Informatica

I have said very little this year about my double life as my school's computer teacher. I teach eight classes a week to students in 7th, 8th, 9th and 11th grades. It's tiring, but it's by far the most enjoyable thing I do in my village, for several reasons.

First, my students understand me. In the English classroom, I can only make jokes with a few students, and more than half of my students don't understand most of the things that I say. When I teach informatica, as computer class is called in Romanian, I am speaking my students' native language. They feel more comfortable, and their personalities can come out more than they would in English. This also allows me to reach more students; I have about a dozen students, especially boys, who are poor English students but love working on the computer and enjoy talking to me about the latest computer technology.

Second, I feel like I'm back at summer camp. I was a digital video instructor at iD Tech Camps for five years, and I enjoyed seeing each kid "get it" as they worked independently and as a group. I also knew that once some of the faster students learned how to do a specific task, he or she would help the others. I have tried to instill this same concept into my computer classes, and the result is that I have a classroom full of students working, calling me when they need help, and slowly learning to ask each other for help. I instituted the "Ask Three Before Me" rule, meaning that students need to ask three of their classmates how to do something before they ask me. The goal is to make the students resources for one another, and also to save me from repeating the same thing over and over.

Third, informatica teaches my students critical thinking skills that they don't necessarily develop in their other classes. When an 8th grader asks me for help with a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, for example, I'll ask her to try to figure out why we use a particular formula. This has resulted in some frustrating moments, such as when it took me over five minutes to push two 8th grade girls toward the conclusion that in order to calculate the price of a number of items, they needed to multiply the unit price of the item by the number of units. (Imagine repeating in a foreign language, "If I buy three notebooks for three lei each, how much do I pay?" for a minute before getting the correct response, then waiting another two minutes before the student realizes how she got that answer, and then waiting another two minutes until she understands how to write the correct formula in Excel.) But overall, my insistence that students think for themselves develops their minds much more than simply having them repeat rote activities or copy down my lectures in their notebooks, which is the more common method of teaching informatica in this country.

Fourth, I'm now teaching my students what are arguably the two most important subjects for their future outside of the village: English and computers. I repeatedly tell my students that in 20 years, they will be unemployable in well-paying jobs without computer skills. I am planning on bringing guest speakers to the school in the coming month, and a major focus in our discussions will be the importance of computers and foreign languages in their work. These kids will need to use computers in their lives, yet very few of their parents understand the value of computers and don't stress their importance. It is part of my job to drill it into their heads that they need basic computer skills like typing, using Windows, writing documents in Word, creating spreadsheets in Excel and navigating the internet.

Fifth, I'm giving the finger to the Ministry of Education's curriculum. I believe I've complained already about the ministry's curriculum for 9th through 12th grades, which is centered on programming in PASCAL. PASCAL is as useful a language to the average computer user as Zulu is to the average American. I have completely scrapped the 9th and 11th grade curriculum (we don't have 10th or 12th grades), and replaced it with more important everyday computer skills that the students didn't learn in their first few years. My 11th graders, after a semester of typing lessons consisting of about 35 minutes of practice per week, have gone from typing approximately 3 words per minute to 10.6 words per minute with 94.1 percent accuracy.

One of the ways I'm changing the curriculum in my schools is through fun group projects that express creativity and individuality. In the second semester, my 11th graders will be writing their own web sites, both for themselves personally and for the village or school. The sites will be written in combinations of Romanian, English and Russian, since I am stressing the importance of publishing items online in foreign languages in order to improve exposure to the rest of the world. These sites will include photographs, links to other sites, and hopefully some really nice formatting through cascading style sheets; that's as much detail as I can give without boring segments of my readers. I might do the same project with my 9th graders, or I might create a monthly newsletter with them. What do you, my readers, think I should do? Please leave comments.

The allure of these projects is that students use their voices. When I told my students that about 2,000 people read this blog every month, they were flabbergasted. "Have any of you ever written anything that 2,000 people read every month?" I asked. The answer was no. "But I'm not anyone special," I continued. "I'm not an important person, but I have put myself on the internet and I've found people who are interested in my life; Americans like reading about my life in another country, and Moldovans are interested to see what a foreigner thinks of their country. You can have just as many people reading your opinions and thoughts, and you can read about other people's lives, if you use the internet." I think that got my students' attention.

In all, I'm loving my time as the informatica teacher, even if it seemingly takes up every moment of my free time and keeps me at the school from 8:15 a.m. to 4 p.m. nearly every day. I have invested time and money into the computer lab, which is something that past informatica teachers haven't done. I was able to buy 10 CD-ROM drives for the lab for a total of $30, including shipping, while I was in America in December. I am upgrading the memory with chips that my dad sends me from the vast computer graveyard at our house. Slowly but surely, I am improving both the quality of the computers and of the students at my school. It wasn't my goal when I came to Moldova, but now it's become my niche.

I'm also publishing here my first ever web page written in Romanian. This is the first exercise in writing HTML that I gave to my 11th graders, in which I gave them the source code to enter in order to make this page. Their assignment is to find the names of several tags and name the ones that create, for example, lists or bold text. Then the students will write their own web pages based on my model. Later, the students' sites will expand to include photos, multiple pages, links to one another's sites and links to outside material. All of these pages will be published online as they are created.