Last year I wrote about a class-long discussion about race and nationality in Bulgaria and how Bulgarian kids see themselves within the outside world. It all came out of some comment or other that absolutely shocked me when I heard it. Shocked me in a "I can't believe they think that way!" kind of shocking. Well, moments of strangeness still happen off and on, but I've gotten used to them. So far this year, I haven't felt the need to sit on my desk and spend a class talking about something. Oddly enough, I do it every week in my literature class as a matter of course. They're a very free-thinking and participatory sort to this point, so we can spend an hour talking about a few lines of Chaucer (After pounding our way through a translation into Modern English). Unfortunately, that's only once a week. It's a good couple of hours, but it comes rarely.
Most of the time this year I'm working from a textbook with kids taking English as a second foreign language. The textbooks I use (Reward textbooks from Macmillan) are pretty good and get the facts across well, but their subjects are about as far away from inflammatory as you can get. This is great for permanent teachers who want to pound through year after year and turn out good crops of English speakers. But I'm a Peace Corps volunteer, dammit! I want to get into people's heads and understand what I don't know. I want to soak up two years of Bulgarian adolescent knowledge like a sponge. For all their ability to provide examples of non-defining relative clauses, passages about chocolate, the better things to see in London, and the path of St. James in Northern Spain don't spark any fires.
So, when I can, I leave the textbook and talk about things that are going on, and I'm discovering more and more that I can predict the answers and opinions the kids will give. It's still interesting, but the moments are brief and by the time class is over, I forget all that we've talked about except that Cortez first tried chocolate in 1519.
Preventing total reliance on the textbook is a valid and necessary goal for me over the course of this year. It keeps the students interested and prevents me from turning into a male Mrs. Crabapple from The Simpsons. I'm often reminded of her here in Bulgaria. There was an episode where Bart brought in bottles of liquor to give a "how-to" demonstration on the cocktail Homer had invented. Crabapple, shocked, says "Bart Simpson, you take those bottles of liquor to the teacher's lounge, immediately. You may have whatever's left at the end of the day."
On Monday, one of the teachers brought in a bottle of Alaska vodka. It's cheap, terrible stuff. Bottled here in Bulgaria. No doubt trying to cash in on Alaska's famous reputation for, uh, vodka. Does Alaska even bottle vodka? I can only guess that they're trying to duplicate Finlandia's success by using an equally northern landmark. Finlandia cannot be duplicated, in my humble opinion, and Alaska vodka doesn't come close. Anyway, the vodka was there to celebrate the birth of another teacher's baby. Fine, celebrate, but let's not empty the bottle before 11 AM, hmm? I didn't have any on teaching principle and because cheap vodka doesn't work well with me at 10 AM on a mostly empty stomach.
Expected moment, yes, teachers do have the odd drink during the day, though I've never seen anybody drunk. But seeing the bottle next to the box of chocolates still made me chuckle.
Posted by Rob at October 27, 2004 04:13 PM