Taking a breath

It's been quite a little whirlwind for a while here. This weekend is low-key, and pleasantly so. Starting about a month ago, we had many many students out sick with the swine flu, so many that they closed all Sofia schools for a week. Thankfully we stayed healthy, and used the time to travel to Lake Como and Milan in Italy. Hopefully I'll have a chance to post pictures and stories from that wonderful trip soon.

After coming back to school we had tons of make-up tests/quizzes to write/proctor/grade, and then grades & comments were due. I didn't particularly enjoy writing comments (even if they were only a few sentences) for about 150 students. This was the same weekend that we were also cooking Thanksgiving dinner for all the Bulgarian faculty and their families. That was a wonderful event, but exhausting and time-consuming.
Thanksgiving break - 4 days in Istanbul. That trip was also fantastic, and pictures will come, I promise. Returning home after vacationing is always hard for me. Besides being tired from travel, you're going back to work...it can be a rude transition. It's even harder after coming back from places as wonderful as Lake Como or Istanbul. Sofia has some nice bits, for sure, but it objectively pales in comparison. I felt pretty much the same way when I lived in Los Angeles whenever I came back from Zion, or the Sierras. The first glimpse of the LA basin over Cajon pass always made me think about flipping a U-turn on I-15.

The following weekend (Friday night and Saturday) we had parent-teacher conferences. This was a much more difficult experience than at Westridge. At Westridge, we had conferences during the several days before Thanksgiving (no school that week), and many families were vacationing. I taught half as many students, parents made appointments for their conferences (so I could figure out what I wanted to say to each parent) and I generally had a reputation as somewhat of an easy grader, meaning I didn't get too many surly visits. Here we had to do them after a long hard week of school, I had so many parents (70+) come through that I never even had time for a pee break in either of my 4 hour stints, and I had a lot of "concerned" parents who wanted to know why their child was studying all the time for Biology but still not getting an acceptable grade. Oh yeah, and more than half of the conferences were conducted with an interpreter, which added an interesting element (Do you talk to the parent or the interpreter? What exactly are they saying to each other?). I explained (over and over, so that by the second day my interpreter could just more or less give one of three versions of my canned speech) how the textbook (new this year but one that I didn't choose) was very challenging ("the most commonly used textbook in the world, for University students, so of course it is quite difficult for 10th graders that are still learning English"), that I offered students a "do-over" on a test where the class average was a 63%, and that I was adjusting the curriculum to move more slowly through the material to increase comprehension. Sometimes I admitted that I had been learning more about the rest of the Bulgarian curriculum (students are learning just now things in Chemistry I thought they already knew), and that next year I would plan the curriculum differently, not that that would help your fine son or daughter. I told them (repeatedly) to encourage their child to come for help during office hours, and that the material covered second semester would likely be less abstract and more approachable. Lather, rinse, repeat, times 70. It was exhausting. All I wanted to do after conferences was go home and sleep. On Sunday I chaperoned a student hiking club trip, which was a great chance to get outside and to meet some students on a more personal level, but it was also another 10 hours spent doing school-related stuff but not doing any required school work like grading or lesson planning. I couldn't get any sympathy at home, either, as Shannon spent much of the time when I was hiking working on Science Fair preparation. For both of us, it was the weekend that never was.

Science Fair was Wednesday last week, which involved some students showing off research projects they had done, and then the rest of the school being involved in science-related games/activities to keep them occupied. The research projects were great, and I would like to do more to encourage students to do these next year. The science "knowledge bowl" (trivia) and "Science Survivor" (relay race with 4-5 different science-y puzzles) were fun, but they took a LOT of time and energy to put together, and I'm not sure that the students really "learned" anything from them. I felt somewhat like a pinata maker...hours making a game that students tore through in a few minutes. The morning after science fair the whole science department looked like zombies. (How's that for a slasher movie idea...zombie science teachers attack the school after science fair?) I felt like I had a hangover, though I hadn't been drinking. During science survivor, I was the only male faculty member helping to run it, so I ended up with yelling and corralling duties (my low voice is good for something). Next year we need a whistle and/or megaphone, as trying to direct 200 students in a noisy gym (4 different times), with just me yelling...ouch. My throat hasn't yet recovered fully.

Friday night we had a Christmas party at the house of the school president (nice place...Khruschev reportedly stayed there back in the day when this campus housed the Bulgarian secret police). It was the start of the recovery. A lovely evening, with a secret santa gift exchange and a very nice feeling of community. I must admit Westridge spoiled me with lavish Christmas parties, but the happy feeling here was the same, even if the catering wasn't so fancy (well actually, it wasn't catered at all...just food from the cafeteria and various teachers taking turns as bartenders). After the party a large group of both Bulgarian and international faculty went out bowling. Yay, bowling! (For what it's worth, I rolled an 80 the first game and 142 the second...consistency is not my strong suit).

Yesterday we had a mellow "clean-up-the-house and get-grading-done" day, but we forgot about the grading parts. :) We had packed up our bags to do some grading at the Starbucks downtown (it's smoke-free), but on the bus got a call from some friends and detoured to go watch the movie 2012 instead. (I thought it was both awful and fabulous, others thought it was just awful. Shannon pretty much had to go see it for research, as she's talking about earthquakes and volcanoes in class and all of her students are asking her about it.) So right now, I should be grading, but this is much more fun.

What's next? Final week of school, then more exciting travels. Shannon and I are set to perform 2 Balkan Dances as part of a teacher/parent troupe at the Christmas concert this week (in front of the whole school and parents). I'd be a little more excited about that if I knew the dances, but we're working on them. Hopefully we can get some video of that to post here. For Christmas break we're flying to Venice (because a one-way flight was only $25! My carbon-guilt is acting up, but how could we resist?) for a few nights before heading to Austria (destinations TBA...definitely the Alps). We'll spend New Year's in London, visiting with our newlywed friends Chryssi and David.

I know the Thanksgiving-Christmas corridor is a crazy busy time for lots of people, ourselves included. We're having a lot of fun, when we have a chance to slow down and think about it. We miss you all, and regret that we couldn't spend more holiday feasts with each and every one of you, geography be damned. Stay tuned for upcoming posts (with photos!) about Istanbul, Italy, and (a nice place you haven't heard of) Koprivshtitsa, Bulgaria.
Love
Jeff