gkb 17. March 2008 - 18:02
Students here don't get "free periods" in school, in the way American students do. There is no such thing as study hall, or even lunch period; all that's given here is "pauza", which is the ten minutes that falls between the end of one lesson hour and the beginning of the next. There is usually a lot of insanity that occurs during this time, as kids are running around, buying/eating food, burning off energy, socialising, finishing their homework for the next hour. These ostensibly ten-minute (usually more like 15-20) periods are unlike anything that an American public school teacher would expect to see more than two or three times during their teaching career, and are the times when I usually feel that I'm less of a teacher and more of a cross between a zookeeper and a prison warden in the midst of a full-scale riot. It's not irregular to see students beating up on one another, throwing food, pushing each other down the stairs, screaming and yelling at the top of their lungs, running in and out of each others' classrooms vandalising things and stealing other students' notebooks.
Responsibility for supervising schoolyard activity falls to various teachers, depending on the day, and I've taken to joining one of my English teaching colleagues during her stints "on duty". It's interesting to observe how students handle having only brief breaks in between classes to do anything from homework to eating to running to the washroom, and still manage to get up to all manners of antics within that short period. Recently, during one of these periods of insanity in an already trying teaching day, I got to thinking about how Peace Corps had told us, before we departed for Romania, that Romanian schoolchildren were very quiet and well-behaved, obedient of authority, and that often it would be difficult to get them to speak in class as a result.
I have to admit, those few sentences caused me a fair amount of mental anguish when I first started teaching, as nearly all of my students were the diametric opposite of this. Loud, chatty, getting up and moving around the classroom, getting in arguments, not paying attention to the lesson, talking over me or interrupting me as I tried to present material. And, since "Romanian schoolchildren are obedient", I assumed that it must be me, that there was something wrong with my teaching or my approach that made them so unruly in my presence. I wondered if it was because I was the foreigner, because I wasn't Romanian and they didn't look at me in the same way they looked at their other teachers, if it was because I approached discipline differently or because the previous volunteer seemingly did nothing but play games with them. I finally came to realise that, far from being an anomaly, this was the normal behaviour of these students, and that though it's true that they were giving me more trouble--much in the way that kids will misbehave with a substitute teacher who doesn't know all the classroom rules--their behaviour was more the norm than the exception, and I couldn't attribute it entirely to incompetent classroom management on my part.
When my colleague wandered back over I commented idly on this phenomenon; namely, how the information given in my organisation's literature seemed to be wildly out of the norm with regards to the reality of the circumstances. I told her about how I'd expected to have a bunch of silent, stony-faced children sitting in desks, hands folded, listening primly to whatever I said, writing it all down verbatim, and not saying a word, even when asked questions or given the opportunity to present input. I didn't really expect an answer, as even under the most ideal circumstances I tend toward the contemplative and overly pontificating, and often things I comment on have equal potential as either questions to spark debate or vocalised internal musings. Now, living someplace where I don't really get to have serious, involved conversations with anyone about anything, I've grown disappointingly accustomed to throwing out comments that, with my circle of friends, would start conversation-debates that could burn down a weekend … and instead of opinions, analysis, discussion and argument, getting absolutely nothing back. A stone dropped into a void.
So I was rather surprised when my comment about the divergence between scripture and reality as it relates to Romanian schoolchildren got an immediate response. They used to be like that, she said musingly, when she was a student. Children were obedient and respectful and behaved properly in school. Intrigued, as she's not nearly old enough to be playing the "when I was young everything was wonderful" card, I asked her what she thought had caused the change between her school days and the current crop of students. She then came out with one of the meatiest comments I've gotten from her in nearly a year spent working together; she said "They misunderstood democracy".
As she explained it, when the revolution came in 1989, it brought a lot of freedoms … perhaps too many, at least all at once. People were so accustomed to living under the yoke of Communism, having huge chunks of their lives monitored and regulated by the state, that when that omnipresence was lifted, they didn't know what to do with the newfound freedom. People who had grown up with Communism were now raising their own children in democracy, and it was bewildering; they passed the freedom they had been given on to their children, allowing them to grow up without the rules that they had had to live with. In some ways this was good; removing a lot of the arbitrary regulations handed down by the state allowed people to take more control and direction in their own lives. But in some ways it was also bad, as some people didn't know what to do with all this freedom, something they'd never experienced before. So they abandoned not only the state-mandated rules, but also the familial and interpersonal rules, and their children grew up without the structure and discipline that had helped their parents figure out what was right and wrong, what kind of behaviour was acceptable or not acceptable. In wanting to give their children everything they hadn't had, they gave them too much, and the children in turn became disrespectful and uncontrollable. It seems like a classic case of paving the road to Hell with good intentions.
