Day 152 - The Students Who Never Came To Class

empty classroom image by earthisthering, via Flickr.com

Another purpose for that big book in the English Department was to record grades of students. At the end of the first term, I learned that the members of each class would be listed in the book for the teachers to record their grades. Grades in Romanian universities ranged from 1 to 10 with 5 or higher passing.  Since my classes were Conversation or American Culture, the grades I gave were admittedly subjective. I didn't have tests or papers with grades to total up and average.

The first term, all of my classes were second-year English majors. The second term, only three of my classes were second-year English majors. One class was third-year French majors with English as their minor. And one class was a fourth-year elective course developing writing skills in English.

Three of those classes met in the evening. It was inevitable that some of the classes were held in the evenings, given the number of hours students spent in the classroom. It was challenging to get all the students to attend the evening classes. They followed a break of at least two hours, long enough for the students to get back to their dorm rooms or their apartments at the other end of town. Sometimes they just didn't make it back for that evening class.

The third-year French majors and English minors were one of those evening classes. Most evenings at least two of them showed up. Sometimes there were as many as five. Once none of them showed up, but I think that was one of the classes who heard I had gone to Bucharest.

It was very difficult to figure out what activities to plan for when it wasn't clear how many students would be in attendance. One of my favorite activities was something we also did in Iran called Dialog Cards. This exercise involved an ambiguous dialog written with only one half on each of two cards. The class would decide ahead of time if the dialog would be spoken by two men, two women, or a man and a woman. The class would decide which emotions the two speakers would put into their half of the conversation. The two speakers would look at one another while they spoke the words on their cards to one another, using the emotions the class had decided on.  The results were always hilarious. And the same cards could be used over and over again with different results just by switching the emotions and combination of speakers. But with only one pair of speakers, a class planned for this activity ended pretty quickly.

While I never saw them all at the same time, in all there were probably seven students in that class. I kept thinking about what I could have done during the term if they had all attended. So when the term ended and I opened up the big book to provide grades for those seven students, I was shocked to discover that there were 14 members of that class. Seven students came at least once. but seven more never showed up at all.

I gave them all 0's.

Within a week, one of those missing students came to the American/British reading library with a large bouquet of flowers and an explanation. She apologized for not attending any of my classes. She said she was married and had an infant. Once she got back to their apartment after her daytime classes, she had to take care of the baby and it was just too difficult to leave the baby behind for her to return to the university for the evening class. I asked her a number of other questions to get a better sense of her English ability. At the end of the conversation, I told her I would think about what she had told me and would consider changing her grade.

The next day, another of the missing students appeared outside the English Department and asked to talk with me. She said she had heard from her colleague that if she asked me, I would change her grade. I countered by explaining that her colleague had come to me, showing more courage than any of the other members of the class, that she had apologized to me for not showing me the courtesy of attending my classes, and that she had explained her reasons for not coming back to the university in the evening. Based on those factors, I had assured her that I would think about whether or not I would change her grade. I did not tell her I would change her grade. I told her I would consider it.

The following day, a third of the missing students appeared outside the English Department and told me she wanted me to change her grade. I was a bit surprised at the abruptness of the request so I told her I didn't have any reason to change her grade. Her counter to that was to tell me that if I didn't change her grade, she would have to retake the class in the summer and that meant that I would have to stay for the summer to teach the class again. I replied that whether she had to retake the class had nothing to do with whether I had to remain to teach it. But still she didn't give up. She said I had to change the grade because 0 wasn't a grade. So I replied, "And that is just what you got - no grade."

In the end, I changed the grade of the first student who came to explain and apologize, but I don't think I made it a passing grade. I didn't change the other grades. But I did add a note in the big book to explain why I had given the seven students who never came to my class a grade of 0. And I explained that I had been asked by some of the students to change that grade, but that I didn't feel I could in good conscience change grades of students who had never attended a class. But, since I didn't know all the implications of my decision, I would understand if someone on the faculty felt it necessary to change the grades in my place.

Day 150 - March in Iași

Sample mărțișor

By March, I had been in Romania for six months and had been living in the apartment on the plaza in the middle of town for two months. But I wasn't yet ready to say I was happy there. Life in Romania was much easier than life had been in Iran. It was as though everyone in Romania could sense when I had reached the point of wanting to walk away from a situation that had become too frustrating and then they would turn to me to ask what I needed. In Iran, I learned that when I reached that point, I had to patiently wait as long again unless I really did think walking away was necessary.

