Inseamna ca lectiile de informatica sunt un succes

One of the homework questions for my seventh grade computer students about Microsoft Word was, "What is the purpose of headers and footers? What information can these things contain?" One girl responded perfectly to the first part, and then got creative in the second part of her response:

"These objects can contain: important information, scholastic information, information for teachers, information for students and lastly, secret information that only the principal should know."

The answer is too entertaining to be marked wrong.

Apasati pe Control pentru a impusca

Every Friday evening for the past month, I've time-travelled back to 9th grade. Back then, my friends and I would meet at my house, where my dad had installed a 16-port 10/100 Base-T ethernet hub and had wired nearly every room in the house with network ports. We would set ourselves up in different rooms and play Quake, Quake II and Myth: The Fallen Lords for hours and hours. The hallways were filled with the sounds of shotgun blasts, grenade explosions and shouts of, "How ya like dem apples!?"

Now, I'm reliving those online playing days in my school's computer lab. In February, several students asked me to open the computer room for games in the evening. It sounded like something I would enjoy doing and something that could easily raise money for improving the school's computer equipment in a few basic ways. After getting approval from the school principal, I began running game nights every Friday from 4 to 6 p.m.

Every week since then, over a dozen boys have come to play games on these aging but still fun computers. They pay two lei per hour, and with eight computers available, we are able to raise 32 lei (about $2.50) per week. When I started in February, I only had Doom II, Sim City, Civilization II, Quake II and Monster Truck Madness on the computers. We also had no network on which to play the games, because the power adaptor for the ethernet hub had been either lost or stolen.

Two weeks ago, two major things happened; we raised enough money to buy a power adaptor for the hub, and I received a shipment from my dad full of memory chips and some of the best games from the mid- and late-90s, including Warcraft II, Quake and Starcraft. I installed the memory, upgrading each computer from 16 or 32 MB of RAM to 192, their maximum capacity. A memory upgrade like this would have cost thousands of dollars when the computers were new in 1997, but it cost a total of about $40 for all eight computers when my dad bought the chips on eBay earlier this year. I then installed the new games, plugged in the ethernet hub, and let the games begin.

My first test drive of network gaming (the nerds who read this can get nostalgic; it was over an IPX network) was playing Quake with three 8th-grade girls who had been typing up their English papers after class and another 6th-grade girl who didn't have anything to do after school. My old instincts came back, and I soundly defeated a handful of newbie girls. It was not the most challenging match-up I've ever had. I also ran some tests with Starcraft and Monster Truck Madness before the big Friday night showdown.

By Friday night, word had spread that we had a functioning network in the lab. Turnout was higher than usual, and all the boys wanted to play on the network. I watched them scramble around for two hours, and then announced that I would keep the lab open for extra time only if I got to play Quake with them.

I joined their game, the rules of which said that the first player to 10 kills was the winner. I beat three of my 7th-grade students in four straight games, although I was nearly beaten once by Ion, a boy who had very good mastery of the controls for a first-time player. After an extra half-hour of games, I closed the room and sent the boys home.

This is the kind of small project that works in Moldova, for two reasons:

First, it's not dependent on creating new capital. The computers were already there, and with less than $100 of financial help from myself and my father (I also bought CD-ROM drives and new batteries for each computer in December), we have greatly added to the value of the school's computer lab without needing to write big grants. Now that some basic items have been installed, game nights at the lab can generate over $2 a week, which can pay for the school's internet fees or other technology-related expenses, such as filling up the printer cartridge.

Second, the idea of a game night was proposed by Moldovans, and I can pass it on to Moldovans very easily so that they can run it when I'm gone. It's these small successes, the successes that are sustainable, that I think I'm going to be happiest about when I leave in five months. That, and I'll be happier after the virtual therapy of shooting my students with a rocket launcher.

Informatica

I have said very little this year about my double life as my school's computer teacher. I teach eight classes a week to students in 7th, 8th, 9th and 11th grades. It's tiring, but it's by far the most enjoyable thing I do in my village, for several reasons.

