2011-2012 in books

I need to write a real post (there’s been plenty to write about), but I’m going to cheat here and just do another annual “Year in Books” post just to keep me in the habit/mindset of posting something, at least. 

I am not a Kansan

Because I am not nearly nice enough or patient enough to make it through this week without quite a bit of teeth-grinding.

As I mentioned yesterday, the reason why I’m in Kansas is to attend a professional development workshop that relates to a new position I’ll be filling next year. This is actually the first PD that I’ve done since leaving Boston two years ago (as you can imagine, there aren’t lots of PD opportunities in Bulgaria; plus I was adjusting to, you know, being in Bulgaria). I was pretty excited about it, especially because I figured it would be really helpful and relevant, since I’m pretty much looking for anything and everything that can help me figure out how to do this new job.

But I’d forgotten something about PD in the two years that I haven’t attended any PD. And that is that PD is almost always awful.

My major issue is this: In my mind, an in-person in-service or PD ought to consist of knowledge that you cannot get simply from reading a book. Otherwise, my time is better spent actually reading the damn book. PD should be experiential. Today, the leader of this workshop actually made a point to highlight that experience is the major factor that actually changes beliefs, and everyone nodded at this sage wisdom and wrote it down, but this workshop itself is not embodying that philosophy. The irony: someone standing up in front of a ballroom and telling us, “Talk doesn’t work. Experience is what changes belief.” You wonder if these people can hear themselves sometimes.

This is day 2 of the first of two 3-day workshops. We meet for approximately 6 hours a day: 3 hours in the morning, 3 hours in the afternoon after lunch. Do you know how much material I could read in 6 hours? A lot more than gets covered when someone just gives you an overview of the ideas and structures and talks with only slight variations of the prompt, “What do you think about this idea? Does this resonate with you?” I can do that on my own, too – it’s called annotating the book. I would LOVE to talk more with the people here and actually learn about their experiences, but the ratio of our talk time to the leader’s talk time is way below what they’re advocating we look for in classrooms.

Here’s what I would do if I were in charge:

Бала

It feels pointless to even make any “I’m alive!” jokes, as this is just my 5th post of 2012. So in a nutshell, yes I’m still alive, yes I’m still in Bulgaria, yes it’s still weird sometimes, yes the paradoxical trend of my seeming to get busier and busier the more teaching experience I have continues. I have still been keeping a list of things I want to write about eventually, but it is now a list of seemingly free-associative topics that make very little sense anymore, so I don’t know that I will ever get to them.

But one topic I’ve had on that list since last year is “prom,” and since the class of 2012 just had their prom last night, plus I happened to witness some prom arrivals in Kazanlak this past weekend from my hotel balcony (there’s another post that needs to be written), this seemed like as good a time as any to finally write the post (one year late better than never).

The year in books

I sometimes like to look back on the past year in terms of the books that I read. This stems from the BPS Reader’s Workshop requirement that students read 20 books a (school) year; given that none of my students ever really seemed to hit this number, I often wondered if I actually read that many books in a given year, and resolved to up my pleasure reading to try to meet the same requirements that were placed on my students. I also find it a good way to “measure a year,” as they say in Rent, because while I often look back and feel that no time at all has passed since the beginning of the school year, usually I’m shocked to see what I was reading at the time because it feels like ages ago.

Also, now that I’m on Goodreads, it’s a lot easier to keep track of these things. 

Eurokids

I’ve been keeping a running list of topics I want to blog about during this whole span of time where I haven’t been writing anything, and the list has been reaching epic proportions, so I thought I should just do some housecleaning and write about one of them at random. Some of them are sorely outdated, but this one at least seems to be sort of universal and fitting as an end-of-year reflection.

The kids finished exams yesterday, and teachers are in school until this Friday. Overall I had a really wonderful year and loved my kids (especially my 10th graders) dearly. One of my former colleagues in the States saw a video of some of my students (boys specifically) and said, “Ah! They’re SO European! They’ve got the European male walk/strut down.” Which got me thinking about some of the other differences between my Bulgarian students and my American students. I mean, my kids here speak English, they watch American TV shows and movies, they have fancy cell phones, they want to learn to drive and go to prom, they drink and smoke and have sex when they probably really shouldn’t…so what are some of the differences? How could you tell that my kids are native Bulgarians and not just an immigrant American kid with an accent? 

