From a student of mine who I ran into on the street: "My father says you'd have a perfect body if you were 120 kilos." I'm at 100 [about 205 lbs.], if that, after almost 2 years on the Bulgaria diet, and 20 lost pounds. There's no way I could ever gain the necessary 40 to meet the high standards of my students' parents. Sadly enough.
And in an earlier report from a complete stranger talking to his friends in Bulgarian: "Hey, it's the American. [Much quieter]. F--- the USA!" Glad to have your support, friend!
It's been a long day. I woke up at 6:30 to teach at 7:30 and haven't been back home since 7:00, so over 12 hours now. The cat must miss me.
After school there was a 2 hour, well, press conference I suppose, on the hot topic of the possible removal of a parallelka from next year's class. A parallelka is a group of students that studies one language together and stays together as a class for 5 long years. They switch up when it comes to the second foreign language classes, but, otherwise, they're stuck with the same 25 classmates for the duration. The removal of a parallelka would mean 25 fewer students in the incoming class, half as many French and Spanish students (they would combine into one parallelka), and the loss of about 5 or 6 teaching positions, as I understand it.
At today's press meeting, a man from the French Embassy defended the students of Silistra's right to study his language in larger numbers. His chief argument was that French will be absolutely necessary when Bulgaria joins the EU in 2007. Yes, I suppose so. Everyone applauded when he finished, although part of that, of course, was that a Frenchman had come all the way from Sofia to defend 13 students and (probably) 1 French-teaching job.
The school's German teachers piped in with a couple of speeches, although they're relatively safe with their 2 groups of students. The 1000-kilo gorilla in the room, the English staff, didn't say anything and was never mentioned. They have their 2 groups, like the German teachers, but English is what sells the language school. If the students can't study English because there isn't enough room, they're usually happy to study another language. But, in the end, a large majority want to study English when they come.
I thought about that from the Frenchman's perspective. If a school decided to cancel its English program, and the American Embassy somehow found out about it, someone there would probably shrug, say "their loss," and set the news aside. I wondered if the guy was angry that he had to come all this way to defend his language. Or if it was a source of pride for him to go to bat for the old Lingua Franca. Or if I'll ever see the day when English will be defended with that kind of emotion.
I don't think so, not without a major war and a horrible turn of events anyway. China or India may somehow rise to be international powerhouses in the next 20 years, but that won't mean that English will stop being the world's most powerful language. I think the turnaround would be far too quick, especially in a world where India is succeeding as well as it is right now because the people there speak English as flawlessly as they do.
But I respected the guy's passion (he really was passionate in his speech) and I could vaguely see myself doing something like that in a similar situation. But I was thankful it was, for the moment, mostly unimaginable.
Posted by Rob at February 22, 2005 08:39 PM