Alaskan Bulgarian

The Vacuum

I just finished re-reading Peter Hessler’s River Town, his book about serving two years as a PCV in China. After a semester of teaching, it was pretty enlightening. A lot of what he had to deal with was breaking through taboos and teaching English with propaganda-laced textbooks. His students would often bow their heads and say nothing if they, or the Party, had been offended. College students, they had a childish glee when the read Shakespeare. Any new information was good information. Reading it, I noticed that many of the things I notice with my students are in the same areas, only the problems are the opposites of what he had to deal with.

In a conversation with a group of teachers a while ago, I heard for the first time the concept of a “values vacuum.” For forty years the values of communism had been so pressed on the teachers, students, and people in Bulgaria that the sudden release of those values 14 years ago left a gaping hole. Now, the teachers all agreed, that gap was being filled by MTV, Cartoon Network, and tiny amounts of discipline from the Ministry of Education.

When the students want to make a good show of it, they’ll all stand up at the beginning of class, their leader giving a sharp “class stand up!” Most of the time, though, the classroom is a bustle of activity when the teacher walks in. Like the sex-ed class John Cleese teaches in Meaning of Life the kids almost seem to get into highly organized disorder so the teacher can have something to do as soon as he or she walks into the room. Without constant attention, a classroom devolves into small groups talking about what they want to do in the afternoon. Sometimes I have to talk to one kid three times in a day, lower his grade, tell him all will be good if he just keeps his mouth shut, and as soon as I turn around he’ll start talking again. I don’t think a lot of these kids can help it, being kids and all, but it’s amazing how the classroom gets when everybody’s quiet. It’s either a loud din or pin-drop silence, with little in-between, and the silences seem more terrifying than the noise because the kids must be up to something.

The results are incredible when the middle-ground is reached or the din overcome, something that happens at least once a day and often for good stretches, When that creative, disruptive energy is actually applied to useful class work, these kids are capable of doing any work they put their mind to. Eighth class is already working on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, an idea I came up with cautiously. And when the first day with it was over, when all the whining about it being hard and impossible was through, they’d gotten it all. Maybe they don’t quite appreciate the immortality aspect of a poem beginning with “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” but they know all the words and understand what Shakespeare was getting at, and by the end of the second day, the prospect of a test on it seemed easy to them. I had to overcome some complaints, but it all came out okay. And it ended a hard, great week really well.

I’d started it all off by finishing a unit on superheroes, trying to get an idea of what the kids admired. Turns out they admire the ideals of the Powerpuff Girls, Batman, and any other superhero they’ve seen in the movies or on TV, but that’s certainly okay. Most of them had their heroes fighting “the crime” or “the evil,” and apart from being a little standard, it provided me with a great chance to go back into what they were covering in the textbook, namely the proper use of articles.

“Do we know what crime the Powerpuff Girls are fighting?”

“No, Mister Young!”

“Then we don’t use ‘the’ right? But what if they’re fighting Mojo Jojo, Polina?”

“Then they’re fighting the crimes of Mojo Jojo?”

“Right. ‘the crimes.’ Very good.”

They’re little sponges, all of them. The problem with that is, I have little control of the things that go out of control in the class. Hessler’s students threw “yahoo” around after they’d read Gulliver’s Travels. In my eighth class students yell “you’re stupid” across the room at another kid, all because of “Dexter’s Laboratory.” I do what I can to reign it in and tell them that calling other people stupid is wrong, no matter how funny it is when Dexter does it to Didi, but it’s stemming a pretty strong tide.

Quiet students under communism, noisy students after. Well, I’ll take the latter, since it doesn’t in any way apologize for Stalin, praise Zhivkov, or substantiate Castro. Whatever MTV and Cartoon Network give the kids, it’s better than propaganda for genocidal and oppressive regimes. And the examples that I can use in class are a lot more fun.

Posted by Rob at January 23, 2004 05:06 PM