Sărbători Fericite – Or the Christmas Holidays Come to Bihor

Romania is said to be a poor country, at least in financial terms, and Romanians are, by their own admission, somewhat disorganized.  But neither trait was much in evidence during December as my fellow Bihorians got ready for Craiciun, the Romanian word for Christmas. This American visitor in their midst is delighted to observe variations on familiar customs – and the generosity of friends and neighbors here. As with Halloween, it is particularly intriguing to see how songs and symbols from “home” are given a Romanian accent. 

            At the end of November, Christmas decorations, cakes, and candies were abundant in the local stores – not much different than we would see in Target. In early December, lights began to adorn homes and town centers; the newer of the two Orthodox biserica in town held a colinda – the singing of Romanian carols. Groups of children and adults from neighboring villages performed, all dressed in traditional costumes -- women and young girls wear glorious black velvet vests and aprons over white eyelet skirts and blouses, all embroidered with flowers and sequins – a visual delight. The men wear white shirts and pants with decorative belts and sashes, black boots and black lambskin hats.

The next weekend, we had our first snow – only a few inches, but enough to suggest the season.  At school, one of my classes was reading a selection from Charles Dickens, which inspired me rather spontaneously to decide that my 10^th and 11^th graders should know something about “A Christmas Carol.” Vocabulary lessons for them; other sorts of instruction for me. No “Bah, Humbug!” here.

A group of high school girls were interested in teaching carols in English to younger children, as the start of a possible volunteer program. This, too, became a learning experience as much as whatever else it might turn into. The older girls were eager to do the tutoring, but by the time our lesson was to occur, the 7^th and 8^th graders had organized their own Christmas production, with some guidance from their truly gifted English teacher. One boy had written his own Christmas song, another delivered “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” with the innocent charm of an adolescent chess player, and two girls did “Twelve Days of Christmas” without missing one lord a’leeping.

A chorus dressed in Santa hats sang Romanian and American songs. Most popular are “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” “Feliz Navidad” – they prefer the Celine Dion version to that of Jose Feliciano – and of course “Jingle Bells.” As for our contributions, “Go Tell It on the Mountain” worked well because it is easy to learn; not so for “Away in a Manger.” Most of the younger children were able to follow along on “T’was the Night before Christmas” even if a lot of the vocabulary was over their rooftops.

After this celebration, I went to another at the middle school where a fellow volunteer teaches. Though the show got underway a half-hour late, the production was a delight – and at my friend’s suggestion, it even included a printed program. Though Romanians are fond of certificates for all sorts of things, programs are not part of the culture. The mix of songs – and students in Santa caps singing them – was similar to those at my school. But this one included a college-age dance group and a display of homemade baskets brimming with holiday foods.

When I listen to Romanian carols, I’m intrigued that so few tunes are familiar, but later that evening I had an opportunity to hear several hundred people join Romanian singing sensation Fuego in a few of their favorites. “Colindim, colindim iarna” – we sing, we sing, of winter -- has become one of mine, too. Before the concert – the first I’ve attended in Romania – some women were selling holiday items made by participants in program for disabled adults; this attractive and inexpensive collection was something else I’ve seldom seen in Romania.

On the actual first day of winter, the lovely snow we’d enjoyed all weekend was rained away –- but a Christmas celebration at my school kept holiday spirits high. One of our really well-organized colleagues had guided her 10^th graders to present a Power Point show of Christmas traditions from various European countries, complimented by actual performances from the cultures represented by our students: Hungarian, Slovak, and Romanian. Among the joys -- seeing many of my students dressed in sheepskin hats and jackets, or the sparkling embroidered vests and aprons, looking more like Romanians than, well, Americans, as they do at school.

That evening, the mayor’s office put on another celebration that included 20-odd eight-year olds learning to master traditional dances, all dressed in embroidery and lambskin. Their big brothers and sisters offered a highly-gymnastic (and slightly risqué) dance to “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” As usual, I was impressed by the talents displayed – without all the expensive facilities and instruction of American suburbanites, students here can perform on par with them. And, it’s usually American music they choose to sing, play, or dance to.   

Social customs and holiday entertaining, however, are strictly Romanian. In the week before Christmas, when I asked my students to say – English sentence, please! – what is special about Christmas, they all mentioned being at home with family. Whereas in the U.S., the holiday season involves various parties at work and among friends, the custom here is to observe the holiday with close family only. Though my school did have a Christmas meal (snitel and potato salad with hot mulled wine) for faculty on the last day of school, inviting friends to one’s home to share the holiday is not a Romanian custom. Part of this might be that homes are small and there are few “living rooms” as we know them – most of the living goes on in the kitchen – but the reasons are more rooted in the culture than in the architecture.