I thought of three…

How To Clean a Bathroom (BG Style)

I know that I haven’t posted much lately, and I realize it’s a bit uncouth to have the first post after a long absence be potty humor, but I have a random 25 minutes to kill at the end of the school day (not enough time to get through another essay, but too long to just sit around and do nothing), and because I’ve been drinking tons of water lately, the issue of bathroom maintenance at my school has once again come squarely to my attention. Also, my students are working on satire projects, so I’m in an ironic mindset. Of course I realize that not EVERYONE in BG cleans a public bathroom like this, but I’ve certainly never seen anyone in the U.S. use these particular “techniques,” so I’m going to go ahead and call it BG Style. And with that said, I bring you this How To:

How To Clean a Bathroom (BG Style)

1. Fill bucket with water from sink.

2. Flush toilet. Bonus points if you catch some of the swishing, swirling toilet water in your bucket. 

3. Use water in bucket and cleaning rag to scrub interior of toilet. Rinse rag frequently in bucket while doing this. 

4. Without changing water, upend bucket over toilet to douse the entire toilet with water. IMPORTANT! Do not wipe water off!!

5. Flush toilet. 

6. Close toilet lid. IMPORTANT! Still do not wipe any water off, particularly off toilet seat, which will now remain soaking wet under the toilet lid.

7. Water that flowed over toilet will now be pooling around your feet on the floor. Use mop (and maybe occasionally cleaning rag, for hard-to-reach places) to swirl water around floor. Make sure floor is good and soaked. There should be a physical film of water with serious hydroplaning possibilities remaining on top of the tiles at all times if at all possible. Under NO circumstances should you attempt to dry the floor in any way. 

8. Put mop in empty bucket in corner of bathroom. 

9. Use still-damp cleaning rag to wipe down all desks in classrooms, then store rag on external window sill, to allow it to dry in the sun and pigeons to roost in it.

10. Lastly and VERY important! Remove any rolls of toilet paper from bathroom premises and lock them away where they can never be found. 

Bugga’d

I’m feeling very Bugga’d today.

(NB: The internationals use the term “Bulgaria’d” as a verb and have now shortened it to BG’d, which in turn sounds like “bugga’d” when you pronounce the B and the G in the Bulgarian way. This term usually refers more specifically to cutting people in line, but can also be used in general when life in the Bulgat is kind of getting you down.)

This is not to say that anything that happened to me today is particularly Bulgarian (or particularly traumatic, I’m just cranky and whining). Certainly I’ve had very similar days in the U.S. But when days like this happen to you here instead of at home, you get all indignant and entitled and “Muhhhh…Bulgaria!! die!!!” like a big ol’ baby. Which sometimes, you just need to be. 

Here is basically what happened:

Bulganglish

Day 2 of Easter Weekend has me lounging around my apartment at 2 pm with nothing to do, and it’s AMAZING. Actually, I achieved another milestone in Bulgaria this morning by successfully getting my hair cut and was going to write about that, but I’m waiting on some Egypt photos from a colleague in order to make the post complete, and then I was going to make this a really productive day by dropping off some dry cleaning but then realized that I had left a dress that I need cleaned at school (it was a costume for Faculty Follies) and there’s really no point in dropping off all of your dry cleaning except one dress because you’ll just have to go back to drop off the dress. Also I discovered that there’s a dry cleaner’s a block down from my apartment, so the urgency and investment in needing to make a trip to the dry cleaner’s decreased considerably.

So then I decided what would be really productive would be to clear out one topic from my list of “blog posts to write eventually” (and yes, I do have such a list because I’m neurotic and I like lists). I thought I would write a little about Bulgarian English (Bulganglish) and then, in a later post, because this one ended up being really really long, the current state of my Bulgarian (Engarian).

My students’ English is excellent overall. I sometimes “forget” that they are Bulgarian and not American because their English, especially their written English, can be so good and in many ways more academic than my former students’ in the States. It is really, really impressive, and I am constantly amazed by how competent they are, even the ones who didn’t really start intensively studying acdemic English until 8th grade. One topic that comes up a lot in ESL licensure programs is the difference between second-language learners who are highly literate and academically literate in their native language before learning English, vs. learners who aren’t, and you see that distinction very clearly with these students. Relatively speaking, there are often very few grammar errors in their writing, and mistakes that are common among American students, even native speakers (i.e. subject-verb agreement) don’t occur with nearly the same consistency here. I wonder in some ways if that comes from speaking a highly inflected native language – when you have dozens of different verb forms and tense types, subject-verb agreement in English probably doesn’t seem at all intimidating.

