Reforma la bacalaureat?

The year-end baccalaureate exam required for graduation from 12th grade is best known for two things: being too hard and being a hotbed for cheating and bribes. So imagine my surprise on Thursday afternoon when I talked to Irina, a girl from my village who is finishing 12th grade at a school in the county seat, and she told me that the Romanian subject test she had taken earlier in the day was both accessible and very hard for people to copy on.

Cheating on tests, I discovered early in my service, is epidemic in Moldovan schools. I have done my best to crusade against it in my own classroom, but I've always known that English was probably the only class in which students didn't regularly copy off of each other. After talking to Irina, I was hopeful that the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports had finally addressed a major problem in its system, but I didn't want to get my hopes up. On Thursday evening and Friday morning, I talked to my school's 11th graders about the test. (Like in many Moldovan villages, my school only goes to 11th grade, and students who finish 11th grade can take a slightly different version of the baccalaureate and continue to a trade school or a university. Starting next school year, universities will require students to finish 12th grades, meaning that students from my village must go to the county seat for 10th through 12th grades.) The 11th graders told me the same things Irina had told me earlier; the test was easier than they had expected, but there was almost no way to copy.

The bac used to be administered at each school by the school's own teachers. Teachers, wanting their students to succeed, turned a blind eye toward the rampant cheating, and would often even help the students in the middle of the test. The government tried to institute reforms last year, but schools and teachers complained, and the system remained as-is.

This year, however, the baccalaureate is only given in county seats. My students took a six km ride to Hincesti, along with all the other students their age in the county. Students were separated into rooms according to alphabetical order, so classmates with the last names Mititelu and Moscovici were in the same room, but they were surrounded by kids they didn't know, and their classmates with last names Colesnic and Chirita were far, far away. Also the tests were given by two teachers whom the students didn't know, and they were supervised by two observers from the Ministry of Education. This took away two important motivations for cheating; students wanting to help, feeling pressured to help, or expecting help from their classmates, and teachers having a personal stake in the results of the students in the room.

It seems to me that the Moldovan educational system has just taken a huge step forward. My 11th grade students, who know my feelings on this even though I never taught them English and I never gave them an informatica test, gave me some interesting reactions:

Tanea: "I was writing my essay, and this boy near me said something, and I realized he had been copying off me. I didn't know what to do. I covered my paper."

Nadea: "It was nice to worry about just my own test, not someone else's."

Iurie, in response to me saying that the changes were good for the future of Moldova: "Yeah, but they're not too good for me."

Dana: "It's hard to copy on the Romanian test, anyway, because if they see the same essay on two different tests, they'll just mark it zero. We'll see what happens on the math test."

I like Dana's pragmatic answer. Like everything else in this country, we'll just have to wait and see if these reforms are real, and if they'll stick around next year, or even next week. Until then, I'm smiling with cautious optimism.

Ultimul Sunet

Thursday was the most emotional day of my life since I left America in June 2005. It was the last bell ceremony at school, the end of my second and final school year in Moldova. I had been asked several days beforehand to make a short speech, but I had no idea how I would react as I read it, and I didn't know how the rest of the day would go.

I woke up at my regular time and got to the school by 8:30 a.m. I went upstairs to the second floor, and as I turned the corner toward my toward my two classrooms, I saw Ecaterina Ivanovna, the Romanian teacher, and Nina Ivanovna, the geography teacher. A wave of emotions hit me, and I knew I needed to hurry to the solitude of my classroom; if I could barely handle seeing two teachers, that didn't bode well for my speech in front of 250 students, more than half of whom have been my students for a year or more.

At 9 a.m., the ceremony started in the shade of the school's front garden. I was busy keeping the 8th graders quiet, which was especially important because the microphone wasn't working and a single noisy student could drown out anyone speaking in front.

After several awards were handed out, Mrs. Lucia, the chemistry teacher, introduced me. During her introduction, several of the 8th graders around me kept saying, "Stay another year, Mr. Peter," and, "You can't go."

I walked to the front and pulled my speech out of my pocket, saying that I was too nervous to remember a speech (which you can read here in Romanian or English). I tried to improvise a thank you that I hadn't written at the beginning of the speech, but I choked up and had to turn my back to the crowd for a few seconds. I got through the speech well, although my voice stuck in my throat numerous times. When I finished, students blitzed me with dozens of flowers. In total, I received at least 40 flowers, enough to fill both a vase and a five-liter bucket when I got them home.

The ceremony continued with presentations from the first graders who finished their first year and from the 9th and 11th graders, both of which are leaving our school. After the ceremony, a few more students gave me flowers, including one of my 8th grade girls who broke down in tears when she started thanking me. Students then went to their homerooms to receive their grades, and I retreated to my English classroom. I opened the door and one of the windows, letting a nice breeze through the room, and I sat on my desk next to the window with my feet on the radiator pipes, looking out over the front garden and thinking about my two years of work. American hip-hop music was blasting in the garden, which may not have been the most conducive to thinking, but was somehow fitting.

A half-hour later, everyone in the school gathered again on the front lawn for Children's Day, which is technically June 1, but we celebrated it a day earlier. There were contests for chalk drawings on the cement in front of the school, poetry readings, essay-writing (for the elementary school kids), singing and dancing. The winners received prizes of candy and boxes of chocolates. After the concert, the boys played more music and the teachers and kids danced. A handful of kids asked me to pose for pictures with them.

Some of my 7th- and 8th-grade boys asked me to come to the pond with them, and I gladly joined them. When we got there, the boys all stripped down to their skivvies and ran in. I didn't swim, but took off my shirt, socks and shoes and sat on the grass near the pond. When boys wanted a break from swimming, they'd come out and talk with me for a while. After an hour, I walked back with a few of the boys, including one who didn't feel the need to wear anything more than a t-shirt and his boxer briefs as he walked back into the village. I went home, ate some lunch, and took a quick nap before returning for the school dance that evening.

After checking whether the boys organizing the dance needed any help, I went over to a nearby bar to grab a beer. I was accompanied to the store by one of my 5th grade students, who was going there to buy gum. Not wanting to buy a beer alone in front of one of my students, I was glad when I saw Vasile, one of the school's groundskeepers. I bought us each a beer and some peanuts and we talked for about 45 minutes. I then went back to the school, where the dance was starting to pick up momentum.

The boys had set up the speakers and sound system outside so that we could have the dance in front of the school. The weather was perfect for dancing, but the outdoor setting made my students and graduates think that it was acceptable to smoke at the dance. I had three ways of dealing with the kids, depending on their age; with the 11th graders and boys who had already graduated in years past, I told them to smoke on the road, not at the school. With my 8th graders who were smoking, I took the cigarettes out of their hands and stomped them out. (One of my 8th graders apologized and told me, in English, "Mr. Peter, I'm only smoking when I'm drunk." The fact that that was an acceptable rationale in his mind tells me there is a fundamental problem with attitudes toward alcohol and tobacco.)There was one other guy, about my age, who was not from the village and kept saying, "Show me the rule that I can't smoke at the school." I stood within two inches of his face, puffed out my chest, and harassed him in both Romanian and English for about three minutes until he put out his cigarette; if he wanted to be a jerk, I wasn't going to let my kids see me cave in to him, and I wasn't going to let him enjoy his smoke.