Many of my fellow volunteers attribute differences in such practices to communism --one needs to be careful what one says after too much polinka – but I’d argue that it goes back much further. Or, perhaps, that Americans are the exception here. We value interaction and cross-fertilization, the stimulation of new ideas and new people – one of the reasons we are fond of cocktail parties. While I have enjoyed many Romanian meals – some for 20 or 30 people – none have involved much milling about; instead, one sits at a table and talks with those one knows. Romanians value the familiar more than the novel, the comfort of family rather than the distraction of something new. It’s both a virtue and a liability.

My Christmas involved both American and Romanian practices. First, an invitation to a friend’s home to make sarmale – stuffed cabbage, labor intensive and de riguer for a holiday meal -- plus salata de boeuf (no beef, but peas and carrots and homemade mayonnaise), and one of the layer cakes Romanians are masters of (thin layers of cake, filled with cheese, cream, and jam). Then a Christmas Eve with my Romanian friends who lived in the U.S. for several years – and they were delighted to include in the invitation my fellow volunteer, along with her visiting husband and son. We ate, we talked, we walked – the polinka and a tour of a neighborhood biserica that’s being decorated by its talented priest were the chief elements that differentiated it from a holiday we might observe at home.

On Christmas Day itself, sans children to tend to, I slept late, until joining my Romanian friends for more talking and eating and walking. On the way home, we stopped at a relative’s home, where we were of course offered more polinka and wine, but then found ourselves involved in yet another bit of Americana. “Monopoly” has come to Romania (Piata Unirii, Boulevardul Regele Carol, etc.) and 10-year-old Mihai persuaded my friend and me to join him and his six-year-old cousin in a game.

Given the snail’s pace at which I can read Romanian and my friend’s reading glasses left at home, it was obvious the two boys would best us – a delight to watch them play. Though our adult conversations had involved whether Romanians could become competitive and organized enough to haul the nation out of its economic problems, the talent with which these boys went at acquiring property, collecting rents, and calculating how much they could afford gave me hope for Romania’s future prosperity.

Sărbători fericite şi la mulţi ani to all!

 

Community versus Productivity: Some Differences between Schools in Romania and the United States

In order to know what kind of schools you want to have,

you have to know what kind of government you want to have.

Attributed to Plato in The Republic

A truism among education historians is that the kind of schools a society has will determine the kind of government it will have, an insight usually credited to Plato. Extending that insight a bit to cover a nation’s economy, I rather wonder whether some sources of Romania’s economic difficulties are, in part, found in its schools.

            But before addressing that question, I must first say emphatically that the schools here also foster many of the country’s virtues. In addition to providing access to a sturdy academic education, Romanian schools encourage people to live together harmoniously.  I’ve also been impressed by what I’ll call a predominance of healthy personalities among students and teachers, or the absence of its inverse – self-destructive or belligerent behavior. In the United States, alas, we seem to have much more of the latter.

However, after year and a half of observing differences between the two systems, I’ve come to propose a dichotomy of sorts as a way to understand them. This I’ve termed community vs. productivity, with Romania is stronger on the former and the U.S. on the latter.

The U.S. has had the world’s most productive economy for a century or so, and that happened because our schools have encouraged the technical skills, innovative attitudes, and individual accomplishments that have made our productivity possible. On the other hand, we also have a higher proportion of our citizens in prison than any other industrialized nation.   

Unlike in U.S. schools, which remix students into different classroom groupings each year, Romanian children remain with the same group of students – and the same teacher – for grades one to four.  In grades five to eight, they also take classes with the same group of students, but they have a variety of teachers. In high schools, students select a “profile” – technology or literature, for example – and this determines their classmates, courses, and teachers for the next four years.

While this arrangement leads to an admirable sense of community among Romanian students – they not only know each other well, but assume a certain protectiveness toward each other -- it also has a downside. Students might find it difficult to “reinvent” themselves over a summer, and they do not have the stimulation of attending classes with a new group of students each year.  There is less cross-fertilization and less impetus for change.

Productivity – defined here as how much profit can (eventually) be made from each worker – may be a rather foreign concept in Romania. For one, the communist system spread the work around so that everyone had a job. But available equipment and school schedules also discourage productivity.

