A Normal Day

I go to school every day but have written surprisingly little information about what it is like.

School is a bit different over here. First off, we have lessons from 8:30 – 1:30. There is no break for lunch but students have fifteen or twenty minutes to run out to the line of snack carts that reminds me of what I used to call “Tin Can Alley” on Drexel’s campus.

With few clocks throughout the building and no centralized bell, a student runs up and down the four flights of stairs ringing and actual bell when it’s time for teachers to rotate classes. There are about five minutes for teachers to stop off in the teacher’s room and pick up the class registers (a sacred book with the class roster and student grades for all subjects) before going to class. When they enter the classroom, wearing white smocks that look like lab coats, the students stand up. Students in my school also wear uniforms during the warmer months. When a student is called to answer a question, they may also choose to stand up to give the answer.

My favorite thing that students do is wiping the desks. When I go in for a lesson I usually sit in the back at an empty desk (if there is one, since sometimes three students have to share a single desk). But before I can sit down, students order me to stand while they clean the desk because it is “dirty,” or rather, dusty. At the mere sight of me getting ready to set my books down, an army of students rushes to the desk, tells me forcefully “NO NO” and, armed with tissues from individual packets, cleans the desk for me.

Albanian students are masters of rote learning, which means that their critical thinking and reading skills need a lot of improvement. Ask a student what they have read about Bill Clinton, a popular figure here largely because of Kosovo, and they can give you an entire string of information, perfectly memorized. Ask a student why Clinton is popular here and they have difficulty answering. Trying to break students of the memorization habit is something I will be working on for the rest of my time here. Memorization certainly has its place, but there are far more important skills to work on (like converting information students read to other areas).

As for the schools themselves, they do not have many amenities. I haven’t seen any heated classrooms and usually wear my coat every day, all day. The steps are treacherous because they are crumbling. I’m waiting for the day when I bite it and always make a point to be extra cautious. My school does have the internet, a computer lab, and two libraries (one for Albanian books and another foreign language library that I’m working on). These are resources that not every school has and are a good starting point for our students. By writing to an American organization called Darien Book Aid, I was able to add about 25 new books to our little English library and I hope to expand it in the future. There isn’t an overwhelming appreciation of libraries here, but it provides our students with authentic materials as opposed to inaccurate and outdated text books and is often the only source of English materials that they have.

The textbooks are another thing. Never in my life have I really paid any particular attention to the role of a textbook, not even as we (my parents and I) regularly shelled out $80 a book during university. A good text is everything; it’s the source of your lessons, information and discussions. There are two distinct types of books here: ones produced for the international market by English publishers and books produced by Albanians, for Albanians. There is a marked difference in price and quality between the two books. It’s safe to say that on almost every page of an Albanian text book, you can find a simple mistake that would have been noticed had it been spell checked. There are also other factual errors and omissions. I have been teaching a lesson on Hamlet this whole week. According to the Albanian-produced text, Hamlet was a “king” of Denmark (if that were true, then there really wouldn’t be much of a plot). After an elaborate and confusing summary of the play’s plot, it makes no mention of Hamlet’s death. On the bright side, the lesson did teach me the Albanian words for revenge and indecision as we talked about the play’s themes. It’s disappointing to see so many errors in an educational book, especially considering that many of them could be easily corrected if anyone bothered to edit anything.

Looking back on my public education, I’d say that discipline also played a big part. Kids continue to get surlier and surlier, but even when I was in school you could have a certain fear about the repercussions of your actions. Mouthing off would get you sent to the principal’s office, and the possibility of detention was very real for any number of offenses. Not to mention that I could also count on getting it at home for any indiscretions. We don’t have a distinguishable, clearly defined discipline system here. Sometimes kids will get kicked out of the lesson, but I haven’t seen anyone being sent to the principal’s. As a result, class is often chaotic, with students talking at regular volume over fellow students and teachers. That is, when they aren’t busy with their phones or causing other forms of general disruption. It is a difficult environment to teach in, combined with the sub-par textbooks, and I really have to tip my cap to the teachers that I’ve seen in action. They are people who somehow overcome the normal wear and tear on one’s nerves and do the best they can—because they believe in what they do. It definitely shows in their work and I look forward to our future working collaborations.

At the beginning of this entry, I wrote that school ends at 1:30. Thanks to a new initiative from the Ministry of Education, lessons in my school will now finish at 2:15 with the addition of a seventh instructional hour. It’s kind of a mixed bag, where a few teachers every day will run supplementary courses. Out of a staff of almost thirty, five or so teachers will teach an extra lesson each day a week. During this time, I will hopefully work with gifted students four times a week. My other colleagues in the English department have done the best they can with these students—and I’m lucky enough to reap the rewards of their previous work by stepping in as a native speaker to teach them. The students don’t know it yet, but I have got so many things lined up for them and I have some high hopes about what we can all achieve in working together.