The dance was scheduled to end at 11:30 p.m., but we teachers were lenient and let the kids play music until midnight, on the one condition that it be Moldovan music so that we could dance the hora. When the dance finally ended, a handful of teachers stayed at the school and talked with Doichita, the security guard. Teachers repeatedly told me, "Don't forget us."

I finally got home at 12:45, happy to go to bed after a long day full of memories.

Ce am spus la Ultimul Sunet (in romana)

This is the speech that I gave at the last bell ceremony at my school in Mereșeni on May 31, 2007. I'm sure my Romanian isn't perfect, but this is how I said it.

90 de ani în urmă, un scriitor american, Robert Frost, a scris o poezie care se numește "Drumul Neluat". Se începe așa:

Două drumuri s-au separat într-o pădure galbenă,
Și parîndu-mi rău că nu puteam să merg pe ambele
Și să fiu un călător, mult timp am stat.

Doi ani în urmă, eu am stat, gândându-mă la viitor, vădând două drumuri: un drum în America, cu o viață cunoscută și comodă, și un alt drum în Moldova, o țară străină în care nu aș știe limba, nu aș fi alături de familie și prieteni, și aș primi o zecime de salariu. Trebuia să aleg un singur drum. Ați putea să spuneți că eu am luat drumul neasfaltat.

21 de luni în urmă, am stat aici cu voi prima dată în fața școlii. Pentru voi, eu am fost un străin, și pentru mine, voi ați fost mai multe de 250 de fețe necunoscute. Dar incet, incet, am învățat numile tuturor elevilor mei. Voi repede v-ați deprins cu metoda mea de predare, și din cauza ospitalității voastre, după numai câteva luni m-am simțit ca acasă.

În al doilea an, am avut noroc să vă învăț și informatică. Mi-a plăcut să vă văd folosind calculatorul, înțelegînd un instrument care, pentru mulți din voi, a fost ceva nou în viață. Mi-a plăcut tot să vorbim la lecție în limba voastră că să știu mai bine personalitățile voastre. Sunt mulți copii și adolescenți minunați aici în școală, și sunt mulțumit că am putut să vă cunosc.

M-am uitat aseară la câteva poze din anul școlar trecut, și nu mi-a venit încredere cât de mult v-ați schimbat. În pozele mele, Denis Boincean este un baiățel mic și nedisciplinat, dar anul acesta s-a slăbit la față, s-a crescut, și a fost un lider adevărat la lecții de informatica, dar tot rămâne puțin șmecher. Ion Cătană din pozele mele este un elev pe care îl dedeam afară în aproape fiecare zi, dar anul acesta el întotdeaună facea tema pe acasă și leniștia clasa când era gălăgioasă. Când eu am sosit în sat, Tanea Cazanji și Doina Bufteac erau fete liniștite și pasive, dar s-au transformat în timpul de doi ani că să fie două din cele mai active eleve. Mă uit la elevii din clasa a 6a și îmi pare că toți s-au crescut cel puțin trei centimetri.

Acestea sunt numai câteva exemple de schimbările care am văzut în doi ani de zile. Fiecare din voi s-a crescut, s-a maturizat, a avut experiențe și bune și rele, și a învățat multe lucruri noi despre viață.

Când mă gândesc la toate lucrurile care eu am învățat de când am venit aici, mă gândesc la poezia aceea, a lui Robert Frost, despre două drumurile într-o pădure. Frost a terminat poezia cu cuvintele acestea:

Două drumuri s-au separat într-o pădure, și eu--
Eu l-am luat pe acela mai puțin călătorit,
Și asta a contat cel mai mult.

Eu nu am luat drumul mai ușor, dar mă bucur acum pentru că pe drumul acela am sosit în satul acesta și la școala aceasta, care adevărat a devinit a doua casă a mea. Dacă nu aș fi luat drumul mai greu, mai puțin călătorit, nu aș fi ajuns aici niciodată, și niciodată nu aș fi făcut cunoștință cu toți voi.

Peste aproape două luni, m-întorc în America. O să-mi fie dor de voi, și o să vă țin minte întotdeaună. Vreau să vă rog un singur lucru: să nu uitați cuvintele lui Robert Frost. Lumea este foarte mare, și voi o să aveți mai multe drumuri posibile în viață voastră decât parinții și bunicii voștri au acum. Sper că voi întotdeaună veți lua drumul mai puțin călătorit. Eu așa am făcut, și asta a contat cel mai mult.

Vă mulțumesc de nou că m-ați facut mereu că să mă simt acasă, și vă doresc mulți ani de învățămănt, sănătate, bucurie, și succes. Mulțumesc.

Ce am spus la Ultimul Sunet (in engleza)

This is the speech that I gave at the last bell ceremony at my school in Mereșeni on May 31, 2007.

90 years ago, an American writer, Robert Frost, wrote a poem called "The Road Not Taken". It starts like this:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood...

Two years ago, I stood, thinking of the future, seeing two roads: one road in America, with a familiar and comfortable life, and another road in Moldova, a foreign country in which I wouldn't know the language, wouldn't be near my family and friends, and would receive a tenth of the salary. I had to choose a single road. You could say that I took the road unpaved.

21 months ago, I stood here with you for the first time in front of the school. For you, I was a foreigner, and for me, you were more than 250 new faces. But slowly, slowly, I learned all my students' names. You quickly adjusted to my teaching methods, and because of your hospitality, I felt at home after only a few months.

In the second year, I was lucky enough to also teach you informatica. I enjoyed seeing you using computers and understanding a tool that, for many of you, was something new in life. I also liked that we spoke your language in class, so that I could better know your personalities. There are a lot of wonderful kids and teenagers here at this school, and I'm thankful that I could know you.

Last night I looked at some pictures from the last school year, and I couldn't believe how much you have all changed. In my pictures, Denis Boincean is a little boy without any discipline, but this year his face is thinner, he's taller and he has been a true leader in computer class; but he's still a little bit of a punk. The Ion Cătană in my pictures is a student whom I used to kick out of my class nearly every day, but this year he always did his homework and quieted down the class when it was too noisy. When I arrived in the village, Tanea Cazanji and Doina Bufteac were quiet and passive girls, but they've transformed over the course of two years to be two of the most active students in class. I look at the 6th graders, and I think all of them have grown at least three centimeters.

These are just a few examples of the changes I've seen in two years. Each of you has grown, has matured, has had experiences both good and bad, and has learned many new things about life.

