I met Veselina some weeks ago in a language school. I have a conversational part of her lessons. Once she invited me (well, to be honest, I more or less invited myself) to spend some days with students from Estonia, Romania and Turkey who were about to take part in Comenius Partnership program by EU. It was real fun and I met a lot of people working in Shivachevo school.
Last week, Veselina went to Iceland to take part in another European project and I was offered to take her classes. I thought it might have been fun, so I said yes, but wasn't sure, if my school would allow me to leave for a week to teach at another school in a different town. Shivachevo is officially a town, but in reality it is a really nice village, just like one from Western Europe imagines eastern European ones. Anyway, the headmaster from Shivachevo found somebody to talk to the director of my school and I was allowed to leave Hadji Mina Pashov for a week.
I didn’t have any textbooks, because Veselina forgot them at home. So I prepared general introductory lesson without any idea what the students‘ level of English is. Honestly, based on my experience from Hadji Mina, I didn’t expect the kids to speak English at all. I was so wrong. At least in my first class. My lesson plan was done in twenty minutes and I had twenty-five left. Oh no! I had to improvise, which I hate, especially with students I don’t know. I managed to keep the kids occupied by playing „Simon says“ or drawing dictatition for clothes revision.
My other class was on the other side of the scale. There were only five boys who were hardly able to repeat something in English. It was a very challenging lesson where it was me who was practising foreign language skills instead of them. After the class, I talked to Matt (an American volunteer teaching there) and he explained me that those kids (all 5 were gipsies) even cannot read Latin letters properly, so that is the core of the problem with gipsies.
To sum up my experience from the week in Shivachevo:
Sometimes it’s good to know kids‘ mother tongue, especially when they (gipsies vs. others) start to fight, so the only way how to stop them was to find another teacher who was able to calm the kids down.
Nobody, except for a few exceptions, is preparing their lesson plans :(
Schools here don’t have so many (if they do have any) supplementary materials as we do in Czech.
Teachers were really nice to me there and tried to talk to me. Trying to talk to me in Bulgarian is always highly appreciated. I got, again, more confident in this language.
The gipsies are totally not motivated to learn anything. I was wondering why...is it because of they don’t have any studying habits and strange family background or is it because teachers have different attitude to gipsy and Bulgarian kids? Probably both. I felt quite sorry for those gipsies, since they don’t have any future. They will in the same slum as their parents.
Teachers of English speak English there. :-)
There was no timetable on the bus station in Shivachevo, so I came to there and waited until a bus came. Btw. one driver was crazy, no one in Czech, hopefully, would dare to drive like that with a bus full of people...
I felt welcomed and useful there. I wish I felt the same at Hadji Mina Pashov. I mean, they’re nice to me, but is teaching just one lesson a day enough?
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