First, my students understand me. In the English classroom, I can only make jokes with a few students, and more than half of my students don't understand most of the things that I say. When I teach informatica, as computer class is called in Romanian, I am speaking my students' native language. They feel more comfortable, and their personalities can come out more than they would in English. This also allows me to reach more students; I have about a dozen students, especially boys, who are poor English students but love working on the computer and enjoy talking to me about the latest computer technology.

Second, I feel like I'm back at summer camp. I was a digital video instructor at iD Tech Camps for five years, and I enjoyed seeing each kid "get it" as they worked independently and as a group. I also knew that once some of the faster students learned how to do a specific task, he or she would help the others. I have tried to instill this same concept into my computer classes, and the result is that I have a classroom full of students working, calling me when they need help, and slowly learning to ask each other for help. I instituted the "Ask Three Before Me" rule, meaning that students need to ask three of their classmates how to do something before they ask me. The goal is to make the students resources for one another, and also to save me from repeating the same thing over and over.

Third, informatica teaches my students critical thinking skills that they don't necessarily develop in their other classes. When an 8th grader asks me for help with a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, for example, I'll ask her to try to figure out why we use a particular formula. This has resulted in some frustrating moments, such as when it took me over five minutes to push two 8th grade girls toward the conclusion that in order to calculate the price of a number of items, they needed to multiply the unit price of the item by the number of units. (Imagine repeating in a foreign language, "If I buy three notebooks for three lei each, how much do I pay?" for a minute before getting the correct response, then waiting another two minutes before the student realizes how she got that answer, and then waiting another two minutes until she understands how to write the correct formula in Excel.) But overall, my insistence that students think for themselves develops their minds much more than simply having them repeat rote activities or copy down my lectures in their notebooks, which is the more common method of teaching informatica in this country.

Fourth, I'm now teaching my students what are arguably the two most important subjects for their future outside of the village: English and computers. I repeatedly tell my students that in 20 years, they will be unemployable in well-paying jobs without computer skills. I am planning on bringing guest speakers to the school in the coming month, and a major focus in our discussions will be the importance of computers and foreign languages in their work. These kids will need to use computers in their lives, yet very few of their parents understand the value of computers and don't stress their importance. It is part of my job to drill it into their heads that they need basic computer skills like typing, using Windows, writing documents in Word, creating spreadsheets in Excel and navigating the internet.

Fifth, I'm giving the finger to the Ministry of Education's curriculum. I believe I've complained already about the ministry's curriculum for 9th through 12th grades, which is centered on programming in PASCAL. PASCAL is as useful a language to the average computer user as Zulu is to the average American. I have completely scrapped the 9th and 11th grade curriculum (we don't have 10th or 12th grades), and replaced it with more important everyday computer skills that the students didn't learn in their first few years. My 11th graders, after a semester of typing lessons consisting of about 35 minutes of practice per week, have gone from typing approximately 3 words per minute to 10.6 words per minute with 94.1 percent accuracy.

One of the ways I'm changing the curriculum in my schools is through fun group projects that express creativity and individuality. In the second semester, my 11th graders will be writing their own web sites, both for themselves personally and for the village or school. The sites will be written in combinations of Romanian, English and Russian, since I am stressing the importance of publishing items online in foreign languages in order to improve exposure to the rest of the world. These sites will include photographs, links to other sites, and hopefully some really nice formatting through cascading style sheets; that's as much detail as I can give without boring segments of my readers. I might do the same project with my 9th graders, or I might create a monthly newsletter with them. What do you, my readers, think I should do? Please leave comments.

The allure of these projects is that students use their voices. When I told my students that about 2,000 people read this blog every month, they were flabbergasted. "Have any of you ever written anything that 2,000 people read every month?" I asked. The answer was no. "But I'm not anyone special," I continued. "I'm not an important person, but I have put myself on the internet and I've found people who are interested in my life; Americans like reading about my life in another country, and Moldovans are interested to see what a foreigner thinks of their country. You can have just as many people reading your opinions and thoughts, and you can read about other people's lives, if you use the internet." I think that got my students' attention.