When I think of all the things I've learned since I came here, I think of that poem by Robert Frost about the two roads in a forest. Frost ended his poem with these words:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I didn't take the easier road, but I'm glad now because the road I took lead me to this village and this school, which has truly become a second home for me. If I had not taken the more difficult road, the road less traveled by, I would never have come here, and I would never have met all of you.

In about two months, I'm returning to America. I will miss you, and I will always remember you. I want to ask you to do one single thing: Don't forget the words of Robert Frost. The world is huge, and you will have many more roads open to you than your parents and grandparents had. I hope that you always take the road less traveled. I did, and it has made all the difference.

Thank you again that you always made me feel at home, and I wish you many years of education, health, happiness and success. Thank you.

Nu mai scriu nici o singura nota

Monday, 2:30 p.m. I walk into my school's vice-principal's office, hand her the 5th grade class register, and with a smile and over-dramatic timing, declare, "Never again in my life will I write another grade in this country."

It's been over a year since I've written about The Catalog, the pale blue grade book for each class that must contain a detailed listing of every lesson taught in every subject and every grade given to every student. The Catalog, which was mysteriously renamed The Register this year in a change that only I seem to have noticed, must be written in with a particular pen and must be constantly updated with handwritten entries. Failure to constantly update The Catalog, I have discovered, is the fastest way to alienate your coworkers and get everyone at the school ticked off at you.

But it doesn't matter any more. On Monday, I finished writing all of my grades—I needed to write them for about 140 students in two subjects in eight classes for a total of 12 sections to complete. That included pulling some of my failing informatica students out of their classes to complete an assignment so that they'd have a passing grade. There were also several students who were in The Catalog that I didn't even know, but their homeroom teachers begged me to give them a passing grade. I protested for a minute or two with both of the teachers who asked me, but I caved in. After all, what do I care if a kid with a tough situation at home gets a 4 or a 5 in my class?

I could complain more about The Catalog. I could praise the American system, in which teachers provide progress reports to the school, students and parents every six weeks and don't need to detail every lesson that they teach and every grade they give. But what's the point? Instead, I can stay positive, because never again will I have to write another grade in those stupid blue books.

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.

Ce facem cu elevii buni?

The widely accepted theory in American schools is that students who act out are doing it largely for the attention that they think notoriety will bring them. That's why in American schools, students with failing grades or poor behavior are dealt with on a personal level and are rarely rewarded with attention in front of the entire class. On the other hand, students in America who behave well and receive good grades are praised and encouraged by everything from stickers in elementary school to citizenship awards in middle school to trophies in high school. This system isn't perfect, but it is relatively successful based on one principal: students must understand that misbehaving will isolate them from their peers, but demonstrating excellent behavior and doing well academically will earn them praise in front of their classmates.

Contrast that with what is practiced at my school and, based on conversations I've had, most others in Moldova. At every Monday's school assembly, the class that served as hall monitors for the previous week presents its behavior summary in front of the entire school. The student representative, in either 8th, 9th or 11th grade, names a handful of students who misbehaved in the hall during the week. Those students are forced to step forward and, so the theory goes, face the judgment and condemnation of their teachers and peers.

If we were still in the politically charged atmosphere of Soviet Union, being branded as a problem child in school would taint a student's entire life. A student would be so ashamed of not being a good Pioneer that he would quickly conform to the system. The problem is that the Soviet Union ended over 15 years ago. At my school, the same handful of boys are pulled to the front of the assembly every week, and they're often smiling. The teachers yell at them for misbehaving, and the boys either deny that they did anything wrong or come back with a quip that makes the entire student body laugh. One of the more vociferous teachers will then attempt to belittle the misbehaving student, but the comment usually comes across as a flustered raising of the white flag, and all of the students laugh even more. I have seen this over and over, and I have concluded that this system is fundamentally broken. The misbehaving boys are being rewarded with attention, and they don't seem to mind that it's negative.

Sometimes my school gets it right. A month ago, the principal picked several students out of the assembly to show how students should dress for school, with a collared shirt and ironed pants or a skirt. The students up front felt that they were being rewarded for doing something right (even if it was for something as materialistic as wearing the proper clothes), and the next day, the majority of students came to school better dressed than they had the previous day.

In my own classroom, I've tried to emphasize rewards over punishments. My attempt in September and October to give students detention didn't work because I didn't have time to enforce it after school (instead, I keep the computer lab open for kids to work in, which I think is far more useful than detention in the long run). So since my punishments lack teeth, I've relied on rewards to coax students away from the Dark Side.

Every month, I give an award for the student of the month in each of my six English classes, choosing students who impressed me during the previous month through a combination of grades, effort, attendance or the respect that they showed their classmates. I take their pictures and post them on the wall, and they can choose a prize from the prize table, which offers everything from Fruit Roll-Ups to Swiss Miss hot chocolate to lanyard bracelets to their own personalized mix CD of English-language music (by far the most popular choice). I always say what the student did to impress me, and then I ask three other students to tell me what the student of the month did to earn the award.

In my seventh and eighth grade classes, the good students take their award in stride. The medium-level students who don't normally receive awards but are singled out for their effort that month stand up and pick their prize with a proud smile. My fifth and sixth graders, on the other hand, get excited when the month is coming to an end, and I can usually milk a week of good behavior out of those classes at the end of the month by saying, "I still haven't picked the student of the month for this month. Anyone can still win, and I'm watching extra carefully trying to decide who it will be." Almost universally, a medium-level student who wins student of the month has an even stronger month after winning.

I've also had success with my "Race to 50," a system of incentives that gives classes points for perfect homework participation, perfect attendance and respect. Classes can also lose points if three or more students are late for class or don't do their homework, or if the class doesn't quiet down when I start counting to three. When a class reaches 50 points, they win a party during class time, complete with card games, English-language music, soda, cookies and candy. (The fifth and sixth grades had their first parties today, at 8:30 and 9:15 a.m. I almost never use caffeine, so drinking soda and eating candy for an hour and a half in the morning nearly killed me.) Classes like to compare themselves to one another to see which are the best-behaved, and they love the party. They also force the boys who normally would cut class to come, just so they can get the extra point for perfect attendance, and they get indignant toward students who don't come to class on time or don't do their homework.

The American system is not perfect, and I will never defend it as being perfect. I've never heard of a gun being fired in a Moldovan school, and there have only been one or two serious fights at my school in the past year and a half, compared to America, where both of these things are frighteningly common. But the Moldovan system needs to emphasize the good qualities in its exemplary students instead of making a circus atmosphere every Monday and showering attention on a handful of punks.

Last week, my school's ninth-grade homeroom teacher announced to the faculty that she would be holding a parent-teacher meeting later that week. "So if you have any problems that you need to tell the parents about, come to the meeting," she said.

"Well, can we come and say anything good?" I said with a smile.

No one deemed my question worthy of a response.

