I can safely say that the Fulbright is a program which has changed my life. Basically the Fulbright is a fellowship and exchange program and offers hundreds of grants each year to students and scholars all over the world. For me it was Bulgaria. I came here with about 12 other American scholars and similar numbers of Bulgarians won grants to study in the States.

As an ETA (or English Teaching Assistant), I was placed in a public school in Sofia to teach English. I ended up leading conversation classes.

I created lessons plans in such a way to encourage students to speak as much English as possible--to me, with their classmates and in small groups. In 8th grade the goal was to get students speaking as easily and freely as possible and to reinforce the subject material and vocabulary they were already learning.

The challenge of course was that kids come to a language school with a huge variety of language skills. My school had the children of diplomats who had studied abroad in English language high schools and it had students who showed up not really knowing the alphabet. The school didn't place students in 8th grade based on their English language ability but based on the second language they would study in 9th grade (!!) which is pretty insane.

So there were students who were desperately board because their English was already very strong and as a result caused lots of problems in class and students who I am pretty sure didn't understand what I was saying and who also caused problems because of this. This set-up stinks. It doesn't help the students. Any of them. It's incredibly hard to learn when your classmates are misbehaving and even harder to teach anything when you spend your time (ineffectually) disciplining students.

My school was not the exception to the rule quite the contrary. The school I taught at that year is considered a good public school. And I know that similar things are happening at language schools all over the country because traditionally in Bulgaria the class that you find yourself with in 8th grade you stay with for the next five years. (A side note: this is not the case at ACS.)

So ETAs find themselves in these challenging situations which they have little control over. Problems are systemic and then amplified by budgetary and human resource constraints. Did I mention that most classroom sizes start at 30 students?! (In comparison, at ACS my class size has varied between 15 and 18. A much more humane number.)

Interestingly in the face of these challenges, ETAs have a couple of choices--adapt to the system (and the culture of apathy), figure out how they fit into the system and make the best of it or to do what they can do and to find some additional outlet for their creative and intellectual interests. As I mentioned earlier this week, mine was (and is) this blog.

But another group of ETAs recently emailed me about a project they worked on while in Bulgaria.

This project is clearly a labor of love--called <a href="http://yarn.fulbright.bg/index.html" target="_blank">Yarn: Lots of little stories tell one big story</a>. It's an oral history project.  A