ГОСПОЖА КОЛЕВА

Gospoža Koleva is our teacher of Bulgarian and is in her 50s. In spite of things I like about her, there are some I don’t. Since I am Czech (so I like to emphasize negative things), I’ve decided to share some of her negatives.

First of all, she has definitely never read Harmer or Scrivener, otherwise she would know something about classroom management:
 - She is usually sitting behing her desk (x rule: sit behind your desk as little as possible) and stands up only when she wants to write something on the blackboard. Unfortunately, she writes very small letters (but her handwriting is really readable), so the guys in the back can’t read it. Sometimes she stands just in front of what she’s written, so no-one can see it. 
 - She is using only frontal teaching. There are 18 students, so enough people for group work. I think group work would work in our case, because 1) we’re sometimes speaking Bulgarian to each other in our free time and 2) we’re from different countries, so there isn’t any danger of slipping to a mother tongue. Group work would make the dialogues easier to remeber and we would also be practise of speaking.
 - Never does monitoring.
 - TTT (Teacher talking time) is dominant to STT (student talking time)

The second thing I really hate is her focus on mistakes. This approach is old-fashioned! I don’t feel comfortable to say how many mistakes I had (even if I didn’t have many). If she wants to know how I’m doing, why she doesn’t read my exercise-book? Moreover, I’d love to know if my Russian apahbeth letters are understandable or not. I’m a bit mixing them with our Latin ones. 
She also doesn’t have a lesson plan. We’re just doing exercise by exercise in our textbooks. Actually, she’s got a plan, which was written by somebody else stating what we should cover during the course. We’re doing almost a lesson a day. I’m OK with that but for others (like Germans or French) it must be really fast. 

And the last thing is that she doesn’t speak English well. At the beginning I didn’t mind it, but now, when we needed something to be explained properly, she totally failed. The class turned into a market when everybody was speaking in their mother tongue trying to figure out how the articles in Bulgarian work. On the other hand it is good that we’re exposed to the target language.