Un "chinez"

As a white guy who wears boots, pants, a coat and a hat that all conform to the Moldovan norm, I get none of the strange looks that some other Peace Corps volunteers get when they walk around. That's why I was shocked, but not surprised, by what happened when Scott, a Peace Corps volunteer who was born in America to Korean immigrant parents, visited my school last week.

Because my students had been studying journalism, I had invited Scott to be interviewed by some of my top eighth-grade students for a profile they were writing for our one-issue English newspaper. I only had two classes that day, so I met him at the school in the late morning. I knew that for just about every student at the school, Scott would be the first Asian they had ever seen; still, I wasn't prepared for their reaction.

The bell rang, and the students flooded into the hall for their 10-minute break. My sixth-grade students came into the classroom to drop off their backpacks, and they stopped dead in their tracks when they saw Scott standing next to my desk. Girls stood 10 feet away and giggled. Boys stood in the doorway and stared. I described the scene to Scott as he had his back turned.

"It's okay," he said. "I'm used to it. It happens everywhere I go. I don't mind when kids do it, because they've never seen anyone like me. It just bothers me when adults act the same way." On the plus side, none of the students pulled their eyes back to slits, which is an inexplicably rude and offensive gesture that seems to be obligatory whenever a Moldovan describes an Asian.

At the beginning of class with my sixth grade, I allowed my students to ask Scott questions. They stuck to cookie-cutter questions, such as, "How old are you?" and "Who is your best friend?" After answering a handful of them, Scott sat in the back of the class and observed.

After that lesson, I had a free period. I took Scott next door to see the computer lab, where we discussed computer games from the late '90s, a subject in which Scott is well-versed—some Asian stereotypes have truth behind them.

Next was my 8b class, which asked Scott questions for about 15 minutes. The questions were wide-ranging, from "Do you smoke?" and "Do you like the Chicago Bears?" to "What are your parents' names?" and "What is Shao Lin?" Questions about Shao Lin and whether Scott spoke Chinese were based on stereotypes, but Scott was happy to deflect them, and in some ways affirm them, since he speaks some Korean and did a small amount of martial arts as a child. The kids came away learning something new about a kind of person they had only seen before in action movies.

Then came my 8a class, specifically the group of girls who were ready to interview Scott. They talked to him for the full 45 minutes of class time, and then continued the discussion for a few more minutes. Their questions were generic enough to ask any American working in Moldova, since I had told them only that they would be interviewing a Peace Corps volunteer. During the interview, I threw in a couple questions about what it was like looking different in Moldova, and I think Scott's answers made a small effect on the girls. It surprised them, for example, that Scott was stopped by Moldovan police 13 times in 2006, including once when he was hauled off and interrogated (thankfully, he's now on a three-month streak free of harassment).

I saw Scott off, feeling that I had exposed my students to something new, and hoping that meeting someone with Asian heritage who didn't know karate or how to speak Chinese had challenged some of their assumptions.

The next day, one of my sixth-grade girls bounded into my classroom and asked, "Mr. Peter, is the Chinese man going to be here today, too?"

"Did he say he was Chinese?" I asked. "No, he said he was American."

The girl merely shrugged and laughed. "I don't know. He looked Chinese."

Perhaps my expectations were too high.

Folclor

I often have dreams in which I have to go onstage, not knowing the plot of a play or the words of any of its songs. In my dreams, I'm never that worried about not knowing what I'm doing; I just go up and do my best.

During today's school play about Moldovan traditions, my dream of unpreparedness became real, and I totally winged it.

The play, as I had gathered from attending only one rehearsal, centered on a husband and wife, played by two 9th-grade students, as they hosted a party for dozens of friends, who sat in a circle, knitted, told jokes and sang songs, "just like in the old days". My part was to sit on a stool close to the hosts, have a short, unscripted dialogue with the wife, and then lead that dialogue into a song that I would sing solo with accordion and flute accompaniment. Later, I would dance the hora with everyone else in the final number.

The song was the least of my worries. I had sung "Buna Seara, Mandro, Buna" many times before, even in the exact same assembly hall that I would sing it in today. But other than the three minutes in which I would sing my song, what else was I going to do on stage? I asked my school's principal, Mrs. Maria, who was also the stage director for the play, this exact question less than one hour before the performance. It didn't seem to bother her that in the 20 minutes between my entrance at the beginning of the play and the time when I sang my song, I had nothing to do and didn't know any of the words to any of the songs the kids were singing. If it didn't bother her, it didn't bother me.

In the fourth minute of the play, I made my entrance, Mrs. Maria feeding me my line two seconds before I needed to say it: "Will you welcome me, too?" I sat down next to the hosts, certain that even though I was sitting on a low stool, I was still blocking the audience's line of sight to several of the 7th, 8th, and 9th-grade girls who were sitting on a table behind me.

Each of the 25 girls in the circle—compared with four boys—was holding some sort of knitting work or another item that you can find in a Moldovan home economics classroom. The kids traded scripted jokes, stories, riddles and tongue-twisters, and joined together several times to sing songs. Even though all of my theatrical experience was in school, choir and church productions and ended before I entered high school, I knew what I was supposed to do in this situation: realize that anyone could be looking at me at any given time, always turn toward whoever was speaking, and mouth fake words to any song that the kids sang so that it wasn't obvious that I didn't know the words. I did that much well.

Then it came time for my big scene. Diana, the 9th-grade host, stood and asked me several questions:

"Mr. Peter [even though everything else was in Romanian, she still said, 'Mr. Peter'], in the time that you've lived here, what traditions have you liked?"

"I've enjoyed all the food in Moldova, and I like how you sing and dance."

"Have you learned any of our traditions?"

"Well, I've learned how to dance in the Moldovan style, and also how to sing Moldovan songs."

"Could you sing us one this evening?

"No problem."

I stood up, the accordion started, and I began to sing.

It was not my best performance of the song, because I have three very memorable performances of it under my belt: once at the Peace Corps Swearing-In ceremony with the other guys from my summer training village in my first three months of living in Moldova; another at last year's school alumni dinner, where we were all a little liquored up; and last summer, when I was vacationing in Romania with my sister and a friend and surprised them one night by performing it with the musicians at a restaurant in Brasov.

It wasn't my best performance, but it was the one during which I thought the most. In the song, the singer says goodbye to his love as they see each other for the last time before he joins the army for two years. When I learned the song at the beginning of my two years of service, the lyrics hit me personally, as I had just left America and for two years would be away from the people and country that I love. But as I faced an audience full of students, over 150 of which I teach at least one subject and sang the words, "I leave you with goodwill, because I'm leaving you today," I nearly choked up as I realized that the tables had turned. Mereseni was no longer my two-year assignment; it was the home that I would be leaving in less than six months. I settled myself, sang the final two verses, and received applause as I returned to my seat on stage.

