Last night I met 20 new Fulbright ETAs in Bulgaria. They are teaching all over the country from Sofia to Russe to Varna to Vidin and Kurdzhali among other places. This is pretty incredible considering the fact that four years ago when I showed up in Bulgaria as an ETA, I was one of<em> two</em> ETAs. I was in Sofia and the other ETA was in Plovdiv.

Here's the thing, I don't think it's easy to move to a new country, learn a new language, make new friends, start a new job and try to figure out which way is up anywhere in the world. Bulgaria is no exception. But of all of the jobs you could have and all of the places you could work, I think that teaching in a Bulgarian school is especially difficult.

It's difficult for a lot of different reasons: differences in educational school systems, underpaid teachers (the starting salary is something like 450 leva), underfunded schools, huge class sizes (think 30+ students), poor textbooks and often a pervasive sense of apathy.

On top of this being a quote "Native Speaker" is difficult because the school wants as many students as possible to have access to you and your language. It often means that you see 8-12 different groups of students each week. That's probably 250+ students and given the fact you see these students once a week (or worse) every other week, you quickly realize I am not going to know these kids names until Christmas break. And the names of the kids that you do know, you know for self-preservation and classroom management reasons. I don't know another way to put it, these students are naughty and you have use their names to get their attention.

This alone would be enough to frustrate anyone but then there's the always-changing schedule, the awesomely bureaucratic paperwork, chalk boards (or white boards sans whiteboard markers) and there's the fact that you don't get your own classroom. You go to the students.

So what's a Fulbrighter teaching in a Bulgarian school to do?

Well, I think it boils down to this: adjusting one's expectations, establishing personal makers/levels of success, looking for the joyful moments and letting the rest go.