Danseaza si fuge? Domnul Peter este bravo!

One of the things I knew when I chose the small village of Mereseni for two years was that I was going to be a popular teacher where every student would know me after two years. Just by teaching half of the fifth-through-eighth graders, I am teaching about a fifth of the school. But quickly, I have seen opportunities to be active with more students.

One of my two seventh-grade classes has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic to invite me to every extracurricular event. The first occurred last Friday, when they asked me in the middle of class if I was going to the disco that night. As I knew well from my days in Costesti, the disco at a town's casa de culturaВ is full of older high-schoolers and younger 20-somethings getting drunk, so I knew that I could not go and still have a reputation as a teacher. But my seventh-graders told me that the disco was not at the casa de cultura, but was instead a booze-free dance club in the cafeteria of the school every Friday. Hearing this, I said I would try to make it.

The dance started at 8 p.m., and after Desperate HousewivesВ ended on Romanian TV (English with Romanian subtitles) at 9, I made the 10-minute walk to the school. It would normally be a five-minute walk, but walking on dirt roads in the dark significantly increases increases your travel time. (I will absolutely rock at Night Banana when the 2007 season kicks in.) After talking with Doamna Elena, the physical education teacher who runs the weekly disco, I walked into the cafeteria. For a moment, I felt like Brad Pitt walking into a middle-school dance, because every one of my students' hands went to the sky amid shouts of joy. Not exactly knowing what to do, I sat down for 30 seconds before my students told me to dance in a circle with them. I obliged.

For the first 45 minutes, I couldn't stop laughing. All of the characteristics of my old middle-school dances were present, such as bad dancing, several of the girls towering over the boys and slow dances that clear the floor in two seconds while the boys and girls sit in separate areas, where the boys work up the courage for three minutes and then dance with a girl for the final 30 seconds. Memories of 4'11" Peter asking 5'7" Nicole Marek to dance in eighth grade came flooding back more vibrantly than ever before.

What happens in Moldova more than I remember happening in America is the natural separation of boys and girls circles for the middle-schoolers. Ninth, tenth and eleventh-graders at the dance had no problems with co-ed dancing, but the younger girls, probably sick of the boys after the first 30 minutes, went off to dance by themselves. In America, this would be a crippling blow for the boys. Here, the boys dance in their own circle and have a hell of a time anyway. It was only in the all-boys circle that the serious efforts at break-dancing were undertaken. Well, maybe "serious" isn't the word I want to use. One sixth-grader who is not my student managed to stomp up, down and sideways furiously in the middle of the circle and call it dancing.

I was impressed, however with the dancing of Ilie, a seventh-grader of mine who always speaks English in class, with the emphasis being on "always". Although I have yet to find a seat for him in the class where he will not be hyper-active, I like him. It helps that he wears a Chicago Bulls sweatshirt, even if he thought that the team was from New York. Friday night, though, he took off the sweatshirt to reveal a wife-beater undershirt and proceeded to show off his dance moves. In summary, not bad for a white boy.

I mostly stuck to dancing with my students, mostly because they're my students, and also because the energetic dancing of middle-school boys is replaced by a slow back-and-forth rocking by the time those boys are in 10th grade, making it decidedly un-fun.В 

The other time that I stayed away from the older students was this Wednesday, when I knew they would outclass me in the weekly running competition. So instead, I ran in Tuesday's race with the middle-schoolers. The boys ran four laps around the village's soccer field, and the girls ran two laps. I came in at a solid middle of the pack among middle-school boys, but to be optimistic, I ran a lot better this week than I did when I was their age.

The disco and the race provided me with the first smack-my-head moment in Mereseni. Doamna Elena, the P.E. teacher and someone who I can definitely get along with in planning extracurriculars for the next two years, collected a small entrance fee of several lei from every student that came to the disco. She then asked me if I could possibly find a way to get some soccer balls, basketballs and volleyballs from America. I said that it was possible, but that I was here to set up systems so that the school could buy balls when I was gone. I then asked her what she used the money for that she collected from the students.

"For the races," she said. "They're prizes for the first, second and third place finishers. It gives them a reason to run."

I held my tongue because I wasn't sure how well I could elaborate my views in Romanian on the fly, but I will certainly raise the following questions with her in the next week or two:В 

<li>Why do half of the kids in the school run afterschool, while most of the rest of the school watches from the side? They can't all want money, because the majority of them don't have a chance. I would argue that they run for fun, whether or not there's a prize involved.</li>

<li>Do the students who try a little harder for a prize really want money, or do they just want some sort of prize? Would a prize as simple as a pencil be just as rewarding?</li>

<li>Which would the students want the money used for more, prizes for the 18 fastest runners in the school, or balls that the entire school can use?</li>

It's these small bits of thinking that I think I am here to bring to Mereseni. These little tinkerings are the ones that can have the biggest contribution. If after three months, the school can buy its own new basketball and volleyball for the winter, then I will consider it a success.В 

In the meantime, I'm putting together a mix CD of American and British hip-hop and techno music for next week's disco. Even if students don't know the lyrics, I really don't feel comfortable dancing with them all to the current selection of DMX's "Up In Here".