In all, I'm loving my time as the informatica teacher, even if it seemingly takes up every moment of my free time and keeps me at the school from 8:15 a.m. to 4 p.m. nearly every day. I have invested time and money into the computer lab, which is something that past informatica teachers haven't done. I was able to buy 10 CD-ROM drives for the lab for a total of $30, including shipping, while I was in America in December. I am upgrading the memory with chips that my dad sends me from the vast computer graveyard at our house. Slowly but surely, I am improving both the quality of the computers and of the students at my school. It wasn't my goal when I came to Moldova, but now it's become my niche.

I'm also publishing here my first ever web page written in Romanian. This is the first exercise in writing HTML that I gave to my 11th graders, in which I gave them the source code to enter in order to make this page. Their assignment is to find the names of several tags and name the ones that create, for example, lists or bold text. Then the students will write their own web pages based on my model. Later, the students' sites will expand to include photos, multiple pages, links to one another's sites and links to outside material. All of these pages will be published online as they are created.

Sunt dezamagit, dar trebuia sa stiu mai devreme

My school's computer lab came today, but not as it had been promised in October. Instead of a 10-computer classroom full of modern machines to replace our school's current ones from 1997, my school received a single computer, which they placed in the secretary's office.

I should have known better than to believe a document from this government.

Nobody may ever know what happened to the money and computers that were promised to my school. What disappoints me the most is not the fact that we didn't get what was promised to us, but the reaction of my school's principal and vice-principal.

"It's not what we were told was coming, but it's one and we're thankful for what we received," the vice-principal said. The principal had a similar opinion. I seemed to be the only one in the room of four people even closed to outraged.

"The county has a problem with finances," the principal said.

"The county has a problem with lying," I countered.

It's a disappointing day for me, but honestly, I was half-expecting it. October had been the first time in over a year of living in Mereseni that I had heard of the federal or county government helping my village in any way. Now that I know it was a lie, it all makes sense.

Calculatoarele noi vin degraba?

The laboratory full of new computers that my school won in October will arrive before February 1, according to a talk show on state television that focuses on education. I'll believe it when I see it.

In the meantime, I made some upgrades to the nine-year-old HP Vectra computers with 16 MB of RAM and 166 Mhz Pentium MMX processors. After spending a total investment of $60 at Fry's Electronics and on eBay and scrounging around the computer history museum that is my parents' house, I was able to equip each of the eight computers in the lab with 8x CD-ROM drives, the requisite IDE cables, and new motherboard batteries (when a motherboard battery runs out of juice, a computer can no longer remember the date and other important information when it is shut down).

These upgrades were cheap and should be effective. This is the first time the school computer lab has had CD-ROM drives. In introducing the CD-ROM drives, I was able to tell one of my favorite jokes, which translated easily to Romanian:

A man calls technical support and says his computer's broken just two days after he had bought it.

"What seems to be the problem with it, sir?"

"Well, I put my coffee mug in the cup holder, and it broke off."

It got a laugh in all of my classes. Maybe my sense of humor is getting better in Romanian.

The killer app that I'm trying to push on the kids is the CD-ROM encyclopedia. I showed each of my classes the 2000 Compton's Encyclopedia in English, and they were impressed with the possibilities, especially because the only encyclopedias that the school has, according to my 8th grade students, are from the Soviet times. One of my students has offered to bring in his CD-ROM encyclopedia from home, a 2006 edition in Russian. A Russian encyclopedia is more useful at the school than an English one, because nearly all the students understand Russian, as opposed to the approximately 10 percent of the students who understand English.

Of course, maybe we'll get an internet connection with this new computer lab. Then we'll have access to Wikipedia, at which point the possibilities are endless.

But will the new computer lab come? As the Moldovans say, "Vom trai si vom vedea." We'll live and we'll see.

O surpriza la primaria

Since summer, I have wanted to invite a non-governmental organization, Noi Perspective pentru Femei (New Perspectives for Women) to begin seminars in my village. The organization works with the disadvantaged, orphans and young women, teaching them about some of the unpleasant realities of working abroad, and building up their ability to be employed or start their own business here in Moldova. New Perspectives for Women is funded by both the Winrock Foundation and by USAID, and its funding allows it to conduct these seminars free of charge. The only thing they need before conducting a series of seminars are some statistics about the village.