The kids continued the play with other songs, me mouthing the words the whole time. After my solo, however, Mrs. Maria seemed to have noticed that I didn't have anything to do. She told one of my 7th graders who was sitting behind me to give me her ball of yarn. For the rest of the performance, I held the yarn that Vica was knitting with, slowly un-spooling it so she would have enough to work with; whenever I didn't feed her the yarn fast enough, she would tug on the yarn to get my attention, and I would continue giving her material to work with.

Then the final dance came. The older students left the stage to dance in front of it, leaving the younger students to dance in their own circle on stage. Since I am much closer in height to my 7th, 8th and 9th graders, I assumed I would dance with them. Mrs. Maria had a different idea; she and I would stay on the stage and be partners in a circle with the younger students. As we organized ourselves into pairs, Nadia, one of my 5th graders, came up to Mrs. Maria and said that she didn't have a partner.

"Then you'll just dance alone," Mrs. Maria said.

"Or I can dance with her," I said, resigning my principal to be a wallflower.

"Okay, good," Mrs. Maria said. I joined hands with Nadia on my right side and another student on my left, and the music started.

Nadia and I danced well together, even though her head barely came up to the same level as my chest. She also kept coughing a very wet cough every 10 seconds or so, and I made a mental note to wash my hands extra-thoroughly before I ate lunch.

The performance ended, and I had done it; I had participated in a Moldovan village school play, by no means a goal which I had set out for myself two years ago. It was not a crowning achievement of my time here, but it was fun. Most importantly, I realized today, more than I ever had realized before, that in a short amount of time, I'm going to miss this place.

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.

Fotbal american

As a native Chicagoan and life-long Bears fan, I'm very excited about the Super Bowl this sunday, where my Bears will take on the Indianapolis Colts. It's not the first time the Bears have been in the Super Bowl in my lifetime, but I was only two years old when they won in 1986, so my memory is a little foggy. I'll be in Chisinau watching the game in a secret location, although there are only so many secret locations in Chisinau that receive the Armed Forces Network, so you can probably figure out where I'll be.

Friday, I wore my Bears sweater to school and wrote "Go Bears!" on the chalkboards in both my English and informatica classrooms. I told each class about the game, and offered them one extra credit point if they came to school Tuesday and could tell me the score of the game. Why extra credit in informatica? Because the only way for them to know the score is to do a Google search of the team names, and that shows some technical savvy.

Also, before I let each class use the computers, I made the kids yell, "Go Bears!" with me several times. Some of the students looked at me like I was an idiot, but others really got into it. During passing periods throughout the day, boys would come up to me, and say, "Mr. Peter!" When I turned to face them, they would put both their fists in the air and say, "Go Bears!"

Judoisti la scoala

For more than a year, a handful of my students had been telling me that they practiced judo in nearby Hincesti. I didn't know until today that two of them are some of the best judoists in Eastern Europe.

At an assembly today, Eugen Vreme, and 8th grader, and Mihail Brinzeanu, a 7th grader, received the well-earned praise from their fellow students because they brought home first and seventh place, respectively, in an international judo competition in Kyiv, Ukraine.

The competition, the Olympic Hopes Tournament, featured boys and girls from 14 countries, mostly in Eastern Europe but also including Israel, Greece and Great Britain. In Eugen and Mihail's under-46 kg weight class, there were 34 boys. Our boys not only made our village proud, but they should make the entire country proud; Eugen was the only Moldovan in the entire tournament to win gold.

How do two village kids from the poorest country in Europe end up representing their country so well? Well, it helps that Mihai and Ilie Buiuc are their trainers. The Buiuc brothers were students of Vasile Colta, and became some of the USSR's best judoists in the 1970s. They took over Colta's studio later, and now train boys and girls from all over Hincesti county.

Eugen received the boatload of the praise today at the assembly, from teachers, the director and students who make appreciated "ooohs" and "aaahs" when they saw his trophy and medals. Eugen, who is normally incredibly talkative in my class, for better or worse, was taciturn in the face of praise; he answered questions that his teacher and a student interviewer asked him about judo, but never expounded on anything. Judo has certainly taught him humility.

The school director closed by making an excellent point; she had looked at both boys' grades from last semester and was happy to report that both boys had excellent grades. Judo hasn't affected their success at school. If anything, it has probably made them even more disciplined and focused.

I already thought highly of these two boys, but now I respect them even more. Especially because they can probably beat me up.

Olimpiada

Tuesday was the English Olympiad at our school, a competition that will choose a handful of students to represent our school at the county-wide competition in Hincesti. Fourteen students in 7th, 8th, 9th and 11th grades competed. Each class had its own essay topic, and the students had 35 minutes to write their essays. Since I haven't showcased student work for a long time, I thought I'd type some of the 7th- and 8th-grade essays to share with you. I hope you notice both the level of English that some of our school's best students possess, and also some of the thoughts that are in the minds of 13- and 14-year-old students, paying extra attention to the cultural leanings toward America, Russia, Romania and Moldova.

7th grade: Write about an imaginary trip anywhere in the world. Where will you go? What will you do?

First prize:
I will would to trip in America, this is one of my the bigest dreams. America is ones of the bigest country in the world. I want to visit the schools of America, the Statue of Liberty. For mee the most important will be to tack with people and with children of America. I think will have a very good opinions about their people, I now what in America live very interesting and nice people. If I will go in America I think my life would change only in the good thinks, but for this dreams I will be learn very good and menny, if I will learn good I will now very good language. I think in America will be a new life with a new friends with new people. In my dreams America is the most beautiful country. Every time I think how is atmosfera in America? How is vegetation, the people are a bed or a good than Moldova.

Second prize:
I visited city Boston then citys very big and very nice. In Boston very big houses and very biutyful. Boston in sud U.S.A., and then very nice people. Then are many rivers and likes. I go to the my friends Julia and Robert. They live in the very biutyful house and very comftable. Then I visited friends Julias and Roberds and very many markets and unyversity. I to mith very many good people. I did very mach friends nice. Then was very nice cat and doogs. I am happy because I go to the citys Boston and vizited this is a citis. I keep this is a trip because was very beutyful and intersting trip.

Third prize:
I like very much my countries. She is a wonderful for we. World is a very imaginary trip in we heart. France is one my prefered countries. In world I will and I visited Turnu Eifel and for me is a beautiful city Paris. In Franta I will do go in library, in university, in school, in governament and at distraction parc. I have many friends and colegi, they are ingenios, good and super friends.
Anglia is a big countrie. In she are a good people. In Anglia I will be go at my friend and I visited lie, mountains, rivers and etc. I go in the world and world for me is a enigma, for me world very important lesson. I visited in world the art, muzeu. I will do read book. In America I spoking wit Britney Spears and Madona. Britney is a good musician and Madona is a good mother.
I like very much world how is he.

8th grade: Describe someone who is a good role model. Why did you choose this person?

