In the public high schools, I observed classes, practiced pronunciation with the students, and tried to inveigle my Iranian colleagues to use the aural-oral methodology of teaching. My work was centered in Kerman’s four high schools for girls, although I also taught at the nursing school, and had classes for adults. He made my life in Kerman possible - and, occasionally, very frustrating. Sayeed-Nejad was the intermediary between the Volunteers and the Kermanis. He introduced us to the people he thought we should know, monitored our activities outside of the classroom, and worked hard to insure we didn’t step outside of Kerman’s norms for unmarried woman - a very narrow path. But he was concerned with more than our classroom activities. He was the one who took my roommate and me to each of Kerman’s four public high schools for girls, introducing us to their principals and the English teachers with whom we would work. The Peace Corps Volunteers in Kerman had a wonderful mentor, Ahmad Sayeed-Nejad, an Office of Education employee assigned to shepherd us through the maze of Kerman’s educational system. My second year in Kerman, I had a new roommate (sixty-six-year-old Alice Phinney), an apartment, and a refrigerator, making things a lot simpler. We had no key to this gated community rather, we rang the doorbell and waited for the caretaker’s wife to let us in. My roommate and I, with no culinary skills, attempted to prepare meals on a two-burner stove, buying potable water from a man with a horse-drawn tank who delivered all over Kerman. The plan was for us to take our meals with the students, but somehow that never worked out. The school was on a large piece of property that included offices, a dormitory for the girls who lived outside the city, classrooms, a lunchroom, a pistachio grove where a donkey was tethered, a basketball court, and a large bath/toilet building (a sixty-yard dash from our room). My roommate and I were housed in a single room at Kerman’s daneshsera, the teachers’ training school for women. There, we were to teach English in the public high schools where the students were required to study English from grade seven through grade twelve. I was assigned with two other Iran 4 Volunteers, to Kerman, a provincial capital in south central Iran, nineteen hours by bus from the center of everything, Tehran. Rather, we would train their teachers, encouraging them to employ the aural-oral method of teaching English. Peace Corps envisioned that members of our group would not have classes of their own in the public schools. Working with U of M’s summer English Language Institute students, we trained to be teachers of the English language. We studied Farsi, of course, and Iranian history and culture. I was part of a large TEFL group, Iran 4, which trained at the University of Michigan during the summer of 1964. What was your Peace Corp project assignment? I was a Volunteer in Iran from 1964 to 1966. Where and when did you serve in the Peace Corps?.Here she talks of her Peace Corps experience, her career, and how she came to write Walled In, Walled Out. She describes her book this way: “A young American woman comes of age in Iran, threading her way through the venerable history and culture of this ancient, proud Muslim land to find her own unique role.” In April, Mary Dana Marks published Walled In, Walled Out: A Young American Woman in Iran with Peace Corps Writers.
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