That was why I went to the primaria, or mayor's office, on Monday. I spoke with the secretary, Tatiana, and asked her for the number of girls in the village aged 16-24, the total number of orphans and the approximate number of girls and young women aged 16-35 who are currently abroad. Tatiana was happy to help, but said it would take a few days; she would have to sort through the village's 12 record books for this year and calculate these statistics by hand.

"That takes a lot of time," I said. "It'll be much easier in two or three years when you have a computer in the office."

"Actually, we have one now," Tatiana said. "We bought it two weeks ago, but we haven't installed it yet."

I did a double-take that would have made a Saturday-morning cartoon character proud.

"You have a computer?" I asked, astonished. "Can I see it?"

Tatiana took me into the mayor's office and showed me the computer boxes. While I didn't plug it in to find out exact specifications, it looked promising. The computer was assembled by hand, not in a factory, and included several USB 1.1 ports, a floppy disk drive, sound and a 52x CD-ROM drive. This thing wasn't going to play Doom 3 at 100 frames per second, but it was powerful enough to crunch through Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and Access databases.

Without even thinking of how it would work into my schedule, I offered to teach all five primaria employees how to use the computer. Other volunteers, namely Brad Dakake, have had a lot of success with computer classes at the primaria. Unlike teaching the kids, these women have already seen their counterparts in other villages using computers and know that computer skills will make their jobs much easier. Mereseni is the last village in the county to get a computer, but hopefully I can help them make up for lost time.

Until then, poor Tatiana will have to count up my statistics by hand. And I'll have to wait a week.

Calculatoare noi

When I showed up to the fields on Friday to help with the grape harvest, the school's geography teacher told me that the school was getting new computers. When I checked with my vice-principal, she confirmed that the school had won a county-wide contest for cleanliness and upkeep of facilities, and as a result is one of six schools in the county to receive a new computer classroom with 11 computers.

When my vice-principal told me the computers would be installed next week, I jumped up and down in the middle of the field and hugged her. Later in the day, I called my parents at different timesand received a "That's great!" from my mom and "No shit!" from my dad.

I'll have more details on the lab next week, but all I know so far is that my lab is changing from eight Pentium MMX 166 mhz machines (three of which are in disrepair) to 11 modern computers. I won't talk more about the possibilities until I know exactly what I have, but in the mean time, I'll wait with high hopes. At the very least, the computers will have CD-ROM drives.

Drum fara sfarsit

Recently I had to take my Apple PowerBook to a repair shop in Bucharest (no one knows how to repair them in Moldova) and also take four students on a field trip, all in the same extended weekend. Here's how the schedule went:

Friday:
3 p.m. I finish lunch in my village and hitchhike to Chisinau. 45 minutes of travel.
7 p.m. I depart by bus for Bucharest. The bus is packed, allowing me to sleep very little. A Russian translation of The Nutty Professor, starring Eddie Murphy, is playing on the bus TV.
10 p.m. In the bathroom at the border, a Portuguese man is trying to talk to a Moldovan. I ask him if he speaks English. He does, and we talk during our time at the border and at a later rest stop.