For example, Romanian schools – at least compared to those in the United States -- have limited equipment and technology. There are no science laboratories or workshops or art rooms; or at best they are inadequate to developing incipient scientists or mechanical engineers. The libraries have limited collections and students little time to visit them. A student with an idea – for a musical composition, a new software application, or some environmental improvement – would have little idea of where or how to start developing it.

Further, Romanian students, especially in high schools, take many more courses each year than do American students. A typical schedule might include an hour per week of biology, chemistry, and physics taken over three or more years, rather than one full year of each. Thus, it is more difficult for Romanian students to focus on one subject or carry a project through, both of which discourage the concentration needed for developing innovative ideas.

Social harmony rather than an entrepreneurial spirit is encouraged by other aspects of Romanian schools. For one, good students are motivated to provide the “right” answer rather than to pursue a distinctive line of thought. And they have little guilt about providing those answers to students who take their studies more casually. Though good “marks” are highly prized by many Romanian students, their U.S. counterparts are probably evaluated more on the basis of individual effort.

Further, neither written research reports nor vigorous classroom debate are part of high school courses.  Thoroughly studying a topic or engaging with the insights such a study might produce has surely germinated ideas that have led to inventions and scientific discoveries – every U.S. entrepreneur can usually tell a good story about some high school experience in which the “light went on.” But in Romania, those opportunities seem not to exist. And direct downloads from Wikipedia, etc., seems practiced more rampantly than in the United States; this provides another way to avoid the mental effort upon which invention and discovery depend.  

Despite this, Romanian students have extraordinary talents – a dance competition I saw last summer would rival any similar regional performance in the U.S. They also have a great sense of personal style – distinctive self-expression sans chains or purple hair, likely a by-product of the emotional security fostered in their classrooms.

Students in my school sing, play guitars, violins, and pianos; this despite there being no organized music program. The artwork hanging on the walls also displays great talent, yet there is little art instruction.  Students here are intellectually and culturally sophisticated – so much so that I frequently have to remind myself that I’m in a small town in northwestern Romania, not on Chicago’s North Shore.

They are also sufficiently computer savvy that they all know how to download a new movie – for free. But their visions of their future are more limited than their U.S. counterparts.  Aside from being forensic detectives (a career idea they’ve picked up from CSI, etc.), their aspirations don’t extend much beyond what they see their elders doing.

And I’ve yet to see signs that school leaders, elected officials, or the omnipresent media are giving much thought to this disjunction between talent and the means to put it to productive use.  Some of the wrenching self-analysis that so often dominates talk about schooling in the United States might be useful here. If Romania’s schools here are not encouraging the sort of society – government and economy – Romanians want to have, what changes can be made in them with available resources? 

10 idei care au influentat dezvoltarea sistemului de educatie american

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The Public Library as Capitalist Tool?

If you give people tools [and they use] their natural ability and curiosity, they will develop things in ways . . . very much beyond what you might have expected.

n  Bill Gates

One of the goals of the Gates Foundation-funded Biblionet project in Romania is that libraries rethink their role – from being simply repositories for books to being information centers for their communities.  But not until I had visited a few libraries did I realize the challenge that entails. However, if Gates is right – the comment above came from a web site offering quotes from famous people – his foundation’s library program could make the same contribution here that the Carnegie program did in the United States (see previous blog on this topic).

            Often, the local contribution towns are required to make in order to be eligible for a Biblionet grant involves construction – the library building must be spacious and secure enough to house the computer equipment it will receive. For some towns, this is a challenge. Last winter, I visited the library in a nearby community and found little more than two dreary rooms and nowhere to sit. Its shelves were filled with dusty volumes, most acquired over two decades ago when the government used libraries to encourage nationalism and disseminate propaganda. The librarian – actually a young woman whose chief credential was an interest in reading – had an office across the street in the town hall. People who want a book have to stop by her office first so she can unlock the library’s doors.

            But it has few patrons. As the librarian noted, if a neighborhood woman comes to check out a book, her neighbors might ask whether she felt she was too good to talk to them.

            Earlier, I had visited another, larger library in another nearby town. It had been a recipient of Biblionet grant, and had rebuilt its library to accommodate its new computers. I was there for the formal opening – a delightful event with many local officials and lots of good food -- and noted an inviting display of colorful new children’s books.     

