Tag: Bulgaria

Учителката #SOL24 8/31

We had only been talking for a few minutes when her phone rang. She glanced at the screen and said, “I have to take this. It’s my father. I’m so sorry.” With an apologetic look, she answered. I looked down at my notebook to give her what little privacy the conference room afforded.

“Говоря с учителката на И”

I looked up, startled. I had perfectly understood that sentence. She said it again, adding “да, да но…” Yup, my student’s mother was definitely speaking Bulgarian.

She hung up and started to apologize again – after all, she’s the one who had asked for this parent-teacher conference – but I interrupted and said, “Are you Bulgarian?” She looked at me quizzically, so I added, “I speak a little Bulgarian; I could understand what you said.”

Soon, the parent-teacher conference had taken a decidedly friendly turn. We talked about Bulgaria, which city she was from, where I had lived, and more. She told me a funny story about getting married in Canada: Bulgarians nod their head up and down to say “no” and side to side for “yes.” As she stood in front of the judge, answering questions so she could marry her fiancé, she kept saying “yes” but, in her enthusiasm, moving her head “no” – to the point where the judge decided he couldn’t accept her verbal answers. They had to call in an interpreter to verify her responses. “I tried to explain,” she laughed, “but I could tell the judge was worried.” In turn, I told her about trying to gauge students’ understanding during a lesson and finding myself completely bewildered by the sea of heads shaking all different directions.

“But… when did you live there?” she wanted to know.

I had to calculate. “Um… 1995? Nearly thirty years ago!” 

“And you still remember the language?!” Her astonishment was clear.

“Oh no!” I laughed. “You just said about half of what I remember. The first half of what you said was more or less what I memorized so that I could leave phone messages for people. And the second part was about teachers.”

I spent a year teaching in Bulgaria. I loved it – the teaching, the country, the people, the language. As I started to make friends, I also started needing to call people. The problem was, no one lived alone in Bulgaria, so I always needed to ask to speak with the one person I knew – who was almost always the only English speaker in the home. I quickly learned to say, “May I speak with…?” (Мога ли да говоря с) Then, I waited. If there was silence followed by a familiar voice, I’d found my friend. If instead there was a long string of what was gibberish to my years, I took a deep breath and said, “Кажи му, че Аманда се обади”… “Tell him that Amanda called.” And then I hung up. Because that was all I could say. I was pretty much terrified every time I made a phone call all year, which means that those two phrases are tattooed in my brain. 

I can also still remember bits of what I used to call the “train conversation.” That’s the conversation you have when you take the train from your town to the next one if you’re a blond foreigner in a sea of dark-haired Bulgarians. It’s pretty much always the same: Where are you from? What are you doing here? How long have you been here? How long are you staying? Do you like our country?” The whole train conversation lasts just under 10 minutes, and I must have had the conversation dozens of times in several languages. 

All of this came together this week when the parent was speaking because what she said was, “Dad, I’m speaking with I’s teacher.” And I can 100% remember all of those words – apparently even 30 years after I last needed them.

The rest of the conference went swimmingly. Shared language can do that. I’m confident that we can work as a team to support her child for the rest of the semester. And I get to spend a few days reminiscing about a year of amazing experiences – and trying to call up a few more words.

(Written for “Multi-Lingual Friday”)

The harm I’ve done; the lesson I’ve learned

I knew that Martin had cheated.

I was teaching EFL in Bulgaria – my first year of teaching – and most of my students were spellbound by my American-ness. After seven months, I was beginning to think that I had mastered the art of teaching or, better yet, that I was simply a natural teacher.

What was so hard after all? Discipline was a breeze: most of my students wanted to be in my classroom. Motivation was a snap: everything I assigned fascinated them just because it was from me. Of course, a few students refused to believe in my American magic, but I had fallen under my own spell and thought of these few as difficult, recalcitrant, even bad.

In fact, cheating was one of the only problems I had encountered in my short time in the classroom. Today I know that I had no idea how to teach writing. I didn’t model, scaffold or even help with revision. As a result, for their first assignment nearly all of my students had turned in essays copied from some famous work or another.

I really believed that these children of a failed Communist state valued accuracy and impressiveness over creative thought. I had no idea that I had played a role in the outcome, so it was hard to tell who was more befuddled by the Fs I gave back on that first assignment – me at what I perceived as my students’ betrayal, or them at my unrealistic expectations.

A few months’ experience had made me a slightly better teacher. I had learned to articulate my expectations more clearly and my ever-attentive students had worked to meet me well more than halfway. It didn’t hurt that the students generally liked me and, mostly, wanted to please me. I rarely received plagiarized papers anymore. Until Martin’s.

He was unconcerned as he swaggered up to my desk after class. He gave his friends suggestive looks as if I were going to proposition him or ask him on a date. I shooed them out of the room, and he planted himself in front of me with an impressive “I don’t care about anything you do” stance: shoulders slumped, hands jammed in his pockets, chin jutted sideways. He assumed an air of infinite boredom. I realize now that he must have been waiting for praise on his essay.

The essay was about his grandfather and his wartime exploits. It was nearly perfect and absolutely fascinating, so I assumed that it was someone else’s grandfather’s exploits. I hadn’t even bothered to finish reading it. After all, Martin’s work in English had been far from perfect to date – when he did it, that was. Frustratingly, I thought that he and I had recently made a connection, and I was angry that he had copied this essay now that we were on the verge of understanding one another. It didn’t matter: he was one of the “bad” kids who didn’t hang on my every word.

Martin was clearly smart, and he had no natural respect for me. He didn’t care if I was from the US or Mars, and I found his apparent lack of motivation more frustrating than anything else I had encountered. I had no idea how to encourage him. Sometimes I felt that his attitude, his unwillingness to do his work, was calling my bluff: I was just masquerading as a teacher. His lack of respect for me fed my growing fear that maybe this teaching thing wasn’t as easy as I had imagined.

I accused him of cheating. Martin was silent for a long moment before he ripped his essay out of my hands.  He raged back to his seat.  He grabbed his bag and shouted his way to the door. Through the noise and garbled grammar, I discovered that Martin had spent hours on the essay. His grandfather was, perhaps, the most important person in his life. He had taught Martin everything. Martin had wanted me to know his grandfather and had worked and worked to show him to me.

I cried after he left. Nothing I could say or do made any difference (and in my youthful chagrin I changed his grade to an A, as if that were the important thing). Martin had long known what I had just realized: I didn’t see him as a whole person but rather as just another kid in my English class, just another one of the bad boys, just another, but not unique. My accusation confirmed his opinion. If I had read the whole thing, if I had listened to the note of honesty that rang through the essay, if I had paused for even a moment, I might have seen Martin, the real Martin, who had tentatively entrusted me with a bit of himself in that essay.  But I hadn’t.

In my whole career, I may never want to go back and fix something as badly as I want to go back and fix that day. But since that awful confrontation, I have tried, in Martin’s honor, to remember every day that I teach whole people, people with lives outside of my classroom and outside of the school. I teach people with problems at home, secrets to keep, and dreams they desperately need to share. I teach people who have amazing grandfathers. Martin may never know that I know this, but I always will. It has shaped my career. It has changed my life.

And I really really hope that it has not shaped his.