School System Provides Many Challenges For Teachers
ZAVET – It was chaos.
My eighth grade class had finished up a simple written exercise and I was preparing to move on to one last English game. There were about 10 minutes left in the period, but the class had other ideas.
I began to put my notebooks together when I saw a student from another class enter the room. Actually, there isn’t any door (it got ripped off), and other students were looking in as well. I walked toward them and told them to leave.
I turned back toward the class and two boys engaged in a playful wrestling match. I ran over and broke it up. Then another pushing match began. As I broke up that one, the two previous boys started in again. One of them got pushed too hard and became angry. Then another boy came to his defense and it started all over again.
Then a girl across the room started yelling at another boy. And if that wasn’t enough, the boy not from my class had returned and was yelling something. Suddenly I felt like I was one of those pathetic officials in the ring of a WWF tag team match trying to act like I had control but knowing that all of it was out of my hands.
I relayed this story to another teacher later on in the day. She slowly smiled and said, “That is Bulgaria.”
This was probably my toughest moment thus far in Bulgaria. School isn’t like this every day, but the school system here is vastly different than in the U.S. There is no discipline system to speak of. Books are rarely provided by the school. There are no substitute teachers. And class schedules change often in the first three months.
These are many of the challenges I face each day, but not everything is terrible. In some ways, students are more motivated and more easily entertained than students in the U.S. However, there are many students who slip through the cracks and fall way behind their peers. There are no after-school study sessions. There is no special education. And there is little awareness of learning disabilities here.
I am beginning to know and understand my students after two full weeks of class and I am confident that things will get better. After talking with a few other volunteers here, I see that my situation is much better than most. Here is a quick look at what a Bulgarian school is like.
The School Schedule
My school has to have two shifts because there are grades 1-12 in one building. The building is more than one hundred years old and it looks like it. Often when I walk up in the morning I can see kids almost hanging out the windows yelling at other kids. I have started walking around the back of the building because if I go the other way students will constantly yell, "Mr.! Mr.!"
Classes are 40 minutes long with 10 minute breaks in between. Each session also has one 15-minute break. These are times when the kids go crazy. They run up and down the hallways. They squirt water at one another with water bottles. They walk around with their mouths stuffed with pastries or candy. (There is a small store in the basement where kids can buy food since there is no meal program)
There are three bells for each class period – one is a warning bell (five minutes before class), the second starts class and third ends it. Rarely are kids in the classroom by the second bell (which is rung by a lady downstairs – sometimes she uses a big cow bell). Teachers do not have their own rooms. Each class (ie. 5th, 6th or 7th) has all its classes in one room. The teacher visits a different classroom for each period. Teachers often are not in the classroom when the bell rings. They usually wait a few minutes.
When the teacher walks in, most students stand and wait to be greeted. I say hello and tell them to sit. Each student is supposed to have a notebook to write in and their textbook, although many don’t buy them. Only five out of 18 students in my eighth grade class have the textbook. In my ninth grade class it’s about the same. Textbooks usually run about 8-10 leva (around $5.00). For many this is expensive, especially if you buy books for all of your classes. However, for my seventh grade class we purchased nicer, more advanced books for 21 leva a piece.
I teach in the afternoons, 12:40-4:50 p.m., Monday through Thursday. I have one morning class on Thursday at 7:30 a.m. The schedule has changed three times already. Twice I have missed one of my classes because I wasn’t told of the change. The schedule is written on a piece of paper that is on the table in the teacher’s room, but I can never tell if it’s new or old and it's all in Bulgarian. There never is an official notice of any kind.
Each class you teach must be recorded in a big book. There is a space where I am supposed to write what I did in class. They are very strict about this. However, they let me write in English even though none of the teachers or the director can read it. So technically I could write "Had party and watched dirty movies" and no one would really care.
Another difference here is that substitute teaches don’t exist. I’m guessing either because of money or the lack of teachers. So when a teacher misses class, the students are free for that period. But they must stay on the school grounds. That means that these kids can run wild all over the school without supervision. Kids roam the halls, some go outside, or others stand outside classroom windows or doors and make noise.
Discipline
A simple way to describe discipline in my school is that there isn’t any. None. Nada. There is no formal process of dealing with a problem student. Under Bulgarian law, a teacher cannot throw a student out of class. He or she can’t even place the child in the hallway if he or she is being disruptive. There is no detention or after-school program. And some times the director, who is the last resort, is not at the school.
The best solutions are to threaten flunking them or talking with their parents. But some times neither of these work. So when there is a child making problems day after day, some times there is nothing a teacher can do. And the bad thing is, the students know this. They learn this at an early age. Many times I have seen second- and third-graders running through the halls. A teacher will yell their name and tell them to stop. The child will look right at them, smile and keep running.
It didn’t always used to be this way. Before 1989, Bulgaria had one of the best school systems in Europe. It was highly disciplined under the Communist government. Schools were well-funded and sponsored many educational programs outside the schools like language and science camps. There was corporal punishment and a student could flunk a class just because of his or her behavior.
Before 1989, students could only have three absences per semester. After the fall of communism, that number increased to 30. Now it is 15. Teachers have lost some of their power to deal with discipline problems. A few years ago a teacher demanded that a student sweep the classroom as punishment. He was fired after the incident was reported, according to my colleague.
Often I have asked Bulgarian teachers why the school system has become such a fiasco. One teacher said, “This is democracy.”