinds of problems the most: 'trick' problems that exposed fundamental physics misconceptions with simple harmonic motion and with energy. In chemistry, I taught about galvanic cells, taking a diagram of a galvanic cell from online, and erasing all of the labels except one. I was most proud of my initiative in AP Calculus, where I created a game of Kahoot for the students and wrote a page of u-substitution problems for them. I included a “challenge problem” where I broke solving the problem into multiple small steps.

part of the u-substitution worksheet!

That week, I also went to Daredzani⁠11 a really good Georgian restaurant that was recommended to me by another American teacher I met on the plane to Almaty with Kai Juarez ’27, who was teaching at Haileybury. We really enjoyed the food. I especially liked the khinkali⁠12 a Georgian food similar to a dumpling that I ordered—I typically find food with mushrooms off-putting due to the texture, but I basically inhaled these khinkalis with no reservation about the texture.

i would give anything to eat these khinkalis again

Khachapuri Adjaruli

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While leaving school on Thursday, I bumped into a group of the English teachers, all of whom I’d already met from teaching classes, who were going to play a game of Lord of the Rings trivia. Knowing nothing⁠13 although it wouldn’t have mattered, since the trivia was all in Russian about Lord of the Rings, I decided to come with them. There, I had a “mid” bowl of ramen and some excellent conversation. Since they were English teachers, there was no language barrier with them like there was with other teachers. Sometime in the middle of the evening, being engaged in a heated discussion about whether “double dipping” sauce was gross or not. We were all doubled over in laughter, the lights of the bar fresh on on faces and the smell of hookah smoke in the air. I thought to myself, I’m not ready to leave. I felt like the best part of the program had just started.

The last day of school is still fresh in my memory as I’m writing this. I played a game with some seventh graders in an English class and I had a “farewell meeting” with the students and with the faculty. 14 do svedanya -> goodbye in Russian One of the students said that she had only started to understand the concepts in AP Calculus after I had explained them, and that she had really liked the questions I had written for the class. I was very very very touched by her words. In that moment, I though that I would remember that moment for as long as I lived.

After school, I visited Arystanbek, who suggested that I say goodbye to him before leaving. He wanted to give me something, even though his cabinets were full of just papers. I told him he didn’t have to give me anything. But he ultimately decided to give me his red pen. “This is the sign of a teacher,” he told me.

After it got dark, I went to Forum, a nearby mall, with two students. We went to a restaurant in the food court, Lanzhou, that served very tasty⁠15 Maybe even better if my sense of taste was all there. Chinese food. One of the students mentioned how many different types of cuisines there were in Almaty, including Chinese, Korean, Indian, Mexican, and more.

delicious noodles 😋

In elementary school, I had considered becoming a teacher, but decided not to when I found out teachers teach the same thing(s) every year. But during this program, actually playing out the role of a teacher had made me reconsider, yet again. One of the many people I look up to is my AP Stats teacher, who had a long and fruitful career on Wall Street, and started teaching as a “soft retirement” of sorts. I wonder if, after the zenith of my career, life would sway me back towards the direction of my old dream.