Alaskan Bulgarian

"And Homer fails Another of Life's Little Tests"

A busy weekend has flowed into a week that’s busy in a general kind of way. Lot’s of things to do, all routine, all right in line with the faithful tradition of a Peace Corps Volunteer in a small Bulgarian town. Excitement came when I went to the big city, Sofia, for all of five hours Sunday before turning right around and coming back. I was escorting 3 students who wanted to take a national English test and wanted an English-speaking chaperone they could bounce questions off of if needed. I’d been told about it a few days before and just kind of went with the flow.

We wound up traveling by train, leaving at 5:20 PM Saturday and getting in at 6:00 AM Sunday, because last year’s group had been snowed in and failed to get to Sofia by bus. This year, the school’s group was taking no chances, although other students went by bus with their parents. It was an epic trip. We split two cabins: 2 girls and another teacher to one, a boy and I in another, and along the way had a nice conversation with the students translating everything back and forth even when I knew perfectly well what was being said in Bulgarian. Although the other Bulgarian teacher, the boy’s mother, wanted to let the studying go on until bedtime, I remember from my standardized testing days (And they aren’t over) that relaxing was always better than hard study, so when the boy wanted to go read in our cabin, I went with him, broke up the party, and set to finishing 1984, the book I had brought along for the trip.

1984 is one of those books that people have always given me strange looks over when my failure to have read it comes up in conversation. As if it’s some crime against my upbringing and English major heritage that it never hit my reading list. Well, I’ll say it was a superb book, revolutionary for it’s time I’m sure, but I knew each and every thing that would happen pages before they actually came up. The book was revealing itself chapters ahead o where I was. Orwell’s fault? Not at all. Instead it felt like reading a book after seeing the movie, although I haven’t seen any of the movie versions of 1984 either (Heresy!). Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, which has always impressed me, should have a “based on” label in the opening credits. It’s a great movie, filmed well, but as far as terrifying visions of a horrifying future go, 1984 and Brazil are brothers, if not twins. I’ll watch Brazil many times over in my life, but I’ll never watch it the same way again, and that’s in all ways a good thing.

Another side effect of 1984 is the new inside joke answer I have to the standard Bulgarian apology for communism. Especially among the elderly here, the common response to any question about politics is that the old times were better because everybody had jobs, and jobs meant security. After this usually follows a long conversation about how individual freedoms can be better than job security, but now I have the short, simple, glib answer: “Winston Smith had a job, and a good one, and look how far that got him.” Seeing as few, if any, Bulgarians I talk with will have any idea what that means, I’m probably going to keep it to myself, but it’ll make me feel better when a baba feels a need to complain about the horrible state democracy has wrought in her country.

Anyway…I didn’t quite finish the book on the train. I was left with about 50 pages, which proved to be a bit of a curse later on in the eight hour bus ride home, but that’d be another digression. We got the kids to the test, they took it, said it was hard but thought they did well, and we got them home. We had some good times, I got to meet a teacher and some students I didn’t know, and I got to pick up some books and candy that had been sent to me and left in Sofia.

One of the books is on the GRE and the other is on the TOEFL. One’s for me and the other is for the school. It’s baffling to understand that I already have to start thinking ahead again. That applications will have to be sent in January and I’ll have to take the GRE sometime in the fall, but that’s the way life goes when you’re still figuring things out. I suppose I was lucky to have these last 9 months of stasis, where I was just trying to figure out Bulgaria and not the rest of my years. Of course, Bulgaria’s still first and the rest of my life is on the backburner, but it hurts to watch that water start to simmer again.

I ended the school day this afternoon by test driving the new TOEFL CD with my students. For the first time, we got to work on the listening part of the test, and never, ever, ever before has a standardized test been so damn funny. The portion consists of tiny snippets of dialogue, all taken from potential scenes at Anywhere University, USA. The dialogue is hacky student angst, but the larger part of the problem is the overuse of the two questions "What does the man/woman mean?" and especially "what does the man/woman imply?"

Actual Example:

Man: I can't believe I still haven't bought a textbook. I guess I've just been so worried about my social life that I haven't had a chance.

Woman: My friend Becky has a spare textbook for your class. I'll give you her phone number and you can give her a call.

Dull, American Narrator: What does the woman imply?

My students and I were chuckling over that one. It kind of ruins the focus. This one was worse.

Woman: All I do when I come home is math. I don't have any time for fun.

Man: Why don't you come upstairs. Haven't you been studying enough?

Narrator: What does the man imply?

Come on! The correct answer was that the woman studies too much. But honestly, is that the first thing that pops into your head when you read that dialogue? It's almost corrupting. My eleventh grade Bulgarians were breaking up on that one. How are you supposed to take a test when you're laughing so hard from the last question? And these are actual questions from past actual tests. So that's what we have to work on in class now. Not detecting double-meanings in standardized test questions. Difficult times ahead.

Posted by Rob at January 27, 2004 04:23 PM