However, they have some unique second-language errors of their own.

Playing like a girl

Well, I’m now convinced that I have light fixture poltergeists, because after flickering out of commission two nights ago, my bathroom light turned itself back on overnight and continued to function perfectly fine for a day before dying again. 

It is Easter Weekend in Bulgaria, a holiday that seems to be in some ways the equivalent of Thanksgiving in U.S. – we get a 4-day weekend, the markets are packed, and traffic is terrible as everyone goes home to spend time with family. I briefly entertained the idea of cobbling together last-minute travel plans, but inertia won out in the end and I’m happy to be enjoying a lazy weekend at home, giving me the opportunity to – among other things – catch up on some blog posts. 

With the warmer weather and a lightening workload thanks to the seniors being almost done (YAY), I’ve been getting out more to watch our school’s various football teams (there are the school’s official varsity and JV team equivalents, and then a whole slew of intramural teams which include the teachers’ team). Yesterday I watched a 12th grade IM team play an 11th grade IM team and was impressed anew at just how good the boys are. These boys aren’t even on the varsity team, but they play fast and hard and elegant, beautiful ball control and foot placement, with lots of headers and precise aerial ball management. It truly is a joy to watch them (and funny when they start throwing absolute FITS when they lose). 

By contrast, I watched the girls’ JV team playing another Sofia school in a tournament our school was hosting this past week, and man, I’m sorry to say it, but they are terrible. They are wonderful kids and they are putting in a lot of effort, but it’s pretty woeful. (To be fair, the other school’s team was equally bad.) I watched them for about 15 minutes and surmised that they would get their asses handed to them by any halfway decent American high school’s girls’ soccer team. For one thing, there was a lot of flailing: actual contact between foot and football seemed to be entirely a matter of chance rather than skill, and it was rare that the ball was actually struck with purpose and direction. Running and field coverage were poor – some of the girls didn’t seem to know where they should be. But most of all, the girls were completely lacking in aggression. They didn’t get in each other’s faces, they were unassured in their ball possessions, they didn’t defend, they didn’t attack. No one seemed to really want the ball – or the win. It was night and day from the boys’ fast-paced, thrilling, aggressive game. 

I started wondering why this would be so. Why would the girls in a football-crazy country, where even the boys who play casually are really good, be so vastly inferior to the girls in a country that generally couldn’t care less about professional soccer and hero-worships figures from the OTHER football? 

Freakin’ kids

Why I both adore and cannot handle my boys sometimes:

7/4/11 17:02 – G to Me

Hi, Ms.___! I am sorry for bothering you during the vaccation, but apparently I’m an idiot and have lost my second draft…. Do you know what can be done about it? I’m sorry 😦

8/4/11 18:18 – Me to G

Hi G,

Nothing can be done – you still have to submit a final on Tuesday. Hopefully you find it!

10/4/11 18:19 – G to Me

Hi, again! I found my 2nd draft, but without the feedback. So, is it possible that I come to you during consultation period and you just give me a very brief feedback on some parts because I have 21/30 so I obviously need to make a few corrections?

10/4/11 18:22 – G to Me

or maybe give it to you in the 1st period so that you have time, if it is not a problem for you..again sorry

10/4/11 18:40 – Me to G

G,

You may come during consultation and I will take a look at it on the spot and give you some verbal feedback. I won’t have time to look it over before consultation anyway, so giving it to me earlier does not make any difference.

10/4/11 18:49 – G to Me

thank you!

10/4/11 21:25 – G to Me

I FOUND IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SORRY FOR BOTHERING YOU, EVEN WITH THE FEEDBACK !

———–

Oh yeah, and I’ve been in Italy for the past 9 days. In fact the first part of that email exchange was occurring while I was in Bologna and Venice, tapping away on my iPod. I’m going to post on Italy soon…it’s just that, in typical fashion, the real world has very quickly and rudely (and humorously, in this case), interceded in my re-entry procedure.