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.