            Over in the corner, though, was a relic of another time – a wooden card catalog. I soon learned that the library had neither an electronic catalog nor a computerized circulation system. And later I realized that the books themselves lacked call numbers. Hmm, I thought, perhaps brand new computers were butter for bread that hadn’t yet been baked.

            I’d not yet visited the library in my own town, a close-knit and welcoming community of 10,000 people, as it was in the process of renovation. But one afternoon last winter I had wandered over to the chilly room behind the primarie – town hall – where the librarians were then stationed with a hundred-odd books and little else. Except I was soon offered a warming mug of homegrown herbal tea, and we introduced ourselves using their halting English and my primitive Romanian.

            The Peace Corps encourages us to have secondary projects – teaching is my primary one – and having spent most of my career in the publishing business, offering my services to the library seemed a natural.  I had a grand scheme in mind -- one in-tune with Biblionet’s goal of helping libraries become community information centers.  I’d mentioned this to my Romanian friend attending library school in Illinois – and she’d replied with a marvelous You Tube video of a librarian in Ukraine exclaiming over how the local tomato crop had been improved through information she’d found on the web. Now that’s the idea, I thought.

            The backyard gardens in my area are marvelously productive – from strawberries in the spring to tomatoes and potatoes all summer long to luscious grapes for eating and wines in the fall. But the horticulture industry that, during communism, had flourished in the surrounding hills and valleys died quickly after the 1989 revolution.  Could some product development ideas discovered by a librarian here work the same magic as the one the librarian in Ukraine had found?

            But, ah, the complexities of getting such an idea off the ground. However, inspired by a conversation with the mayor in a nearby town – made possible by a bilingual friend – I thought of how local talent could be harnessed to create a web-based economic development center housed in a library.  Students comfortable with technology could assist their entrepreneurially minded elders in finding information about reenergizing horticulture and sheep-production – two industries apparently well suited to the climate and soil here. How do you find capital? How do you find new markets?

            During the long, dark Romanian winter, my imagination began to far outpace Romanian realities. Conversations with other friends here soon noted impediments to my ideas – the surrounding fields are divided into parcels too small for large-scale agriculture, there’s a disinclination for communal effort, the regulations are daunting, and there’s suspicion -- not wholly unfounded -- that someone else might profit from one’s efforts.

            As spring came, I downsized my dream. Then the library in my town reopened, and I began to appreciate its strengths and challenges: a delightful staff, space that’s a visual delight, shelves of recent books on contemporary topics, and an ample-sized room that houses computers from Biblionet. But there is no shelf of reference books – no business directories, compilations of associations, atlases, etc.  Of course, this information is available on the web – and no doubt the designers of the Biblionet project had this in mind when they decided to concentrate on technology and training.

            But as of now, no potential entrepreneurs are taking advantage of what the library might be able to do for them; the patrons I see there are mainly students – and mainly female, too. But I’ve been impressed by the librarians’ initiative – they were, for example, the first group of people in town to volunteer for the national cleanup day held this fall, they responded enthusiastically when a college student and I proposed that they might sponsor a career fair sometime this spring, and one of the librarians herself is showing an entrepreneurial spirit. Last fall, she found a package of ornamental squash seeds, regarded them with curiosity and planted them this spring, then discovered what a delightful product she has. This fall, their intriguing shapes decorated the library – and my classroom (one of my clever students called them mutant pumpkins). But I’d bet my librarian friend could charge a premium price for them in local markets.  

            Her curiosity and natural ability as a gardener, plus all the technology she is learning to use, might give her some entrepreneurial ideas. She can also concoct a delicious herbal tea from plants growing wild in neighboring fields. And if she wants to stick to the library, she has an equally talented – and entrepreneurial – neighbor.  She and her husband produce – for sale -- some of the best polinka – potent fruit brandy – I’ve had here. They also sell the wine they make from their abundant crop of grapes.

Both these women, in their 40s, are diligently teaching themselves English, as well as having jobs, raising teenagers, and doing energetic gardening. Who knows, given some of the tools the Gates Foundation has provided, what they might be able to develop? Bihor could become a brand name!

Will Gates Be for Romanian Libraries What Carnegie Was for US Libraries?

Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest. 

