Day 145 - English Language Social Club

film image by thepodger, via Flickr.com

One of the advantages of having classes only on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, was that I could travel to Bucharest each weekend to have time on Friday mornings to pick up books and films from the American Library in Bucharest for use the following week. The books I used in my classes. The films I brought back for the regular Monday evening film nights. The film nights had been going on for at least a couple of years before I got there. The American and British lecturers each had access to films from the cultural offices of our embassies. All we had to do was pick them up in Bucharest, let one of the Romanian staff members review the films to be sure they were deemed acceptable, and get them back to Bucharest later.

Having the films reviewed wasn't called censorship, but it was always amazing that the films I thought had the most interesting stories were deemed to be uninteresting by whoever reviewed them.

Most of the films I could get were in a series that had five segments of about five minutes each. The segments were about ordinary things, like county fairs, rodeos, restaurants. They were glimpses of life in the United States. They wouldn't have been exciting to an audience of American college students, but they were very popular with Romanian audience.

But most of the audience for film night were not our students. Instead, they were students in other disciplines where English was important - engineering and medicine, for example. And they were high school students and their English teachers. We were pleased to have a broader audience and started looking for other opportunities. Well, to be more accurate, my colleague Chris was eager to expand the exposure of English to our students and others. His idea was to set up an English Language Social Club one afternoon a week where the students could play board games, we would provide magazines and books for them to read, and offer opportunities for informal conversation. I was still too strongly influenced by the pessimism that two years of living in Iran had engendered in me. I was convinced it would take too much time and effort to accomplish Chris' idea. But Chris had been in Iasi the year before, so he had the details all worked out. All we needed was a room large enough for all those activities on Thursday afternoon, and permission from the English Department.

Chris managed to find a room in the same building where we showed films on Monday evenings, the Student Center. Thursday was the ideal day because it was the day most of the teachers had compulsory party meetings so there were no classes. Since our students had about 32 hours of classes every week, in contrast to the full-course load of 12-16 hours of American university students, finding a two-hour block when the majority of them would be free was a challenge. It also wasn't certain that our students would choose to spend two more hours with us since they had so few hours to themselves.

Monopoly image by Mike_fleming via Flickr.com

So we brought copies of Boggle, Scrabble, Monopoly as well as those magazines I had bought at Hornbachers and books from both the British and American embassies to the Student Center and waited to see if anyone would show up. They did. We set up the games throughout the room and helped each group get started with the games. I had expected the languages games, Boggle and Scrabble, to be popular, but after watching awhile, it was clear that those games didn't involve much conversation among the players. Monopoly on the other hand was a big hit. After we read the rules, the game began. The university had sent one of the Romanian instructors to the first session as our minder, we assumed, and we got him involved with the Monopoly game. He seemed to be the only player who seemed to think that playing the game just meant rolling dice and moving the tokens around the board. Buying property and demanding rent when a player landed on it seemed to be distractions to him.

Again, many of those who attended on Thursdays were students from other disciplines or high school students and their teachers. One week one of the high school students offered to show slides that her father had taken on a trip to New York. We were happy to give her the opportunity and fascinated at her presentation and the reaction. Her father had taken the usual picture of tall buildings and tourist sights, but those weren't the focus of her attention. Instead, she pointed out all those ordinary things - the traffic lights, the cars parked along the street, the length of the skirts the women walking on the sidewalk were wearing, the exhibits in the shop windows. And those in the audience asked her questions that she did an excellent job answering, given that she hadn't been in New York herself.