Today, I had the nicest thing happened.  At school, there is a group of Bulgarian students who have are tutoring foreign teachers in Bulgarian. These students are volunteers and have no teaching experience.  What they do have experience in is learning another language--English and a second language like German, Spanish or French.  Oh and they are fluent in Bulgarian.  This is probably one of the most important things.  Actually, I'd say the most important thing is that these students want to tutor us and speak both English and Bulgarian.

My tutor checked in with me last week before our first meeting today.  My tutor asked me a few questions, I showed off one of my Bulgarian text books and that was that.  Well, aside from the fact that there's something pretty humbling about telling and showing another person how little you actually know.  But lucky for me my tutor was kind and understanding.

The plan is to meet with your tutor one or maybe twice a week to practice you Bulgarian.  The students and teachers organizing the tutoring are all very kind but many of the teachers didn't know what to expect. It's not as if our students are trained Bulgarian teachers and there's no guarantee they've ever even thought much about tutoring.  So it was recommended that we be prepared to direct our student-tutors to our school Bulgarian text book and ask our tutor to practice with us out of the book.

Today, I was prepared to do just this.  I had my notebook, my pen and my text book out and I was ready. Then my tutor came to my classroom for my first lesson. This is when the nicest thing happened to me.  <!--more-->My tutor pulls out a little book and tells me it is for my lesson.  It turns out my tutor brought a workbook: a workbook for a second grader!! It had been my tutor's younger bother's school workbook last year when he was in second grade. And the plan is that we can use it.

And this is the nicest thing that happened to me today.  Someone thought that my Bulgarian might actually be at the level of a Bulgarian second grade!!

It turns out, I am not actually at the level of a second grader.  Those second graders seem to have a much better vocabulary than I do.

First my tutor made me write a dictation.  This was humorous.  And the first time I've ever done something like this in Bulgarian. I didn't know very many words which added to the challenge and I spent a lot of time repeating slightly wrong phrases to myself as I tried to write down these unknown words in Cyrillic.  My tutor was kind and read very, very slowly, did a little repeating and once in a while even told me how to spell words.

It turns out I was writing a paragraph about a boy and his parents. They are talking because he went outside to play without his coat and now his throat hurts.  He also seems to have messed up his dad's desk and is worried that his day will be angry. The moral of the dictation is that it's hard to listen to your parents.

The next lesson in the work book was underlining vowels. My tutor excused me from this exercise--after she confirmed that I knew what vowels are.  I do. Phew. At least I've got this under control. Watch out second graders, here I come.

Then I did a lesson reading a number of words for pronunciation. This went, um, okay.  What went less than okay was when I was supposed to read a short passage for comprehension. Ha, ha, ha. I knew about four words. But here's the summary. It had to do with a room with a window. A gray bird flies in through the open window. The boy catches it and it's heart is beating fast.

This was when my 40 minute lesson ended.  And when the bell for the end of the day rang I saw the same look on my tutors face that I regularly sense on my own: Really?! How can the last 40 minutes have passed so quickly?