27 Luni

The past week has been very busy; we completed our final practicum lessons, performed our first official language evaluation, discovered the locations of our permanent sites and participated in a conference with our new teaching Counterparts.  These are all very important milestones in our Peace Corps pre-service training and represent the completion of the first half of PST.  All of these events contributed to a very emotionally charged atmosphere with lots of tears and smiles alike.

Practicum consisted of five weeks where our PST group was divided up and sent to various schools in Tărgoviște.  In an effort to get our feet wet in the classroom, we were paired with veteran English teachers that proved to be nothing short of incredible.  The classes were mostly well behaved, respectful and inquisitive.  The practicum experience exposed us to new teaching techniques, cultural differences and gave us the opportunity, in a controlled environment, to prove to ourselves that we can in fact manage classes of Romanian children.  This was the first year that Peace Corps Romania tried this particular methodology of placing Volunteers in local schools.  Technically and logistically, the Program Managers put in an extensive amount of effort to pull this off, amazingly with very few bumps in the road.  Their hard work certainly paid off, giving the volunteers a firm foundation to build upon as we integrate into our permanent site schools.

Wednesday, the Program Managers held a debrief of the practicum initiative; each group was responsible for preparing a 20 minute presentation discussing teaching techniques and methods, cultural idiosyncrasies, group dynamics, lesson planning and lessons learned.  Although this activity was a clear invitation for an exercise in monotony, as we all had similar experiences, each group provided creative and compelling presentations on the aforementioned topics.

One particularly noteworthy segment included an anecdotal, though genuine, story of a fellow Volunteer with no prior teaching experience.  Obviously and understandably nervous at the prospect of teaching thirty some Romanian students, he thoroughly prepared a lesson, consulting one of our Volunteer Teacher Trainers.  Fully prepared, but not fully confident, he began the session by writing a quote on the board and asking the students for their opinion on whether or not they agreed with the quote.  Never mind the fact that the quote was from Friedrich Nietzsche, the question fell flat.  “Let me see a show of hands, how many people agree?”  No hands went up, so logically they all must have disagreed.  “Okay, let me see a show of hands for those who do not agree.”  Again, no hands went up.  This marked the point of a downward spiral in self-confidence that culminated in one petrified and frozen Volunteer and a student body keen to the nervous energy quickly filling the room, they were like piranha to a drop of blood.  In the end, my colleague had endured what all teachers must experience early on in the training process.  The hours that followed were full of overly critical self-loathing and ineffective attempts by group-mates to provide reassurance.  However, in an interesting twist of events the protagonist of our story returned the next week and was given a handwritten letter and a bracelet from one of the students from the failed lesson.  The young Romanian girl apologized for her class’s poor behavior and promised to offer more patience and serenity in the future.  My colleague has worn and pledges to wear the woven string bracelet as a continuous reminder to provide his students with the best possible teaching experience he can.  I share this story because it’s a perfect example of the dichotomy that exists in the classroom; one moment students can be ruthless and in the next they exceed our every expectation.

Like uncontrollable, falling dominoes, our group moved on to the next big folly: our first proper language evaluation.  The purpose of which was to act as a midway checkpoint of our language absorption.   Rather brilliantly, our instructors set up “stations” in various classrooms all throughout our usual educational corridor.  The stations were as follows: Shopping, Eating Out, Post Office, Transportation, Family and Socializing.  Each station was managed by one or two language instructors and provided a forum for which each volunteer could demonstrate his or her language proficiency in a closed environment.  In an effort to successfully evaluate each of the thirty-seven students at each of the six stations, every student had five minutes per station and a thirty-minute break in between.  Upon nervously entering a “station,” based on a predetermined schedule, a student would randomly select from a number of small slips of paper, each with a different scenario outlined in English.  Once finished reading allowed the given scenario, we were expected to act it out with the instructor(s).  As an example, my second to last station was “Eating Out;” my mystery slip of paper roughly outlined the following:  “You are eating out at a restaurant, where you place your order but are given the wrong meal.  Kindly let the waitress know that this is not what you ordered and insist that she bring you the correct entree.  If you succeed in this task the waitress will make two attempts to charge you for both meals, object to these and ensure you only pay for one.”  Needless to say this would be a difficult task after speaking the language for months let alone weeks, top it off with a guilt trip that it’s your waitress’s first day on the job and secondly that she has young children at home and will be forced to pay for the error out of her own pocket.  This one example took many different forms throughout the day and lead to a heightened sense of anxiety in everyone.  Like a well-orchestrated scheme of falling dominoes, the pieces sloppily fall into one another, but if you zoom out and look at the bigger picture a well-planned pattern starts to emerge.   This evaluation was an excellent introduction to the full length, forty-minute interview we are expected to execute at the close of training.  A colleague put it best: we may all have thought that we performed poorly but if we had video taped each session and sent them home to our friends and family they would be blown away by what we have learned in five short weeks.

