Alaskan Bulgarian

A Book Analysis Interspersed With Random Complaints

A 500 page book is the perfect thing to read over a vacation, but it's a pain when a person is trying to work around it. Why? Because of that 200 page stretch. The last climactic story arc inevitably begins around page 300, and those last 200 pages can never be gotten through in one sitting while there's a job to be done.

Richard Russo's Empire Falls fits this life-altering formula perfectly well. A year and a half ago, I had put the book down, citing the fact that it felt like a 500 page short story that was going nowhere. For some reason, I had made this decision on about page 50. Giving it another go here, I found I was very, very wrong. The book is incredible. Although it has a delightful pre-9/11 cynicism that almost feels comforting when it should feel terrifying, Russo gets his characters down better than I thought an author could. Even the characters he seems to hate he writes lovingly.

At any rate, the story begins to build its head of steam around page 300, where I arrived mid-afternoon yesterday with a stack of papers to grade. This morning, before I left for school, the last chapter I had time for ended with the vision of one of the main characters fading to black around page 450.

I went to school, babysat (err. . .taught) a bunch of kids who still seem to think they're on vacation, and walked home with a group of the better, more quiet eighth graders. They always seem apologetic, for some reason, as if the constant talking and occasional trans-room paper airplane flights coming out of the other students are their fault.

Talking to one of them after the others had cut off down another street for home, I asked what he thought the problem might be. He was pretty blunt, as far as these students go.

"You teach different than the other teachers."

"How do I teach differently?" I asked.

"I don't know. You're better."

Ahh, student-speak. "I don't punish you as much, or..."

"The other teachers are more...." He was looking in every corner of his head, but couldn't find the word

"Strict?"

"Yes! Strict. If a student is noisy, they give them a two for the day."

And there's my problem, I suppose. In a language class it seems counter-intuitive to me to punish students in the gradebook for speaking. I do it a little, under the participation grade, but I don't think many of the students have felt that punch. Maybe I need to swing a little harder.

The way I see it, any English teacher in Bulgaria could sit and have his or her students write an essay every day, and writing is mostly what the eighth graders do in their other 18 hours of weekly English outside of my four. I'm here, I've always figured, to give these kids conversation for a simple four hours a week. They have increasingly come to misunderstand that this relaxed, conversational atmosphere can include bouts of Bulgarian. I'm happy that I only have to force maybe two students to speak in anything but Bulgarian, but the others are just as inclined to use it when they aren't talking to me.

I'll admit that language classes were never the time I paid copious amounts of attention, and that's probably the reason I remember little of my French and nearly nothing of my Spanish. Like many of my students, I found language classes a great time to do Math, Biology, or whatever subject I had a test in that day. The problem is, until I went in for the Peace Corps, foreign languages had always seemed a bit useless to me. Call it nationalistic if you want, but Americans have a pretty narrow worldview until they go exploring, I've found.

I've always believed that Bulgarians, in contrast, should have a natural and overwhelming urge to learn a language that could serve them in just about any country they wanted to visit. This isn't always the case.

When I offer examples of how English could be useful to them, I sometimes get the looks of oppressed colonials, as if "The Matrix" could have been produced by a Bulgarian production company, it's just that those theiving Wachowski brothers stole the idea out from under them. This may be a bit extreme, but the point is that they often don't see understanding the English present in every movie they watch, in every TV show they relax to, and on every food package they chow on as a reward for work in class. Subtitles seem to suit them just fine and knowing how to say "May I go to the toilet?," "What does this mean, mister?," and any number of objectionable phrases they've picked up will get them by in international business.

I'm probably going too far here. Deep down, they all want to learn English. That's why they've passed difficult tests to get into a language school. But it just ticks me off every time I ask one of them to speak in English and I get "Zashto?" as a response. I want to yell at them that being ignorant is not something to aspire to, that being the incompetent class clown in high school will get you exactly nowhere when you graduate. But before all that comes out I realize that I would sound like any incompetent principal in any 80s John Hughes movie. After closing my eyes and breathing deeply, I give them a sensible answer, they go on to speak in English, and the class moves on.

Successful? Yes. But it happens every day, and it gets a bit tiring.

I'll give them until the end of the semester, less than a month, to shape up or I'm going to have to make some disciplinary changes. There will be no avoiding it.

Where was I? Oh, yes, the book. After I got home, I managed to get through thirty pages between a late lunch and my Bulgarian lessons. This was enough to get me over the climactic hump and into the resolution phase, which explains why I could comfortably vent here without rushing back home to finish the book off.

After I had finished my Bulgarian lesson, my tutor offered me another bottle of wine, the third in the last month. Her father does well on a small farm outside the city and she seems more than happy to give me leftovers. It started with apples and apricots, and then, somehow, a bottle of homemade wine got thrown into the mix. I took it with me on the trip to Greece and spread the wealth accordingly. Since my return, she's given me two more bottles of homemade wine from the farm. I'm not sure when, exactly, she thinks I'm drinking all this wine on my own, but maybe its because I usually spend about 5 minutes of every lesson talking about my classes that she thinks I need a little help getting through the evenings. Honestly, I only talk about my students with her so I can shift the vocabulary she teaches away from war, peasants, and forests to something a little more topical.

I've always been pretty good at turning things down, but I get the idea that she would be insulted if I rejected another bottle of wine in the next, say, month. Also, when she throws food in with the deal, it's awfully hard to line-item veto a gift. All I can do is thank her politely, tell her I'll see her next time, and head out the door with whatever's in the bag she presses into my hand.

...

You know, looking back on what I've just wrote, if the problems in the rest of my life are no worse than the ones I've written about here, I'll have no problems. Sometimes, I guess, when a person is tired and has a bit of a headache, he just has to complain about amazingly intelligent but noisy students and tutors that offer too much wine.

I'll easily finish off "Empire Falls" tonight, move on to "The Corrections" tomorrow and the whole crazy book cycle will start over. I probably won't write about it anymore, and the likes of this random, bitchy, whiny post will never cross your computer screen again. Forgive me a day's venting.

Posted by Rob at January 12, 2004 07:22 PM