- Lady Bird Johnson

In the U.S., the term “Carnegie library” connotes civic mindedness, high purpose, and distinguished architecture. A philanthropic project initiated in the 1880s by Scottish-American steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, this library construction program helped establish public libraries as welcoming institutions in hundreds of communities across the United States, Great Britain, and Australia.  In the U.S, they were usually easy to spot – sturdy and appealing structures near the town square, with graceful stairways leading to a prominent front door. Their open stacks and central checkout desk invited the curious to browse, guided as needed by a friendly librarian.  On family trips as a girl, I often heard my father point to them with some reverence as we drove by. Lady Bird Johnson probably had these institutions in mind when she commented about the library’s democratic nature.

As astute a businesswoman as she was a first lady, Mrs. Johnson might have added that one of the public library’s democratic functions is career development for individuals and economic development for communities – want advice on how to find a job, start a business, get something done? The library is the place to start.     

            In Romania over a century after the Carnegie project was well established, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is making its own mark on libraries through the Global Libraries program, which supports projects in dozens of countries. Called Biblionet here, the program provides computer equipment and training in its use for librarians around the country. Bihor, the county (or judet) in which I live, was one of the first parts of Romania to earn the right to participate – though the program will eventually include all of the nation’s counties, it’s a competitive selection process and Bihor applied early. (The county also did well last summer when scores on the nationwide test given to graduating seniors were announced; no doubt there is a connection.)

            When expressing enthusiasm for the program to Romanian friends, I am apt to make a comparison between the Carnegie and Gates programs. And, if the former enhanced local communities’ efforts to build or expand access to libraries in the United States a century ago, might the Gates program have a similar effect here?  As we live in a less reverent age, it’s a difficult question. 

For one, the Gates endowment is for technological infrastructure not architecture, it’s not as easy to romanticize about the former. But for an American used to the convenience and accessibility of U.S. public libraries, the potential is equally inspiring. The current state of many libraries I have seen here is at best dismaying, but as the Gates Foundation’s funds are tied to local contributions as much as the Carnegie funds were, that the program has attracted such competitive interest is a good sign.

            My introduction to Romanian libraries came about in part because of my interest in another distinguished American of Scottish origins – John Dewey.  Wanting to know whether educators here were interested in his work, I sent a note to a Dewey list serve.  Soon I had a reply in my inbox from a Romanian woman working on a doctorate at the University of Illinois, which hosts one of the U.S.’s shrinking number of library schools. And she just happened to know another equally energetic librarian in the city of Oradea, not far away from where I live. Soon my new Romanian friend and I were also exchanging emails, and within a few weeks had made a date to meet at the Bihor library, where she is in charge of distributing books to the 55 libraries in the county.

            She also heads the county’s Biblionet program and maintains a valuable blog that supports other progressive endeavors – like volunteerism, city reading programs, and the national environmental cleanup campaign.  Through her, I’ve had a valuable introduction to the strengths and challenges facing Romania’s libraries – and lessons in how far they have to go to become as much an asset to their communities as the Carnegie libraries have been in United States.

            But that is a story too long for one blog post, so it will be continued in another.

© 2010 by Connie Goddard

           

The Land of Dracula Makes Halloween Its Own

An’ the goblins ‘ill get cha if ya don’t watch out.

“Little Orphant Annie”

James Whitcomb Riley

It could be that after 20 years in Romania, the Peace Corps’s most sturdy contribution to this land known for Dracula and vampires will be Halloween. Observations of the holiday were held in most communities that host volunteers – from a gala event in Bucharest to modest pumpkin-judging contests in Transylvanian villages.  We all recall Jack O’Lanterns, trick or treating, and maybe an apple-bobbing contest in less sanitation-obsessed times – and we’ve brought them all here, to be adopted with locally appropriate variations.

            I attended a particularly charming celebration a few days before Halloween, one that captured this land’s virtues and complexities. The festivities are surely popular with teachers because they provide a joyful opportunity for practicing English – songs included “Humphrey the Blue-Nosed Pumpkin” and “Oh, My Darling Frankenstein.” Older children described – in English – their costumes, which included several skeletons, a few ghosts, many witches, even a scarecrow and a devil with blinking horns. Among the lineup’s refreshing elements was that most of the costumes were homemade – a few ghoulish masks had been purchased as had the pirate hat with skull and crossbones, but most of the witches were in mothers’ black skirts and sweaters, complemented by a healthy dose of her darkest makeup.

