Now that the World Series and the American mid-term elections are over, let me take some space to tell my stateside readers about my new job.
In truth, it’s not so new any more, since I’m now more than halfway through my first semester of teaching English composition at the American University in Bulgaria. All classes are conducted in English. I have a total of 72 students in three classes, and none of them speak English as their first language. But AUBG is not an ESL school – students are expected on arrival to have sufficient fluency to take classes in English, and professors aren’t supposed to make allowances for difficulty in comprehension.
This is more of a recruiting concern than a teaching one, because all my students, in terms of spoken English, are fluent. As a monolingual American with four years of high school French and Latin, and a passing Californian exposure to Spanish, I find this amazing, in the non-trivial sense of the word. Not only can they speak English well enough to argue with their professors, many of them can compose thoughtful, grammatically clean essays that would earn top grades in the States.
Still, I have to watch out for the odd Americanism. Having little experience with baseball, they can’t be expected to know what a “ballpark figure” is. Idioms such as “preaching to the choir” often require explanation. (This is also true in reverse: there’s a Bulgarian expression meaning “Let’s go,” or “Let’s get out of here,” that translates literally to “Let’s lift the pigeons.”).
It’s a truly international community. Slightly less than half of AUBG’s students, and slightly more than half of mine, are from Bulgaria. I have students from: Romania, Mongolia, Albania, Serbia, Kosovo, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Lebanon, and Palestine (Gaza). In the Bulgarian Language and Culture class I’m auditing are three exchange students from the US, as well as students from France, the Netherlands, Greece, Croatia, Papua New Guinea, and China, and a fellow professor from Spain. Other professors I’ve met come from the United Kingdom, Ireland, Kosovo and Lebanon again, Italy, New Zealand, Turkey, Greece again, and Germany. This briefly compiled list includes 26 different countries, and these are just the people I’ve met.
Having lived through the Ottomans, the Nazis, and the Soviet communists, and now casting their lot with the European Union, Bulgarians tend to take a wait-and-see attitude toward world politics. But at AUBG at least, interest in the American election was more than casual. At a recent dinner with half a dozen colleagues, I listened as a professor from Kosovo gave a professor from Bulgaria as clear and succinct an explanation of gerrymandering – now there’s an Americanism for you – as I’ve ever heard. He laid out the mechanisms by which state legislatures separate slices of urban areas so that Democratic voters, in insufficient numbers to form majorities, are divided among Republican-leaning districts. “Len, have you ever lived in the States?” I asked when he finished. He had, for several years, in New York.
Kosovo is one of the new countries carved out of the former Yugoslavia, just to the west of Bulgaria. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton is one of their national heroes, for his intervention in the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s. “He saved us,” my colleague says simply.
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Perhaps what’s most remarkable about AUBG is that students from countries recently (and sometimes currently) in conflict with one another seem to co-exist peacefully in the same classrooms and the same college environment. Why should not the same be true on campuses in the United States, between students with differing political philosophies?
Not that there aren’t arguments. Several students got into a heated discussion about terrorism in one of my recent classes. The same generational, gender, and sexuality issues that drive discussion on American campuses play out here as well. Students sometimes show up to class late, or not at all, and complain about grades. They chafe at rules, and sneak peeks at their cell phones in the back of the classroom.
But the mere act of taking classes in a language that’s not your own is a big step toward understanding. And there’s nothing “mere” about it; I admire my student beyond words, and have told them so. Not all of them are good writers yet. But most adult Americans can’t write one coherent sentence in another language. We want the world to learn English, and the world complies. And yet my students teach me more than I am teaching them.
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