Life as a Romanian teacher in a Romanian school

I am a now writing about life as a Romanian teacher. Well I admit I have left this blog for quite some time, as I have been incredibly busy doing everything and as always getting no-where at a tremendously fast speed.

However, I have decided it is again time to try and keep some sort of record of what I am doing in Romania. Especially as I am now in an ever more unique position. I am now working as the only non-native in a Romanian private school, so I am an expert at life as a Romanian teacher. You would be amazed at how quickly my Romanian has improved - I now know what the children are talking about and can follow a staff meeting!

I need to still work on speaking but I am now finding that when a member of staff says they will speak in Romanian, I can have a sensible conversation - no doubt full of errors, but we seem to understand each other. If I am really lucky, I can speak in English, they speak in Romanian, and we get along just fine!

Did you hear about the Romanian troubles. It didn't seem to make the news much nationally. The funniest thing I read was on Yahoo - who said that as they all needed to work, they would all stop quite quickly... there are still people protesting each day, but mainly in the centre of town, well away from my commuter route to the North of the city, and so I just watch it on TV. The Riot police here have really fabulous armour on, which makes it all a little more dramatic. Life as a Romanian teacher however went on, without any breaks, strikes. The only problem was avoiding the crowds which were protesting on my commuter route.

Everyone (in general, especially after they stopped selling alcohol in town) is very well behaved. It is nothing like the UK riots, where everyone left with a TV and a 5 year prison sentence. Life as a Romanian teacher is the same as any other job here - working comes first. Everyone works and protests on the side.

Finally we have snow here - it is really nice to see it swirling down as my little boy, Victor, knows all about the snow and loves to say everything correctly in both English and Romanian. At the age of 2, he is something else. Often we need to ask each other what a word he knows means! He also knows his English poems and his English Alphabet as he has been watching lots of YouTube - which has of course saved me a huge fortune in baby educational CDs.

At Christmas, my terrible book on advice for dating Romanian women hit the national newspaper - my sales rocketed to 10 sales then nothing. The Romanians were furious about it - though even less pleasant about British women! As the book is only $1 to begin with, I was surprised when someone asked for it back - I am sure this costs Amazon more than the book! I took out the most revealing, ruthless points of view about my time here, making it a much nicer read and all that happened was people went - no annoying bits! That can't be right, and stopped buying it!

I am starting a new, really exciting initiative called http://www.free-guided-reading.com, which I think many other people will be keen to get involved in. I am building the world's first, completely free online English reading scheme. At the moment it is based on books which are around a hundred years old, but then I discovered how many great free modern books are out there for sale and so I have also linked to all of them and started to use them in my own classroom.

Our school is the first to go down the Kindle route for Primary school children. I am the first teacher I know who is actively using for all my classes from Grade 1 (Like UK Year 2-3) to Grade 6 (Like Year 7-8) and it is great. A Kindle lets a child research a topic in the classroom, but it stops them from simply cutting, pasting and presenting half of Wikipedia between two sheets. Life as a Romanian teacher gets easier with the Kindles. Suddenly I have all the resources I need.

I would love to know what other people are thinking about this.

Finally here is my final observation for this week. When I said there was no dog cull happening here, I was flooded with rather scary messages. When I asked the question how Romania should deal with its rogue stray dogs without resorting to shooting them, oddly I got not a single comment. Which makes me wonder if, while no one wants Romania to shoot their dogs or put them humanely down, no-one also can suggest a way to resolve this problem. I am not for killing dogs - my Uncle collects them - which as you can imagine causes a completely different set of problems!

Let me know about your thoughts on Romania, especially if you can describe as life as a Romanian teacher. I hope you like the slimmed down Pictures of Romania- I took out all the articles I was not proud of, and the ones which remain are the ones people like to see and I like to be known by.

18th February 2012 - The snows are beginning to go and the weather is warming up again.

12th February 2012 - where the snow really kicks in big time. Check out the amazing pictures I have for you!

5th February 2010 - It is very cold - more snow on the way and also learn why Romanian might aim their car at you!

Blog for 28th January - Why things always seem to happen in threes... sudden snow, death and an missing diamond...

What do you think of my broad round of life in Romania?

You like this blog? What stories or information would you like to bring to this conversation?

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