Saturday:
5:25 a.m. We arrive at the bus station in Bucharest after nearly 10 and a half hours on the bus. The sun hasn't risen yet. I look for a bathroom at the bus station, and sneak into one that may or may not be reserved for the shopkeepers next door. I use the bathroom, brush my teeth and take some pills, then open the door. I'm greeted by a middle-aged female shopkeeper, already yelling at me for using the bathroom. I apologize. She demands 5,000 Romanian lei, the equivalent of about 15 cents. I hand it to her. She continues to yell at me. The other shopkeeper starts yelling at me, too. Then a man who evidently also works at the shop yells at me for standing at the wrong entrance. I tell the first woman that I've given her her money and that she should shut up (using the polite form, of course), then walk away, yelling in Romanian to the sky, "I love you, Bucharest!"
6 a.m. The sun has risen, so I begin to make my way into the city. I have no idea where I am, so I start asking people how to get to the center of the city. My inability to understand the Bucharest accent and my inability to remember spoken directions in any language complicate things. After a couple of kilometers of walking and two bus rides, I arrive at Piata Unirii.
8 a.m. I get some money from an ATM and walk into a McDonald's. I buy a quarter-pounder with cheese and a cup of coffee; I only drink coffee about five times a year, but I'm pretty sure I need it right now.
8:20 a.m. Having finished my burger and coffee (what a disgusting-sounding combination), I stare vacantly at the flat-screen TV at the McDonald's, then go to the bathroom to change clothes and wash my face. I'm impressed and pleased that McDonald's offers such clean facilities, and I marvel for a few seconds that life has brought me to stand naked in a McDonald's bathroom in the capital of Romania.
8:40 a.m. The computer repair guys have asked me not to call them until 10 a.m., so I have some time to kill. I buy some credits for my Romanian cell phone account, then go to a MediaGalaxy electronics store. I spend about 30 minutes looking at nothing in particular, then look at my watch and realize that I have even more time before 10 a.m. So I spend a little more time browsing.
10 a.m. I call Tudor at NouMax and arrange for him to pick me up in his car at 11:15. I walk to the nearby park, sit on a bench, and take a nap.
11:10 a.m. Tudor picks me up in his car and takes me to the NouMax office, a small, cluttered apartment with five rooms and dozens of computers and pieces of gear around. Tudor agrees with my diagnosis of the laptop; a jammed CD/DVD drive and a power supply fried by a surge. We discuss Moldova, Romania and America, all in English.
12:30 p.m. Tudor drives me to the Peace Corps Romania office and they allow me in. There are no volunteers there, even though it's a Saturday; Romanian volunteers don't need or want to come into the capital as much as Moldovan volunteers, of whom there are usually 20 in Chisinau on a given weekend. I talk with one of the security guards for about an hour, then ask for directions to the metro system.
3 p.m. After eating shaorma and drinking a beer for lunch, navigating through the subway system to the Bucharest Mall and buying a donut, I buy my ticket for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest at the mall's movie theater. I doze off during the first 20 minutes, but wake up quickly enough to understand the movie and watch all the cool fights.
6 p.m. I arrive at the Bucharest train station and buy my ticket back to Chisinau. I have some time before the train leaves at 7:45, so I buy a hot dog and some snacks to eat on the train.
7:50 p.m. My train pulls out of the station.
7:51 p.m. Adrian, another NouMax employee, calls me on my cell phone and tells me that the replacement drive I need won't be ready for at least three weeks, so if I haven't left the city yet, I might want to come pick up my computer before getting on the train. Too late for that.
7:53 p.m. After I finish talking with Adrian, the man sharing a sleeper room in the car with me tells me in English that I speak English very well. "I hope so," I say. "I'm American." We talk for several hours before going to sleep.

Sunday:
8:20 a.m. My train arrives in Chisinau after more than 12 hours, and I head to the Peace Corps office to take a shower. I watch some TV and eat breakfast.
2 p.m. I take a bus back to Mereseni.
3 p.m. I arrive at my house, unpack my backpack and pack another bag, because my traveling isn't even close to finished.
4 p.m. I meet up with four of my ninth grade students, whom I am taking to the southern city of Cahul so they can take the FLEX entrance exam. FLEX is a U.S. State Department program that allows hundreds of high schoolers in former Soviet countries to attend high school in America for a year for free. The most convenient test location from our village is nearly three hours away by bus, so we are going down a day early and staying with Krista, another volunteer who has her own house.
4:45 p.m. The bus stops at our village and the students and I board.
6:45 p.m. I send Krista the following text message: "We just entered Cahul raion. We should be at the station pretty soon. It's a good thing, since my kids are getting a little antsy; one of them is giving the finger to caruta drivers we pass." A caruta, for the uninitiated, is a horse-drawn carriage.
7:05 p.m. We arrive in Cahul. Krista greets us and takes us to her house. We go out to a pizza parlor for dinner, where Krista shocks my kids and me by telling them that they need to speak English around her. After dinner we stop by an outdoor gathering, where hundreds of teenagers and young adults are dancing the hora to live traditional music. By the time I study the local steps, which are different from and more complicated than the standard Mereseni steps, and am confident enough to try, the music stops and the event ends.
9 p.m. We come back to Krista's house and the kids watch a Russian bootleg of Bridgett Jones 2 on Krista's laptop with Russian dubbing and English sub-titles. Krista and I hang out in the kitchen. Denis, one of the students, takes an immense liking to Krista's cat and calls it with the same high-pitched voice and baby-talk that Krista does.
11 p.m. Krista and I begin to enforce the kids' 11 p.m. bed-time, which is a welcome relief for me, not having slept much in the previous two nights. Diana, the only girl in the group, sleeps in Krista's bed and Krista takes the floor. The boys' room is a little more crowded; Denis and Victor share a double bed, Eugen has a sleeping bag and a thin mat on the ground, and I sleep on the floor between two blankets. This is the third night in a row that I've slept with a Moldovan within a meter of me. I'm going to enjoy my sleeping space when this trip is over.
11:15 p.m. The boys have gotten into bed, and Victor and Denis have begun to fight for space, wrestling and punching each other in the bed. Moldovan boys tend not to wear pajamas in early October, so the two boys are pushing each other around while wearing nothing but briefs. Every once in a while, their fighting is punctuated by either Victor falling out of the bed and landing within a foot of mine and Eugen's heads or Denis saying, "Hey, where are you putting your hand?!" I don't tell them to stop, partly because they'll settle down naturally and partly because it's really funny.
11:30 p.m. The boys finally quiet down and everyone is asleep within five minutes.