First prize:
I think that Angelina Jolie is the best women in the world. She really deserve to be called "a role model". Angelina is a beautiful women, a very good actrice and a wonderful mother. She adopted 2 kids from diferent countries. Now the poor baby and the young boy have all the chanses to live better. A. Jolie donated a lot of money for people with disabilities and for children from poor countries. And that's not all. She is alwais ready to help if that is necesary. It is very good that even Angelina look like a model, she is a role mode, to. When exist more persons like he world will become a little better. I choos her because maybe she is a ideal person.

Second prize:
A role model is that person who donated something for peoples who need help. I think that Angelina Jolie is a real good role model. She is thinking at that persons who don't have conditions to live anywere. Angelina Jolie have a family who need to live, and need money, but she donated her money to children hwo have a family in Africa. Also Jolie had visited children from any country. Why did she do this? The answer at this question is simple: maybe Angelina also in the past when she was a child, was very bad conditions. I would say that any person who know her should do like her. I chose Angelina Jolie because nobody who are actors didn't that many donations for people in the world. Maybe it isn't true, but this is my opinion.

Third prize:
I thinc a good role model is Stefan Cel Mare in the past became to was a king at 20 years and he was'nt very tall and very muscle but he was a very curajous and smart. He won 39 wars and lose only 2. He sayd "Moldova wasn't ours, not our sons, it were our future people. He is a very good role model and very good king. He has a 7 wifes and 11 children but only one wife was legaly. He protect our country at other countries. He was a very good warior. He made our country how it look like nou. I chose him because he was a very good and loves his country and he was friendly with other countries which was friendly with his country. And I like this tactic. He take people to war and he give them very mych land.

Honorable mention:
I think the role model is the president Russia, is Vladimir Putin because he help people with money. He have a good wife and two girls. He is very good president because he help every contrys with gaz.
For every president he is a good model. He is a good politician and speak with people with respect. Vladimir Putin have and a bad role but is very short. For him life is a respect and reciprocaly help. This president likes the life. In Russia are many posibilitys will be a better child and people are very hapy. In Russia people like hims president because he did for hims many good things.
Maybe this president for me is a nice men. He looked very good and he have a happy family. To be a good model is necesarry be a good men, to respected every children mens and womens, to help people and to looked very nice.

Honorable mention:
I thing that a good role person is Mihai Eminescu. He is a good role because he writed a good poez. He writed: "Luceafarul," "Codrule," "Sona pe deal," etc. He had a good friend Ion Creanga. He tired in 1891 summer in iulie. He was a good man.

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.

Eu stiu cum putem sa-l ajutam

One of my fifth grade students came to all three lessons last week without his homework done and without his notebook and textbook. Today, I noticed that he had done at least half of his homework, and I mentioned it to him as he left the classroom.

"I'm glad that you tried to do your homework today," I said in Romanian. "For tomorrow's class, finish it all and come with your book, too."

"Okay," he said, and then he left.

"Mr. Peter," said one of my stronger students, "I know a way that we can help him do his homework."

"Really?" I said as the rest of the students left and only the student with the great idea remained. "What can we do?"

He hurriedly explained his plan, which I didn't fully understand, but I grasped that there was some kind of writing things down on a loose-leaf sheet of paper.

"I didn't understand your idea," I said as I sat down in a student's chair to lower myself to the student's eye level. "Could you repeat it, please?"

"We can write the homework out on a piece of paper, then give him the sheet and he can copy the homework."

Great plan, kid.

"I'm glad that you're thinking about helping your classmate, but that's not a good way to do it. Does that really help him?" I asked. "What does he learn if he just copies? Nothing. You only learn if you do the work yourself, and if he starts copying in fifth grade, he will never learn how to do his own work."

I noticed that the student's gaze was drifting up and to his left. Was it because he was slightly embarrassed at his plan being shot down, or was it because he considered my concept of academic honesty quaint? Either way, I decided to wrap it up.

"So now you've heard my opinion, and I hope you understand why it's not a good idea to have your classmate copy from you," I said.

I really do hope he understood. But what impact can 30 seconds of discussion have on my student's mind when he sees copying as a legitimate way of "help" in all his other classes?

Antrenement

Although I am the co-organizer of the Peace Corps national basketball league this year, I had ruled out coaching a team for the 2007 season. Last year, I hadn't felt necessary in "practice," which was really just a scrimmage every night. I enjoyed hanging around with the kids, but in the end, I felt that they didn't care about playing in the league and that the whole experience wasn't fulfilling to me. As I approached my second school year, in which my schedule seems more packed (maybe it's teaching 50 percent more hours and also trying to learn Russian), I had given up basketball for this year.

That was before three girls from the neighboring village of Sarata Galbena showed up outside my classroom one afternoon and offered a challenge on behalf of themselves and the boys' team. Sarata Galbena had a volunteer last year, and Casey and I organized exhibition games in each village and Peace Corps league matches in Hincesti. I told Silvia, the English-speaking team manager, that I would talk to students and see if they were interested.

When I asked the ninth and 11th graders Wednesday, they responded enthusiastically and agreed to start practicing at the gym on Thursday night (when the 11th graders already had extra sports training).

I wasn't sure how to approach this new year of basketball. I didn't want it to be laid-back like last year, but I didn't want to make it too strict. Other than sports class at English camp this summer, I had never run a sports practice, especially one in my non-native language or at such an instructional level (a ninth-grade Moldovan villager is far less skilled at basketball than an average seventh-grade American). I planned it out in my head and walked to the school gym.

At 6 p.m., I lined up the 15 boys and eight girls who had come and gave a short introduction speech. I told them that the boys who played last year and graduated had played well, but not as well as they could have. They didn't play as well as they could have, I said, because they didn't want to involve other classes in the team and because instead of learning something in practice, they just scrimmaged. At one point, at a loss for words, I said in English, "They didn't do ****. They just ****ed around." Considering that the only English words a lot of these kids understand are the curse words and my best English students are girls, this may not have been the smartest or classiest choice of words, but what's done is done. The physical education teacher also took offense quickly at my description of last years' practices, saying that I was criticizing her. Granted, I chose my words poorly, but that exact moment was not when I wanted to discuss the situation.

I started the kids with a short warm-up run around the gym. The students at my school have been trained from an early age to run in straight lines, with the tallest student leading the pack and everyone following him in order of height. I yelled to my kids, "Don't wait for Iura if he's slow. If you're faster, pass him!" A few of the boys got the message and ran at their own pace.

Then I circled the kids for stretches. You'd think it was the first time they had ever stretched in their lives. Don't they see soccer players doing it on TV and wonder what the deal is? By far the best "cultural difference" moment was when I sat on the floor of the gym to lead the butterfly stretch and told the kids to sit down. Moldovans are very superstitious about sitting on the ground or the floor; according to them, it will cool your reproductive organs and make you sterile. The boys sat down rather quickly and got into the stretching position, after I told them that their balls wouldn't freeze. The girls remained standing, and the gym teacher told them they didn't have to "sit on the cold floor." Eventually, all the girls sat on the ground, but I think they remained worried.

