I should probably save this for a time when I have a couple of hours to sit at home and think about it, but it's an immediate subject with immediate images. Also, this site has never been about dissertations, but jotted-down musings--however serious they may be--from Bulgarian internet clubs. So here we go.
Yesterday, I had a conversation with a student of mine, let's call him Roderick. Rod, a twelfth grader, came up to me after school while I was watching the language school students engage in an epic snowball fight with the students from the school down the street. Rod enjoys Newsweeks and I give him the new ones I get every week and he returns them the next. He's always a bit nervous when he speaks in English and tends to shift from one foot to another when he speaks. Outside of that, it's hard to see a lot of emotion in him. He's very level-headed and has his English down very well. After we talked about the magazine I'd given him last week, I asked him how he was doing, in general.
"Pretty good. But I'm feeling bad because one of my...schoolmates...was beaten up and is in the hospital."
"Oh?" He had said all that as if it happened every day. "What happened?"
"Well. Three guys came up to him with weapons, like bars and baseball bats and they hit him. After they hit him, he fell and they didn't let him get back up."
He paused.
"He was lucky...A police car drove by and stopped them. They were all arrested for 72 hours. It was very bad. His head was sewed six or seven times, he had broken ribs and other broken bones."
"That's terrible," I said when he paused again. "Is he anyone I know?"
"Oh yes!" Roderick suddenly got a little excited when he mentioned the boy's name. Let's call him Devin. Roderick probably should have called Devin a "classmate" since they are in the same class, one I teach for two hours every week, but I didn't correct him. Devin is a great student, shy, but he was one of the two guys who took me around town in the failed attempt to get internet cable installed in my apartment last week. He lives near me, although I've never visited his family's apartment. I know him as well as I know any of my students and he's not the kind of guy who gets involved in brawls. So I was shocked to hear his name come up.
"Devin?" A thousand questions popped into my head all of a sudden. "Why?" Rod didn't know, of course. "Is he going to be okay?" The class had visited him in the hospital and he would probably be discharged today. He'd probably be at home for two weeks. Maybe more. "Are they charging the guys who did it? Are they going to be punished?"
"Well," Roderick shifted his weight a couple of times before he went on. "The justice in Bulgaria is different. The courts take a long time, and, probably, the guys who did it will just walk away."
Sigh.
We stood there watching the snowballs fly back and forth across the school's fence, and then I realized I was late for my TOEFL class. I told Roderick I'd see him on Thursday and hustled off.
I should note that this is the first time something like this has happened to one of my students, that I have no idea who the assailants were, and that I still really know nothing about what happened. It all went down long after the school day ended and I don't think it mattered, in particular, that Devin was a student. But it reminded me that these students live lives outside of school and that those lives come complete with tragedies and problems unrelated to next week's exam. I'd almost forgotten about that here in Bulgaria.
Some of this came out in a conversation with my tutor today. I had gotten through the prepared lesson pretty quickly, so the last half of class was conversation. The first question she asked was about the differences between American and Bulgarian students, a question I've had to answer several times. The answer changes a little every time.
The part that stays the same is my assertion that Bulgarian students study more outside of class and less in class than American students. The lessons of this week have helped me understand why. I'm beginning to understand more of what the students talk about when they jabber away to each other in Bulgarian when they should be speaking in English. It usually has nothing to do with school.
Now, I'll grant that one of the things I remember teachers saying most in high school was "Please, kids, don't talk about what you're going to do this weekend," but I remember that happening most often on Friday afternoons, when students the world over care nothing for class. And I also think that if some big event occured, like a student being hospitalized, there would be a buzz during classes.
Maybe I'm thinking too much from the perspective of a good student, but I remember "life," as it is, happening more during lunch than in the classrooms. At the very least, lunch gave students a chance to have a life in school that could be separated from their schoolwork. There were the cool tables and the empty tables in the cafeteria; There were the kids who drove to McDonalds and the kids, like me, who did the brown bag lunch in the hallway or library; There was, in the lunch hour, the social rites that everybody remembers, for better or for worse.
Here in Bulgaria, with only a "big break" that lasts twenty minutes, life happens mostly in the classrooms. Students tell me as much. It's not as if the dynamics never change in the classroom in American schools, but they seem far more fluid in Bulgarian classrooms. Instead of using free time in class to do the next day's homework, as I would imagine most of the students in my school would do in America, they SMS across the school with their cell phones, talk about what happened at the disco last night, and generally make me feel guilty about giving them freedom to do whatever work they needed to do. All of the homework gets done at home, and the students come in telling me about how overworked they are and how they have no time to hang out with their friends after class.
I'm not sure if that makes American schools better, worse, or just different. The jury's still out and probably will be for a long time. I note the differences and talk about them with other teachers and the students, but I try hard to reserve judgement on the basis that I'll be a newcomer here until the day I leave. Two years is enough time to get to know a place, to see where it might need help, and to bring in the help needed, but it's not enough time to decide whether a culture's practices are inferior and ought to be changed at the root. It's enough, I think, to show the people here that other ways of doing things exist and to maybe pick up a few things that might be useful for Americans.
Any of this change the fact that Devin was beat senseless? Of course not, and there's nothing I can do about the possibility of his assailants escaping justice. But tomorrow, I'll go into the class a little more wary of the lives behind the students and lay off if they seem a little more distant and unfocused than usual. Life can be hard for these kids, and they're going to have to talk about it, no matter how much I try to teach them grammar at the same time.