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Well, I've gone for about a month with an update. Who would have thought that a separation from the Internet would happen so quickly? I think that I've been in a state lately where I've been busy and I've valued human voices and conversation over the unrequited projection of blogging. But I'm over that, and I can get back to these entries that people seem to want more of.

Everyone from my father to my godfather has wanted to know more about the actual life of a Peace Corps Trainee (as I am called for another few days before my Swearing-In Ceremony on August 19). Description of my everyday life has never held much interest for me, for the obvious reason that it's my everyday life and there's nothing special about it to me. But since you all seem to want it so badly, incepem.

Practice School, the practical training ground for TEFL volunteers that consists of three weeks of teaching two hours a day, has come and gone. I had a wonderful resource teacher, Cesara, to help me figure out different interesting ways to deliver each and every one of my 28 lessons. Finally being able to teach was a reminder of my purpose here, and gave me an intense desire to get to Mereseni and start with my real students.

The Moldovan Ministry of Education is an interesting creature. If any American teacher fears what a federal bureaucracy-controlled education might look like, they can look to Moldova to affirm their worst fears. The federal government provides beautifully-bound grade books for teachers to record grades into, and every student's grade and the subject of every lesson that they have ever learned is kept on federal record for 50 years after the student's graduation from lyceum. In America the idea is budding that if the students at a school fails, the school has failed. In Moldova, this concept is in full bloom; if a student receives a failing grade-five or lower out of 10-for the semester, the teacher who failed the student is responsible for helping the student re-pass the test at the end of the summer. Even if the student fails again, or doesn't even show up for summer sessions, he or she is often passed on to the next class, anyway. Students rarely fail, though, both because teachers don't want to be perceived as failures and because there is often a bribe involved.

Cheating and copying is deeply ingrained in the culture here, and is tolerated by teachers. When young Pavel, a seventh-grader in my Practice School class, was blatantly copying from the boys around him on my test, he was unfazed when I told him to stop. Krista, a fellow volunteer, had to physically hold the head of a fifth-grade girl in place so that she would stop turning to look at her neighbor's test. All of us realized after that first test that cheating is something that needs to be addressed before it happens in our classrooms, and it is also something that we will not be able to stop in other teachers' classes. Cheating is the worst on the day of the Baccalaureate. When I spoke with a volunteer, Melissa, who has been here for a year, she told me that her school's director (principal) instructed every teacher other than her to walk out of the school when Melissa came in. Then the teachers came in a back entrance so that Melissa wouldn't see them, and they helped the students with the Baccalaureate.

I won't speak much about the life of a trainee, other than to say that it is full of fun and frustrations. Overall, there are a couple areas where trainees and the Peace Corps Moldova staff are extremely polarized. We Americans are, of course, adults, and have gotten used to making our choices without supervision for our adult lives, which for the youngest of us has been four years; the Moldovan staff is understandably worried about our safety in a new country, but tends to treat us like oversized children and ignores the fact that most of us have lived in much more dangerous places in the United States than any place that this small agricultural country has to offer. Maybe we're naive, but from my biased viewpoint, we could do with more freedom. I was even restricted from visiting the Mereseni volunteers overnight when, according to the rules, I should have been able to go (since discovering this, I have told the Pre-Service Training director that she owes me a favor now).

The other major difference between the American trainees and the Moldovan staff regards the idea of feedback. Mind you, the word feedback doesn't exist in the Romanian or Russian languages. The staff here often says that they are open to feedback, but we trainees have found that when we bring our issues to the table as we would in America, the Moldovan staff is offended that we have written negative comments about them on paper. And because the feedback forms are not anonymous, the staff wants to know why you said what you did, and tell you how difficult their jobs are. It seems to me that it is a relic of the Soviet system in which dissidents were confronted by numerous peers and told that their disagreements were without grounds and that they should respect everyone else for trying their hardest. It's a psychological block between the trainees and the staff, and it's something on which I'm sure the Moldovan staff has a different viewpoint. Nevertheless, it is frustrating and it is part of the otherwise positive Peace Corps experience.

So Dad and George, this is about what you asked for. But now I am done writing for the night and I haven't even delved into my planned entry on The Moldovan Struggle For Identity. Well, maybe I'll start that entry next.