Monday:
7 a.m. The alarm clock on my cell phone goes off, and it's as if the boys had been waiting for the starter's pistol. They immediately get up, wash their faces and get dressed. Krista and I force them to eat something for breakfast, and I make scrambled eggs. It's the first meal I've ever cooked in Moldova. Krista leaves for school, and the kids and I play frisbee outside until Samantha, another volunteer in Cahul, picks us up and takes us to a different school for the FLEX test.
9 a.m. FLEX registration begins. Since I'm American, people automatically assume I know what's going on. I find the American, Dan, and the Moldovan, Gabriela, who are actually in charge, and they put me to work. The biggest challenge in my job is cutting applicants' photos to the proper size and gluing the pictures onto their application form. Actually, that's my entire job. Other than that, I spend my time talking to any kids who want to hang out with a native speaker. Some of the kids are really impressive, and I begin to realize how outclassed my kids probably are in this competition.
12:30 p.m. My students' turn comes, and they have 30 minutes to take the 20-question test. They finish the test and come out saying that they hadn't realized there was a second side of the test until it was too late. My guess, which is confirmed a week later, is that the students were told about the second part in English, but not every student's English level was high enough to understand.
1 p.m. My students and I meet Sam again and get some lunch. Since results won't be posted until 3 p.m., the kids ask me if they can go off exploring Cahul on their own. Diana wants to stay with some girls that she met, and the boys want to use the internet. In America, I would never allow the kids out of my sight in a city they'd never visited before. But for some reason it seems okay in Moldova. I tell them to meet me at the school at 3, and Sam and I get some ice cream.
3 p.m. I meet my students at the school as they're walking away. None of them passed the first stage. I have done a good job of prepping them for something like this, and they already know before I open my mouth what I'm going to say; "At least you tried, there's always next year, and hey, at least you got to see a new part of Moldova you'd never seen before." Diana, the student who had the highest hopes for herself, says that she'll try again at the more difficult Chisinau test center a month later, and says to the boys, "Did you see some of the English fanatics that were here today?" I realize only then that this trip has served another purpose; my students have seen how seriously some students at other schools take English.
4 p.m. We board the bus home. The kids and I are much more tired than we were on the way down, and all of us nap at some point during the ride home.
6:45 p.m. The bus drops us off in Mereseni, and I say goodbye to the kids.
7 p.m. I arrive back home, this time for good. I make some calculations. In the past 76 hours, I have traveled in a inter-city train or bus for 29.5 hours. That means that 38.8 percent of my previous three days were spent in some form of mass transit, not including private cars, subways systems or rutieras inside cities. I eat dinner and go to sleep early.

Calculator stricat

Because of computer problems, I won't be able to update my site very often in the coming weeks. Hopefully, everything will be resolved quickly. In the meantime, I'll be saving up material to write about on the weekends, when I can access the internet from Chisinau. Stay tuned.