Prima zi de pregatire

School is back in session. At least for teachers.

Today was the first day for teachers to return to the school and begin preparations for the year. Students come on September 1, so a teacher's time is spent in these two weeks preparing visual aids and lesson plans for the new year.

At least that's how it's supposed to be. The reality is that many teachers at my school didn't even come today, and many of the ones who came sat around and talked. The two secretaries were caught up in a game of computer solitaire. (Pune opt pe noua!, for those of you learning Romanian, means "Put eight on top of nine.")

I brought a heavy suitcase full of books and magazines to the school and restocked the English library in my classroom. The library contains scores of magazines and books and is a great resource for my students.

My major effort this year is to improve the number of visual aides in my classroom, in order to make the classroom both more colorful and more informative. I also have set up a spot on my wall for Students of the Month, where I post pictures of the student in each class who impressed me most over the course of the month. Positive reinforcement usually works better than some Moldovan methods I've seen, which include screaming at the kids to shut up and pulling a boy out of his desk by his hair. Like I said, positive reinforcement is important.

I'm excited to be back at work, mostly because summer was getting boring. A man can only make so many trips to Chisinau before he realizes that he's not really being productive. My Romanian has also suffered from not being in a work environment. I noticed that while talking to my colleagues for the first time in months, I was making a lot of mistakes and forgetting words that I had known for six months. Luckily, my level of Romanian will go back up after a week or two at the school.

As I returned home from the school this afternoon, an old lady who lives on my route talked to me from her yard. She asked me where I had been in vacation, and then began talking about her daughter, who was currently living abroad. The woman, standing barefoot in her yard with her arthritic toes curled on top of each other, began to cry.

"I miss her so much," she said. "And you're so dear to me when you walk by every day."

Our connection today isn't the impact of an American in a foreign country. It's just a young person doing the simple act of greeting the elderly as he walks by. And regardless of nationality or culture, those little things can leave a bigger mark than my "real work" at the school. With less than a year left in Moldova, I hope that I have success at the school, but also that I can keep doing the little things that matter to women like her.