Oh November! How Gray and Productive Art Thou!

November flew; days were long and weeks were short. The highlights of the month were project progress: The book club kicked off with a short memoir and is now moving on to The Memory Keeper’s Daughter.* I also brought the summer adult courses back to life, which has been an exercise in scheduling patience. I opened the courses to the town, so some wonderful newcomers are shyly trickling in… AND, the local clinic and I applied for a health volunteer!!! I am determined to bring a Group 14er to Leskovik. We just need to nail down housing, and hopefully all will go to plan. The staff even paid for a group photo shoot and commissioned a town map to submit with the application. That’s worth a volunteer.

Our eighth and twelfth graders met for the first time with students from the Metropolitan Learning Center (MLC) in Bloomfield, CT. With Visa’s unfailing support, I matched a selection of 8th and 12th graders with American peers from an international magnet school in the US. They’re engaged in a teleconference series designed to foster cultural exchange and joint learning.



Grade 8 participants with Visa in the director's office, day of!  From left to right: Suada, Mariglenc, Kristina N., Visa, Teodor, Eva, Kristina D., and Denisa


Our first sessions were a standard “get-to-know-you” via Skype. There was so much anticipation, and many after-school prep sessions were invested into the first round of meetings. I don’t recall ever before looking beseechingly into the eyes of a 14 year-old and urgently demanding, “So, what would you say if an American were to ask you about circle dancing?” Visa and I also had a great deal of fun in these prep sessions, as we don’t usually dare sit on desks and facilitate hour-long open discussion and brainstorming sessions with our students. Chaos would ensue, we would all have a good time, and classroom auditors would give us a poor evaluation.

Our school director (picture a subdued man who listens, nods, and then gets things done) gave over his office, the school projector, and a personal webcam for our meetings. The 8th graders were, in one inadequate word, WOW. Visa and I are infinitely proud of their efforts. They prepared Albanian traditional songs and dance to share with MLC students; filled notebooks with questions and vocabulary; put together an introduction; and memorized student names. The session went an extra 45 minutes (despite two power outages on our end).  The 12th graders put forth a seriously brave effort despite a seemingly unrelenting wave of embarrassment.  Seventeen is a difficult age, I have heard.

Highlights ranged from our students describing their daily routines in fifteen minute blocks (they had that vocabulary down and were determined to utilize all they knew) to debating the rival merits of R&B and hip-hop. Our students were completely impressed with the American classrooms and school uniforms while the Americans were (and I say rightly so!) impressed with the Albanian students’ level of English. The Americans courteously learned a few Albanian pleasantries and gave them a shot, which our director loved. And of course both sessions concluded with the students pledging to connect via the golden parent of contemporary social networking… yes, you guessed it, Facebook! A 2010 friendship is not a friendship until it is consummated on Facebook.

Successive sessions will treat common topics of cultural and social studies. I pledge to post on each.

*I’ve been reading ahead and may I just mention that the total lack of well-reviewed, positive literature on the adult market is mildly depressing? It all seems to serve to remind us that we are grievously wasting our relationships and ambitions. Just saying.