The next major event on the agenda was site assignments.  This was the moment that we had all been waiting for since initially opening our Peace Corps “invitations” to serve six months ago.  Our Placement Coordinators have been working in concert with our Program Managers and Language Instructors to provide the best possible match based on the skills and interests that we bring to Romania.  It’s an arduous process; one that our Placement Coordinators are fond of comparing to a scenario in which there are 74 different shoes that somehow have to be matched, ‘rights’ with ‘lefts’ in an attempt to have a wearable pair.  Each school and each Volunteer had a list of desires, matching them to create a workable and lasting symbiosis is tricky.  In the end, their efforts paid off more successfully than I could ever have imagined six months ago.

In typical Peace Corps fashion, nothing is simplistic or bland; the staff decorated our school’s cafeteria in festive American Flags, streamers and other party decorations.  A loudspeaker and microphone were set up and the lunch tables were lined in two long rows, with Volunteers on the outside of each; in between, a red carpet was rolled out.  The Director of Peace Corps Romania kicked off the event with her reliably inspirational words of wisdom and obligatory mitigation of expectation, then she passed the microphone off to our event’s MC, a three year Volunteer and current PCVL.  After some additional words of encouragement the real fun began.  Each of our Language Instructors was enlisted to announce our site assignments.  In a pseudo-Oscar award nominee style, each volunteer’s name was randomly placed among four other similar yet humorous ‘nominees’.  With music reminiscent of Flight of the Valkyries, each site was handed out; Volunteers walking down the red carpet with a uniquely characteristic strut and/or occasional cartwheel.  Every volunteer was enthusiastically handed a sealed manila envelop decorated by a black and white map with a little green dot that was strategically placed over the most important city, town or village name that volunteer would utter for the foreseeable future.  My green dot encompassed the commune of Valea Călugărească.

In the county of Prahova and next to the county seat of Ploești, Valea Călugărească is a rural commune composed of fifteen villages and situated in the viticulture basin of Dealu Mare (big hill).  My assigned school, Colegiul Agricol “Gheorghe Ionescu-Sisesti” is an agricultural school focusing on vineyard growth and management, veterinary sciences, and farm equipment mechanics.  The school was originally built in 1908 but was remodeled three years ago.  The beautiful and freshly painted main schoolhouse remarkably hosts three information technology labs and, based upon photographs provided by a graduating senior, the classrooms are clean and relatively modern.  According to a summary provided by my future Counterparts, the school has 900 students pulling from a wide area and comprises 25 classes.  The background of each student varies but a significant percentage of the student body lives without one or both parents, as they work abroad in search of higher wages; many students live in a hostel on school property.

On Monday, June 13^th, I will travel to Valea Călugărească with two of my Counterparts.  They were in town this weekend for a Peace Corps organized conference, designed to introduce volunteers to their future collaborators and to communicate the necessary logistical and administrative information to all those involved.  This process is designed to provide a smooth integration among Volunteers and Romanian Teachers and proved quite engaging.  My assigned counterparts are enthusiastic, dynamic and intelligent individuals that seem committed to my successful integration into their school and community.

More to come upon my return later this week.