            On a table near the stage was a delightful array of “pumpkins,” notable for their color – a dark grayish green on the outside and a luminous orange inside – a metaphor, I thought, for the unity of mankind, or at least this corner of the global village. Here were Romanian schoolchildren celebrating a pagan Celtic festival popularized by Americans and exploited by Chinese manufacturers; further, it was held in an ethnic Hungarian church that traces its roots to the Swiss John Calvin. Though the holiday has arrived here, seeds for the strain of orange globes we turn into Jack O’Lanterns aren’t prevalent, so the carvers get inventive with local “dovleac” and “pepene.”

            The English teacher at the local middle school established a pumpkin-carving competition a few years ago – and it attracts a wild variety of carved and painted faces, all of which must be described in English. Two dozen of 50-odd students competed for bags of candy and a “diploma” -- in Romania, every award must be accompanied by a signed certificate attesting to whatever was won. This year’s event featured a mummy wrap – which team can most quickly consume a roll of bathroom tissue by encircling a member – and a highly competitive pass the broom contest.

Last year, I organized a Halloween party in a local park, assisted by a colleague who had persuaded the town’s mayor to purchase candies and prizes for the best costumes and pumpkin faces. Like a lot of Romanian events, it was very impromptu – neighborhood children saw signs students had made and came to see what was happening.  So many showed up for the pumpkin toss, hokey pokey parade, and a noisy “Itsy, Bitsy Spider,” we ran out of treats.  

This year, I encouraged students in the high school where I teach to plan their own party, and one of the livelier classes of 10^th graders did so. The best costume award went to an Adams Family trio; the most popular activity was watching a brief cell-phone video from the week’s classes, including one of an unsuspecting English teacher (me) leading a choral reading of Riley’s “Little Orphant Annie” -- these articulate students reveled in the dialect.

            This year my contribution was largely academic – I decided to turn a brief talk about Halloween’s origins into an exercise on note-taking and a quiz. When preparing for our party last year, it dawned on me that zombies and vampires as well as the prosaic ghost were all characters that live in the netherworld between life and death. The Day of the Dead is a major religious observation here – no doubt one of reasons why All Hallow’s Eve has so quickly become popular – and American movies have taught students about trick or treating and pumpkin carving, even if they don’t know what a Jack O’Lantern is. That’s something I didn’t learn in school either – but a side benefit of teaching is looking up a miscellaneous fact when you realize it’s going to be part of a lesson. Jack was a crafty Irish farmer who had played a trick on the devil; unable to get into either heaven or hell, wandered Ireland carrying a hollowed turnip adorned with the devil’s face.

            In a nearby community, another volunteer reported that her middle school’s Halloween party attracted around 200 people – students, younger siblings, parents and grandparents. The kids all came in costumes and brought a wild variety of pumpkins – but they had modest interest in the bingo she’d helped students prepare. Instead the celebration turned into an exuberant dance. Likely what the Celtic celebrations were a millennium ago.

            The most elaborate celebration – in Romania or elsewhere – is likely the Halloween Charity Ball held in Bucharest’s Parliamentary Palace. Organized by former volunteer Leslie Hawke to benefit Ovidiu Rom – an organization she founded to encourage Rroma, or Gypsy, children to attend kindergarten – it attracts hundreds of lavishly costumed celebrities the last weekend in October. Sturdy support by Hawke’s son -- the actor Ethan -- gave the event instant star-power; this year’s featured guest was Nicholas Cage.

            The Halloween dance party in my town was far less elaborate, but great fun. Held a week after the holiday, it packed the local Casa de Cultura. Real orange Jack O’ Lanterns decorated the stage and students competing for “king” and “queen” were judged on the basis of their costumes as well as other talents. The latter is abundant here – one boy sang a collection of American songs; a group of girls did a traditional Romanian dance; girls handled arrangements and boys the technology.  The student MCs kept it all lively and relatively under control. 

            School in the U.S. seems to have taught us little about Romania – my picture of Transylvania before I got here was a sparsely settled mountainous woodland. And even some friends who should have known better suggested garlic to ward off vampires.  Somewhere in my photo collection is one of my first “gypsy” costumes, something I’m cautious about mentioning; the status of the real Gypsies here is too complex for this American to comment on.

But for a 10 days we are all delighted to be ghosts and vampires and zombies – sau fantome, vampiri, si zombi – and we’ll let ‘em git us if they wants to.    