I ran the kids through some simple dribbling skills, and they weren't bad. No one was approaching the level of an American high school basketball player, but they were better than I expected them to be.

Then I ran them through some passing drills, working only with chest passes. As I expected, they quickly reverted to the "Overhead Chuck-and-Pray" pass that populates so much of Moldovan village basketball. Something to work on.

At this point, the first boy misbehaved. He was shooting the ball and not listening while I was talking about something to the group. I told him to do five push-ups. He looked at me incredulously, but then did then. Over the course of the first hour, I handed out a good 60 push-ups to a handful of boys and one girl. One ninth-grade boy was doing lazy push-ups that made it look like he was humping the floor. I told him I didn't want to see what he did on Saturday nights at the disco; I wanted to see a good push-up.

I then demonstrated a lay-up and formed a line at each end of the court to practice shooting lay-ups. Most of the boys seemed to get it with the need of some minor adjustments. Most of the girls, however, kept stopping right under the basket, getting set, and then shooting with both hands. Once again, something to work on.

Lastly, I showed the correct form for shooting and we practiced it. The kids reverted again to the Moldovan Overhead Chuck-and-Pray. The crazy thing is that some of these kids can consistently sink shots with the Overhead Chuck-and-Pray. Nevertheless, it's a third thing to work on.

We scrimmaged for the second hour, with four four-person groups of boys and two four-person groups of girls. My basketball standards have lowered quite a bit since I was last in America, but nevertheless I was impressed by the effort, tenaciousness and sometimes even the skill that these kids showed. They seem to really enjoy the game, and that should help motivate them to learn it better. After about 40 minutes of scrimmage, the gym teacher said that the floor was too moist and slippery for the girls to play. The boys could keep playing, but it was time for the girls to go home. I asked two of the girls who were sitting on the bench next to me why the boys could play but they couldn't. They said that boys are more careful and tougher, so they were less likely to fall and wouldn't cry if they did. I told one of them, Nadia, that I had cried when I broke my knee playing sports, and then I asked her if she had cried every time she had fallen in her life, to which she responded no.

"So saying that girls can't play now but boys can is just talk, not fact," I said. The statement amused her, perhaps doubly so because she had been to English camp and had seen me treat girls no differently from boys during sports classes.

I'm going to train these kids for a December match against Sarata Galbena, and we'll see what happens after that. Maybe they'll want to join the Peace Corps league this year, maybe not. Either way, I'm thankful that the time that I spend with them is a chance for me to know and appreciate my older students in a way that I can't during school hours. Boys who don't seem to enjoy my English or computer classes are more comfortable talking to me during basketball practice, and that comfort translates to the classroom as well. I know for a fact, however, that with my two hours of computer class, one optional English class and four hours of basketball a week with the 11th grade, I will have a much closer and meaningful relationship with them than I did with last year's 11th grade. At the very least, I already know all of their names.

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.

Chiloti

No matter what language you speak, some things are funny to any middle school student.

In both my fifth grade class and 7a class this week, students used the word "underwear" in a sentence. The seventh grader used it as an example of a compound noun. The fifth grader used it when he thought he was using the word for clothes in general.

I asked both students, "Do you know what 'underwear' means?"

"No."

"Chiloti," I said.

The seventh graders laughed for 15 seconds. The fifth graders laughed for nearly a full minute.

It's good to be back in the classroom.

Suntem nemti si suntem mandrii!

My first national allegiance will always be to America, but for years I have also felt a cultural connection with my German heritage. I also have English, French, Polish and even Dalmatian blood, but I feel much closer to the family names Myers, Tiffenbach and Kress than I do any others.

When I arrived in Mereseni a year ago, people told me that they had heard my last name before, since there was a family in the village called Maier. The first Maier had settled in Mereseni around the time of the first World War, and his German blood had mixed in with Moldovan blood through a few generations of descendents.

A week and a half ago, I was in the hall when three fifth graders came up to me and asked what days we had class. I asked them their names. The first one to respond said that she was Victoria Maier.

"Maier? So you're German?" I asked in Romanian, smiling.

"Nuuuuuuu!" she replied, continuing in Romanian. "I'm not German."

"Yes you are," I said. "Your last name is Maier. I have the same last name, Myers, and I'm German."

She and her friends giggled and I noticed how much blonder Victoria's hair was than any Moldovan's I'd ever seen.

"Ask your mom tonight," I said. "She'll tell you that you're German."

The girls went off down the hall, laughing. The next day, I had class with the fifth grade. At the end of class, Victoria approached me.

"Did you ask your mom last night?" I asked. Victoria flashed a huge smile.

"Mr. Peter," she said. "I'm German!" She giggled and ran out of the room.

Ce, Ion? Vrei detention? Ti-e distractiv?

Moldovans, in general, are always running late. If you tell a group of Moldovans to meet you at 7 p.m., you can call them at 7:15 and they probably haven't left home yet. The first guests at a 7:30 wedding will come at 8:15. School events that are slated to start at 6 p.m. usually start at about 7 or 8. One punctual Moldovan friend of mine often gets to work at 8:55 a.m. to start the day at 9, only to work alone in the office until someone else comes at 9:45.

This is part of Moldova's culture to the point that "to be late" is its own verb in Romanian. When planning weddings or social events, Moldovans automatically factor in the delay and there are no problems. But there's one place where tardiness corrodes the work environment and the respect structure, and one place where tardiness cannot be tolerated. School.

At every class in a Moldovan school, at least one student always comes late, and it is usually more. In a 45-minute lesson, I usually lose at least the first three minutes because kids come late. Students come to class as late as they want and there is no discipline structure in Moldovan schools to punish tardiness or reward punctuality. In fact, you're often lucky if your students are only late; they often don't even bother coming to class, and they aren't disciplined for that, either.

Teachers often complain to one another about students who are consistently late or don't attend school, but schools don't structure a system that expects punctuality and attendance. Unlike in America, students who cut class (or translated from Romanian, "run from the lesson,") don't receive calls home to their parents, nor do they risk failing a course or serving detention if they are consistently late or absent.

Not a single Moldovan will say that student tardiness and class-cutting are good things. Students coming to class whenever they want without reprimand damages a teacher's credibility as an authority figure and encourages laziness and irresponsibility later in life. However, the problem does not receive much attention.

Last year, my school announced a system in which multiple tardies or absences would be punishable by a fine paid at the mayor's office. I think I was the only teacher who wrote out tardy slips, and when I gave them to students' homeroom teachers, the teachers didn't carry the process out any further. At one teachers' meeting, I told the teachers that the system was "a shark without teeth".

