Category Archives: Ariel

“It’s Complicated” with my Students on Facebook

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Right now I have 36 Facebook friend requests pending from my students. I haven’t quite decided what to do with them.

According to socialbakers.com, Milka is the second most popular brand for Bulgarians on Facebook… I totally understand why!

About one-third of Bulgaria’s population is on Facebook, which includes nearly all of my students. On the first day of school I told my students plainly, “I won’t be your Facebook friend until after this year is over.” Hello, boundaries!

Instead, I tried to engage my students through Facebook groups– one for each grade level I teach.  After I had set these groups up, I told each of my classes about them, expecting they would use the search function and join. For one grade level where all my students had Facebook accounts, I even assigned Facebook “homework” asking them to join the group and make three comments on the photos I would post.

No takers. On Facebook homework.

Really?!?

In the last few weeks I have had more students join the groups, thanks to the help of one of my colleagues. The teachers at my school (who I am friends with on Facebook) have few qualms about befriending their students online. One such teacher joined the groups to help me invite and add students. Even so, most students do not post or participate in the discussions. I wonder if befriending students on Facebook would give them more contact with American culture/media, and help my understanding of Bulgaria by forming “friendships” and getting more perspectives on life in Smolyan. Many Fulbright English Teaching Assistants here are friending their students and getting a lot out of that bond. It makes it easier to learn names at the very least.

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that student-teacher relationships and social media don’t always mix well. During the first few weeks, a Fulbright friend of mine here posted about her frustrations with classroom discipline and student conduct on her personal tumblr. They were things that many of us Fulbrighters were thinking/feeling, but said in excessively strong language (read: like a sailor). Bulgarian students are a tech-savvy bunch, and it wasn’t long before her students read her post. Hours later she had an anonymous and threatening message sent by someone claiming to represent a group of her students. The conflict eventually resolved itself, but it was unnecessary drama that might have been prevented through self-censorship or distancing online and real-life identities.

So, should I break my own rule and friend my students early? If I did, would it mean I would have to stop sharing snarky, aggressively liberal Jezebel articles on my Facebook timeline? Or should I wait until the end of the year and possibly miss out on legitimate cross-cultural friendships?

Introducing My Students: They’re… well, teenagers.

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As I researched programs and opportunities to teach English abroad, I noticed a prevalent (and conveniently marketable) idea that all students abroad, particularly in newly industrialized and developing countries, love and are grateful for any education. Now this is a trend that perpetuates neo-colonialism, white-savior complexes, and a whole lot of other –isms I’m not going to get into right now. What I am going to talk about is how my experience hasn’t resembled the classroom full of wide-eyed, smiling kids you’ll find when you Google “teach abroad.”

My students are doing their eyeliner, teasing their hair, texting and even leaving to answer their phones in the hall (at least they don’t answer it in the classroom?). Then there is the sudoku, the driver’s manuals, the earbuds with music just loud enough so that everyone can hear it, and the constant chatter of people in the back. There’s the girl who turns her chair all the way around to talk to the girl behind her, and the boy who comes to class late and immediately starts talking loudly about how he is bored. There are the boys who walk into class 20 minutes late, and the couple in the front row who are always cuddling. I set my rules and expectations clearly the first day, harshed down the second, but I only see each class once a week. I’m faced with the dilemma of enforcing rules (something akin to whack-a-mole), or using my short 45-minutes to teach something to those willing to listen and only commenting on outrageous breaches of conduct.

If you only observed the first day of school, this might not be the classroom environment you expect. I arrived at Ivan Vazov’s quad (a large cement rectangle that hosts stealthily smoking teens and playground games after school), to find all grades, quite a few parents and all the teachers gathered around the speakers blasting a dubstep remix of Flo Rida’s “Good Feeling.” The official ceremony included speeches by the principal and local big-wigs. Students loaded down their teachers with bouquets of flowers.  Students gave musical performances, read poetry, and danced traditional Bulgarian steps. One of my 12th graders played the gaida (a traditional Bulgarian bagpipe) as teachers and students lined up for a symbolic processional into the school, eating a piece of bread dipped in honey as they crossed over the threshold. A Fulbright scholar here doing fieldwork in Anthropology observed this ritual and pointed out that rituals don’t represent what is, but instead harken back to a golden, mythical age (Mircea Eliade, and a huge shout out to the RLST department). In this case, the ritual recalls some time under Ottoman rule, when the three most revered people in town were the mayor, clergy leader, and school-teacher.

