There must be some cultural difference in the way children are raised in Romania that makes it impossible for my students to pay attention. I used to think it was only me who had trouble controlling the kids during my classes. Most of the time I just chalk it up the Karma bug biting me in the ass. I was, afterall, quite the little trouble maker in my day. Though I seem to remember being a little bit more covert than just yelling insults across the room at my classmates while the teacher was giving a lecture. I didn’t have a phone so there was no way for me to play music during class and I knew if I ever didn’t do my homework, my grades would suffer and my parents would have something to say about that.

Having spent the last three weeks team teaching with a Romanian I know now that I’m not alone. Even she has trouble gaining their respect, not because she doesn’t know how to threaten or command their attention, but simply because they are completely apathetic to anything she says. Apart from being the normal amount of boisterous one would expect from a group of adolescent preteens, the kids show a lack of respect for authority that is uncommon outside of the school.

In all of my dealings with Romanians the title, family, or age of a person genders them a certain amount of respect. Priests, first and foremost, are afforded an amount of respect one would expect of clergy, they hold a special place in their community as for the most part, all of the major milestones in Romanian life take place inside of the church. Next seems to be title, obviously people like mayors, directors and business owners have the respect of their peers and for the most part the population they serve. I have noticed though, that here, teachers are given a kind of respect uncommon in the United States. When I lived in the village everyone referred to me as domnul professor, a title of respect and reverence. Even those people who knew my name and whom I had a more informal relationship with would still call me domnul professor when first seeing me. I have witnessed the same thing occur with other teachers from my village and in the city. So why then, doesn’t this feeling transfer over to the students?

I was in a fourth grade class yesterday explaining to them where I was from. I told them I was from the northern part of the United States. One of the kids immediately went to the giant map of Romania in the room and asked me to point out where I’m from. I then had to explain that, the United States is not inside of Romania. He walked to the other map of Europe and asked the same thing. I would have thought this particular child was being facetious if it weren’t for the fact that other members of the class were trying to tell him where in Europe America was located. I became discouraged and pulled out the map of the United States I keep in my backpack just for such occasions. I was even more disheartened when they asked me where Italy was on the map.

This story isn’t meant to illustrate any particular problems with geography the Romanian education system might have, it is more to illustrate how small their world view is. In terms of my kids, their life will more than likely begin and end in Romania. More than likely 90% of them will remain in the village and those 10% who do move away will stay within the same region of the country. Sure one or two might go to school in Bucharest or have to leave to go and work is Italy or Spain as their parents do, but their world, for all intents and purposes is going to be exactly where they live now. What could they possibly need an education for?

I told a story at training for the new volunteers to help illustrate some of the difficulties they might encounter in smaller communities. An 8th grader who was giving me a particularly large amount of grief last year explained to me exactly why he always acted out in my classes. I kept him after class after one particularly troubling day and asked why he didn’t want to learn English. He told me in Romanian, “When I finish tenth grade I’m going to drop out of school and work on the farm with my family. I’m going to live here the rest of my life. Why do I need to learn English?” It was the only thing he could of said for which I had no response.

Maybe the problem isn’t that they don’t have respect for their teachers, it’s that they don’t have any respect for education. My education is what has allowed me to get where I am, to see the world in way that I didn’t think about when I was in middle school. It wasn’t until college that I even ever thought about leaving Michigan, and it wasn’t until I spent time in California that I wanted to travel and see the rest of the world. If it is what these kids desire to live in their own world for the rest of their lives, happily ignorant of the bigger picture I wish them well. The simple life has its own intoxicating qualities, but I hope those who do want to see the world and travel figure it out before it’s too late for them to change their station, or if nothing else, make my classes a little easier to manage.