I refused to teach a second year under this system, so I introduced one of America's greatest institutions: detention.

This year, students who are late to my class must serve a five-minute detention at the end of the day, unless they have a note from a teacher who kept them after class in their previous subject. In addition, students who miss class and do not have a written excuse from a parent receive 45 minutes of detention. Students can also receive detention for bad behavior in class. In my English lessons, I also have class rewards and punishments for attendance, tardiness, mutual respect and homework participation.

On Thursday, I gave detention to eight students for tardiness and one student for misbehavior. I only taught 50 kids that day. All of them served except one, who had to leave school early, and he will serve it when he returns to school. On Friday, my first day teaching computer class, I gave detention to over 15 of my 120 students for tardiness. Because most of the students only had five classes and I could only run detention during seventh period, only five of the students served today, but the rest will serve Monday.

So far, my authority to give detention has only been contested once, and that was by an 11th grader who complained that he was only late because he had been talking to the school principal. After class, he walked away from me as I tried to talk to him.

"Vitale, if you don't come back right now, you won't touch a computer all next week," I called after him in Romanian. He came back, and I told him that if the principal wrote an excuse for him, he wouldn't have detention. I also told him that I didn't care whether he liked my rules or not, because those were the rules. I'm sure I wasn't his favorite teacher for the day, but I'm not bringing the concept of detention to this school to win popularity points with the students. Also, I have plenty of popularity points to spare.

It's not just the concept of detention that is lacking in these school systems; it's basic accountability. No teachers seem to want to teach accountability, especially in my school, and I think that is partly because the faculty comprises 16 female teachers and 4 male ones; among the male teachers, I am the only one who both teaches every day and is under 60 years old. Male students lack a positive young male role model at my school, and those whose fathers are working in Russia, Portugal and Italy completely lack male role models, just like fatherless children in America. Also, the vast majority of young men who stay in my village after finishing school don't attend university and simply get drunk and go to the disco. They are not good role models from which to learn accountability. Girls, while less likely to cause major discipline problems at my school, are just as likely to come late to class or not do their homework.

To put it simply, students of both genders need a young, strict, male teacher who won't put up with their bullshit. I'm happy to fill the void.

O scrisoare de o adolescenta

I want to share parts of an e-mail from Olga, a 16-year-old student at the prestigious (and Pan Romanian-leaning) Prometeu Lyceum in Chisinau. After we met at Moldova's Independence Day celebration, she read my blog and had some things to say (I have made some slight grammatical corrections to her writing for better readability):

Why should I be proud for some kind of decision made 15 years ago? I don't feel free after this decision, as the only place where I am not afraid to say what I feel and think is my school, which fights hard for our independence and still teaches us Romanian (the correct form of the language, not "Moldavian," a word that I can hardly pronounce).

I saw you talked about Limba Noastra too, and the problem we are confronting with the Russian speakers. If you were in Chisinau on the 31st of August you would have been very disappointed just as all of us were. President Voronin came from his journey from Greece specially for the 27th important holiday, but he decided to visit the Czech Republic on the 31st, a holiday with no sense for him but much more important for me and many others. In the center of the city there were no concerts. Nothing. Just some awful folk music with no sense at the lakeside amphitheater.

I am tired of leaving the shops just for the reason that the shop assistant can't give me the thing I need because she says she does not understand Romanian and I say I don't understand Russian (though I know it perfectly). My grandmother is told to speak like a human being (as if Romanian is not a good language) if she asks something in Romanian.

We all still bear the consequences of the USSR system. I give myself as an example. All the 2005-2006 year of study I was fighting and getting good marks because my parents promised to send me to France for the wedding of my aunt.

That was the dream of my life, everything I ever wanted. I got great marks at my exams; I studied extra French and got the greatest marks from my group. When I got tickets and went for my passport all I saw was "visa refused". Why? You can't ask. But from their short sentences I understood: you are from an ex-sovietic country and we risk the fact that you may like the civilization from there so as to never come back here. So everything was ruined, all my dreams, all my hopes.

And when you wrote about the fireworks and the sentence with all the budget money that they are spending for 20 minutes of pleasure, I spread it. All of my friends laughed, but I was talking seriously because they could spend the money on something more useful like to give a better salary to my parents, both very good doctors that save lives, work hard and some persons don't even say thank you after a hard operation.

It's hard, really and if somehow I will escape from here I will just come back to see my relatives and that’s all. Nothing more attracts me here.

Once again, bravo for your reports. I liked them a lot.

I don't agree with everything she has written, but Olga is not the only Moldovan teenager who feels this way about her country. I fear that Moldova is losing an entire generation of some of its best and brightest young minds, who see the opportunities of the outside world and conclude that their home country has nothing to offer them.

Deschideti usa!

On Tuesday, I was the first teacher at the school and the last one out. My 7:40 class guaranteed that I was first, and a locked door guaranteed that I was the last.

I set my alarm Tuesday morning for 5:30 a.m., since part of my morning routine is standing up and pressing the snooze button on my phone for at least 45 minutes. I shaved, got dressed, ate and left the house at 7:20. Not all of my sixth-grade students knew about the "zero hour" class, since the schedule had been posted after most of them had left the day before. I had called as many of them at home as I could, but since three of the students don't have phones, several others didn't answer Monday night and one girl is still in Moscow with her family waiting to get a plane ticket home, I wasn't expecting great attendance. When I started class at 7:40, I had three students, and more trickled in over the course of 45 minutes.

When my sixth-period class ended, I stayed through seventh period so that I could write out lesson plans for the next day. I have more desk space and fewer distractions at school than at home, so this year I plan to work as much as I can in my classroom. Seventh period ended and I continued working for another half hour until 3:30.

At 3:30, I packed up and looked out my window to see Maria, the head custodian, leaving the school with her son. I finished packing, locked my classroom and went downstairs to leave the building.

The school door was closed. I hadn't seen this door closed at all week. I was worried. Two weeks ago, my school principal had joked that I worked so quietly in my room at the end of the second-floor hallway that they might accidentally lock me in one day.

Now I tested the door. My principal had been right. I was locked in.

I called out, "Alo?" hoping someone would respond. No luck. I was the only one around.

If this had happened in my first year, I would have panicked, especially since the door to the secretary's phone was locked. Luckily, I knew where the school's second, unlocked phone was. I called my house, where my host mom answered.

"Maria, it's Peter. I'm locked inside the school," I said with a laugh. "Could you please call someone to come open the school?"

Maria called the secretary, who then called one of the cleaning ladies who lives near the school. I only had to wait about five minutes before the cleaning lady came, took the key out of its hiding place outside the school and opened the door for me. In that time, I helped a fifth-grade girl who had come to the school to find out her schedule for the next day of lessons.

I left the school at 3:45 after spending over eight hours at school. As I walked part of the way home with the cleaning lady, I joked with her, "Maybe this is God telling me that I'm working too hard."