A colorguard leads the processional

Younger students present themselves in the mandatory school uniform

A 10th grade English teacher carries an armful of flowers from her new students, who have forsaken their uniforms for the day

This isn’t to say I don’t have some awesome students. One student has emailed me detailed questions regarding university in America, and another asked where she might be able to find a paperback of the Great Gatsby. Five of my twenty-five 12th graders turned in the short personal essays I assigned, and they were a delight for me to read. My 8th graders have a lot of energy and someone always volunteers. On birthdays and name-days, students and teachers bring in large boxes of chocolate to share. This Saturday, the school marked World Walking Day with a school-wide hike to Balieva Voda, springs with purported healing properties.

Teaching here is a challenge, but it’s not all bad. If anything, it’s just louder than I expected.

Career Choice and the Common Good

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I may be in Bulgaria, but I still manage to keep up with my favorite TV shows.  Recently on Bones, Dr. Temperance Brennan articulated some ideas that have been bouncing around my own skull recently.

Brennan: “I believe every American should consider what is his or her greatest contribution to the common good.”
Booth: “And yours would be running for president?”
Brennan: “I’m brilliant– that is not in dispute.”

As an intelligent and ambitious Scripps woman, I’m wondering, what would be my greatest contribution to society? Isn’t it my civic duty to put this brain of mine to its best use? The most terrifying aspect of career planning, for me, is the idea that I may not live up to my own potential.

I gave up my dreams of the presidency around middle school when I realized that I, like Dr. Temperance Brennan, had little to no chance of being elected to the highest office in America as an atheist. But, there are still plenty of other ways that I could work to improve the lives of others.

Gif from Tumblr- ilovemystripysocks

How can I tell what work is “highly valuable” and respected by society?

Society seems to have a couple of bars by which we judge value. Forbes’ article “The 15 Most Valuable College Majors,” unsurprisingly uses salary and expected earnings to rank majors. I disregarded money-based value judgments long before I chose a self-designed creative writing major (about as far as can be from Petroleum Engineering and Management Information Systems).

On the other hand, we conflate selectivity and value. This is clear in the undergraduate admissions process with Ivy League obsession. It’s also a judgment that presents itself in grad school admissions. The MCAT and LSAT are notoriously difficult, and so we conclude that only the best and smartest among us become doctors and lawyers. Something I didn’t expect to discover in my graduate school research: the most selective med school, the Mayo Medical School, has an acceptance rate of 2.2% ; the most selective MFA in creative writing (Vanderbilt University) has an acceptance rate of 1%.

As I try to map out a career path, or at least a 5-year-plan or two, it’s difficult to ignore the engrained idea that smart, engaged citizens follow these two paths— mountains of money and/or prestigious altruism. As an amateur career-cartographer, it’s hard not to let these voices affect how I plot my own course. I’m lucky to have the Scripps community and CP&R cheering me on, because all of this is a lot easier knowing there are people who have my back.

So what should I do?

In four years at Scripps, I learned that success comes easier when we’re doing something we love.  As for value, maybe I should make my judgment based on what’s been of the most value to me—educational support. I’ve found a couple ways I might pay this forward. There are a number of Americorps positions at non-profits working to expand college access for low-income and potential first-generation college students through near-peer mentoring and academic coaching. I may not get the starting pay of a software engineer, but it’s worth it do something I love.

As I embark on a career in higher education administration, I may never find the cure for cancer or put an end to war through international diplomacy, but I hope to help other achieve those dreams. And maybe one day yet I’ll have the title “President” in front of my name.

——

FMI on Americorps college access programs: Schuler Scholars Program, College Possible (with a new site in Portland!), College Forward, Kentucky College Coaches, or the Americorps website for more opportunities to serve.

 

The Job Description

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On the Fulbright website, the English Teaching Assistant job description is as follows:

In most cases, ETAs:

  • Are placed in schools or universities outside of capital cities
  • Are assigned various activities designed to improve their students’ language abilities and knowledge of the United States
  • Are fully integrated into the host community, increasing their own language skills and knowledge of the host country
  • May pursue individual study/research plans in addition to ETA responsibilities

This description is necessarily vague, because each country dictates where and how ETAs will be most useful. Even within countries, the job can vary greatly.

The view from my kitchen in Smolyan, Bulgaria

In Bulgaria, all the ETAs are placed at Foreign Language High Schools. Some are in cities of several hundred thousand inhabitants. My town, Smolyan, is a town of 30,000 in the Rhodope Mountains of Southern Bulgaria. For reference, 30,000 is roughly the population of Claremont, but Smolyan doesn’t have the added benefit of surrounding towns like Pomona, Montclair, and LaVerne. Smolyan simply is the urban center of this region, and the bus station here acts as the transportation hub to surrounding villages, which range in population from several thousand to only several hundred. The nearest city (and mall and fastfood chain) are three hours north in Plovdiv.