George, Sandra, and Ana in the park

But March first was the beginning of a change. According to the old calendar in Romania, March 1 was the beginning of the new year. Symbolically, observing March 1 centered around women and fertility. For this reason, my students all gave me mărțișor, small tokens or charms hung on twisted threads of red and white that are  pinned to clothing. It was a small gesture, but the first where I felt I was an individual, not the American lecturer.

The following week, March 8, was another holiday I hadn't known about, International Women's Day. On that occasion, one of my classes gave me a doll dressed in a folk costume of the region, Moldova.

Paul running to join us
in the park

Those two events were the beginning of my feeling welcomed in Romania. And that made it possible for me to take actions to enjoy myself from that point on.

Sandra in front of
a statue in the park

George in front
of a statue in the
park

One example was an expedition that Paul, the American Fulbright researcher, two of my students, Ana and George, and I made to a park in Iași on an afternoon. The park featured a number of statues of historically important Romanians. We wandered through the park, taking turns posing in front of the statues in the same poses as the statues and taking photographs. It was an enjoyable afternoon with no purpose other than to enjoy the time.

 My impression was that students in Romania spent so much of their time and effort just getting through the day that there wasn't much time left just to enjoy life. I am happy that I had those small opportunities to enjoy Romania with my students.

Day 147 - Second Term

When the second term began at the university, one of my classes requested to continue with me as their teacher. I guess it was in part because of their choice to continue, I decided to give them some choice into how we would spend the second term. We had about 12 sessions during the term, so I asked them to list 12 topics they would like to discuss during the term. I told them I would decide how the topics would be incorporated into the session.

convoy image by Sangudo, via Flickr.com

One of the topics they chose was American music. Now I had been out of the United States for nearly three years at that point, which meant I wasn't in the best position to provide much information about what was most current on the American music scene. For the two previous years, I had been living in Iran where we had access to American Forces Radio and Television for the first year, but even when we could listen to American music, it didn't take long for it to become a mystery. For example, there was this craze in the mid 70's in the U.S. involving the use of Citizen Band radios. One of the songs to come out at this was C.W. McCall's Convoy. We heard it. We listened to the words. But we certainly did not understand it. The challenge of finding a way to discuss American music was bigger than my students understood.

Just before I left Iran, an American hit that was also a bit hit there was Hotel California by The Eagles. Since we had used the lyrics to that song with our classes in Tehran, I decided that would be how I would introduce American music into the conversation with my class. But after I played the song for them, provided copies of the lyrics, and we discussed just what in the world it meant, my students surprised me by wanting to do even more. Now it is important to remember that the year was 1978, long before MTV, but what my students suggested was that we do something very much like a music video. They suggested we take photos that could be synchronized with the song, a multi-media project. So we developed a story board of the scenes we needed to photograph to illustrate the song.

We took slides. I don't know if it was the title of the song that led my students to decide the perfect venue was a place on the edge of town they referred to as the Motel, but that was where we took most of the slides. And my students decided it was a perfect opportunity for them to take me, their teacher, out for lunch. They insisted, much to my dismay because I knew how much more easily I could have paid for all their lunches than any of them could come up with their fair share of my meal.

Hotel California image by Leo Uehara
via Flickr.com

Because there weren't that many of us, we brought extra jackets, coats, and hats so that we didn't end up with the same people in every slide. I had to send the film back to the U.S. for development and our hope was that we would be able to show the slides, synchronized with the music, at one of the English Language Social Club events.  I think we missed that deadline, but I know I turned the slides and the cassette tape over to my students, so I hope they were able to finish the project.

Another topic the class said they wanted to discuss was life of American university students. For this, I asked Mom to send me a course catalog from Moorhead State, NDSU, and Concordia. When they came, I broke the students into three groups and gave each group one of the catalogs with the instructions to come up with the courses a mythical English major would have to take during the usual four years of college.  I told them I would be available to answer their questions, but I wanted them to figure out the schedule as a group. It was an amazing experience to watch them read through the requirements and discover that American university students only had to take between 12 and 16 hours of classes in a week. They were in class between 32 and 36 hours per week. They also were surprised that they had to make so many decisions for themselves. In the Romanian system, once they were accepted into an academic discipline, they were assigned to a class which took all the same classes together for the following three years. All their classes were required.

None of the groups completed the task, but it was still a success. I learned more about each of those students in that one session than in the full first term.

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.