Teaching and Traveling

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need to travel sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one’s little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

Mark Twain

Twain’s comment arrived on my desktop, courtesy of Google, as I began my second year of teaching English in a Romanian high school as a Peace Corps volunteer. I’d decided, while getting organized for the fall semester, to begin each of my classes with an appropriate quotation, proverb, or simple saying. It goes on the board; students write it in their notebooks.  We consider vocabulary, then meaning, and, if the statement can be attributed to a specific person, who he or she is. The idea of starting each class with a standard, brief exercise, I’d picked up from an English teacher I had subbed for in suburban Chicago. With use of an overhead projector, she did a simple grammar lesson each day with her seventh and eighth graders; it took no more than five minutes and focused students’ attention on the subject at hand.

            The Twain comment I've not yet used -- I'm saving it for lessons on travel later in the year – but it does focus attention on the topic of this new blog.  The 16 months I have been here have provided an excellent school for considering current issues in U.S. education – perhaps not fatal to my prejudices, but surely a restraint on vegetating on my own opinions, or the cant of current wisdom.

            One of my first discoveries has to do with the supposedly superior education in science European students receive – six years of chemistry and physics, for example. Though I am generalizing from a small sample – my school and those some fellow volunteers teach in – the sum total of hours students here receive over those six years does not exceed the daily chemistry classes I had in high school 50 years ago. Many students here get one hour of biology, chemistry, and physics each week for five or six years (and that’s for those headed to a university).  Thirty-six hours per year times six years is 216 hours of chemistry, for example.  The chemistry class I took in high school met daily, with an additional two hours weekly for a lab. That’s 252 hours in only one year. Furthermore, we had excellent laboratory facilities; students here have none. The chemistry they learn is all memorizing aspects of the periodic table and, I assume, molecular structures and aspects of chemical bonding.  But they don’t even have Bunsen burners.

            Those lessons might help students pass tests, but they don’t seem to have provided this delightful and resource-rich country with a vibrant scientific community or with entrepreneurial scientists who can turn their ideas into new industries. The parents of too many Romanian students are working abroad because that’s where the jobs are.

            On the other hand, I rather wonder whether teachers in Romania are not, on the whole, better educated in their academic area than are their American peers. Four of the five science teachers in our school, for example, acquired their credentials during the communist era. Whatever the horrors of that time, schools were better funded then, and a priority of the Ceausescu government was industrial development. What scientific and technical equipment there is in our school -- with the exception of good computers – appears to be been acquired more than two decades ago, before the 1990 change of government.

            One day last fall, a colleague invited me to a literature course required for her master’s degree in teaching English at a nearby university. Jammed into what an American university might consider a small seminar room were over 20 practicing teachers attending a lecture on Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno.” It was a story I’d never read, but I was fascinated by the professor’s grasp of its significance and setting (revenge and manipulation in colonial Chile).  I thought of the high school English teachers I had taught and worked with at universities in Chicago, many of whom may never have read a Melville story let alone been able to discuss the significance of its time and place. But several of the teachers here were doing so, all in English, which was their second (or third or more) language. 

            Despite what might be a superiority in content education, teachers here head out into their own classrooms with far less experience in front of a class than American teachers have.  Field experience for my colleagues here consists of a few weeks in front of students during their last year at university. Their next such experience – assuming they are fortunate enough to find a job – would be in front of their own classes, which for a high school teacher might mean 20 or more hours with 200-plus students in an average week.

            The content vs. pedagogy – or academic background vs. practical experience – debate has been going on for over a century in the US; it’s particularly contentious  now with colleges of education insisting that their methods courses are essential while reformist innovators such as Teach for America assert that bright, motivated, and well –educated college grads can move into classrooms at troubled schools and be far more effective than less broadly educated but fully credentialed teachers – i.e., those with the requisite number of methods courses  -- can be.

            My own prejudice on this issue continues, affirmed by my experience in Romania. Methods courses will never be an adequate substitute for a solid academic education. I’ve seen too many U.S. teachers flounder when faced with questions about photosynthesis from their biology students and elementary school teachers who confuse the dates of the American revolution with those of the Civil War.

            More than a century ago, the renowned Chicago educator (and subject of my doctoral dissertation) Ella Flagg Young noted that the banality of the credentialing process and authoritarian management of schools discouraged “young women of parts” – i.e., well-educated ones – from taking up the work of teaching.  I fear that we are still doing that in the United States. But as my Romanian colleagues have shown me, a solid content education -- knowing what happens to the cellular structure of a plant when sunlight hits it -- is surely more useful than a semester of science teaching methods, particularly if taught by an ill-educated and uninspired instructor.