The English hall of my school, GPCHE “Ivan Vazov”

At school, I’m responsible for 16 classes a week, about 4 per day Monday through Thursday. I work with every single English student in my high school, which amounts to 300+ names and faces. I never see any class more than once per week, so learning their names has been a slow process. While I work with all English students in all five grade-levels (8-12), some ETAs here spend all of their time with one grade level, often the 8th graders.

The opening ceremony was filled with speeches and student performances, including a student singing Wake Me Up When September Ends by Green Day.

Most students receive basic English instruction starting in 3rd or 4th grade, but our 8th graders start again at the very beginning and move quickly through a curriculum designed to get them from A1 (breakthrough or beginner) to B1 (threshold or intermediate) on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.

 

For 9th and 10th graders, I lead discussion classes. My goal is to get them speaking and actively using English. For the 11th graders, I am their once-a-week “English through Literature” class, meaning we will somehow move from mythology to Steinbeck over the course of the year. I’ve been asked to focus on writing with my 12th graders, though speaking is an important part of class, too. I’ve also been asked to help with a Creative Writing club that meets approximately once-a-week. I’ve been toying with the idea of starting an American Movie Club, primarily because I’d like a venue for showing 10 Things I Hate About You, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Forrest Gump, staples in any American cultural education.

Girls in traditional Rhodopean attire serve bread and honey to students and teachers as they cross the threshold into school on the first day

Before I arrived in Bulgaria, the Fulbright Commission sent paperwork, which included an outline of my job responsibilities. Although this was a contract, it was also, apparently, an approximation and my job duties look quite different on the ground than they did on paper. Those changes and uncertainties were a source of anxiety for me, and I’m glad to finally have a solid and clear idea of what I’m doing each week with each class… unfortunately it took well until after school started for me to get there. If you couldn’t tell from my previous post about planning, “going with the flow” is not something at which I excel, but I’m learning.

Planning for the Future

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I have a confession to make: I really like to plan. I like to research grad programs, career ideas and internships. I like to record my findings in lists and, if I’m feeling a little crazy, spreadsheets. I like to be able to see all the possibilities, so that when I set my sights on a few opportunities, I know that they’re the best for me.

(The downside of this is that I’m always living in the future, but this post is not about that.)

My work experience at Scripps opened my eyes to careers in higher education. After my Fulbright, I’d like to get more work experience in admissions or study abroad programming, but there’s not much I can do until spring. Even so, I occasionally trawl the waters of HigherEdJobs.com, the Forum on Education Abroad, and the Association of International Educators job board, just to read job descriptions and get an idea of what’s out there.

What I have been doing is planning for grad school. Getting my Masters degree is solidly within my 5-year plan, which is why I took the GRE this June. I wanted to have the test done before I was out of school mode, but I gave myself a month after graduation to study. Having a deadline helped motivate my study, and having something to keep me occupied after graduation helped keep me sane. I am happy with my scores, but if I had to do it again I would change how I studied. I used Barron’s New GRE test prep (which I do recommend) and studied writing, then verbal, then math. I’m convinced I would have improved my score if I had started with my most rusty subject, math, and moved forward from there, instead of leaving it until the end when I was burnt out and in crunch mode.

The last week has been marked by daily afternoon thunderstorms, so while I stay inside and catch up on season two of Nikita (no shame), I have been making notes on higher education administration (HEA) programs around the country. This became easier when I found the grad school database hosted by NASPA, the association for Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education. It’s not an exhaustive database, but it helped me immensely in putting together a starting list of 19 schools.

HEA programs come in all shapes and sizes. They can be titled M.A., M.Ed. or, less frequently, M.S. They range from nine months to two years. There are small and large cohorts. Some programs prefer research and theory to practice. Some programs cover tuition 100% with graduate assistantships, other programs are reputed as “cash cows” for their schools. Sometimes it is called Higher Education, sometimes it is Postsecondary Administration and Student Affairs, and sometimes it is Policy, Planning & Administration with a concentration in Higher Education. Among these options, I don’t know what I want yet.

Luckily, graduates of these types of programs are abundant at Scripps. I can research as much as I want on the internet, but having real people to ask about the honest pros and cons of their experience is priceless. They have the kind of insights I won’t find in marketing materials.

This all leaves me with choices to make and narrowing down to do. I have plenty of time before I make any decisions, but I like to be prepared.