Category Archives: education

by | 18 August 2026 · 8:48 am

Duterte’s Response to COVID

From The Making of the Modern Philippines: Pieces of a Jigsaw State, by Philip Bowring (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Kindle pp. 109-110:

The last two years of Duterte’s presidency were dominated by the pandemic. Although blame for what, at least by the standards of its Asian neighbours, was a disastrous outcome did not fall on Duterte in particular, but it did show up the weakness of the Philippine state and the low quality of many of Duterte’s political appointees to important ministries and operational departments – not least a chaotic and overburdened Department of Health. Duterte’s own inclinations added to the problems of the pandemic. His instinct was for controls and lockdowns over testing and tracing. The country was very late in acquiring vaccines – and Duterte’s seeming preference for China’s Sinovac rather than Western ones. The severity of lockdowns in 2020 caused the economy to shrink 7 per cent, far higher than elsewhere in southeast Asia, and brought particular hardship to the millions in the informal sector. The lockdowns were no more successful in curbing the virus than less stringent ones in Indonesia. The Philippines also kept its schools closed for longer than almost any country.

The disastrous GDP performance in 2020 was followed by recovery of only about 5 per cent in 2021 due to renewed lockdowns. Meanwhile, the government debt burden was expected to rise 11.6 trillion pesos in July 2021 from 9.6 trillion a year earlier, despite the efforts of a conservative fiscal policy team to restrain spending. Given the low debt level in 2019, the rise was not especially alarming, particularly as only one-third was in foreign currency. However, the speed of the rise showed the compounding cost of lockdowns.

Duterte took his style of government from Davao to Manila, but the nation was a more complicated place and he had little time for details or issues other than a few such as the drug war. On those details he expected immediate obedience. Cabinet meetings were largely irrelevant and ministerial access to the president was difficult. Competent ministers could get on with their jobs but incompetents often stayed in place if they were unquestionably loyal. Appointments were weighted towards associates from Davao, and to retired generals, men accustomed to following orders In Philippine politics, as elsewhere, friends and benefactors were rewarded with positions and deals, but Duterte raised this to a level well above that of his predecessor. He behaved as one seeing himself as above the law, ruling from a bully pulpit.

As the 2022 election loomed, Duterte saw a need to protect himself from prosecution should the opposition win.

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Filed under China, democracy, disease, drugs, economics, education, nationalism, Philippines

by | 11 August 2026 · 5:43 am

Rise of Religious Nationalism in Philippines

From The Making of the Modern Philippines: Pieces of a Jigsaw State, by Philip Bowring (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Kindle pp. 29-31:

The nineteenth century saw a sustained clash between the religious needs of the Filipinos and the colonialist views of the Spanish Church, the friars in particular. Nationalism had its roots in this conflict.

Tension between the Spanish-led Church and peasant Catholics led to the creation of the all-Filipino Cofradia de San Jose in Central Luzon by Apolinario de la Cruz, better known as Hermano Pule, who had wanted to join the Dominican order but was barred because of his race. Becoming a lay preacher, he and a Filipino priest established the Cofradia de San Jose, attached to a hospital. It gradually attracted several thousand followers and only admitted Spanish and mestizos personally approved by Pule. It combined Catholic teaching with some pre-colonial ideas. Refused recognition by both State and Church, it was seen by the governor-general as implicitly political and was violently suppressed. In a battle with followers, troops killed several hundred and Pule and other leaders were captured and executed; Pule was just twenty-seven years old. Madrid was shocked and eventually the Supreme Court admonished the governor-general saying the Cofradia was not political but had merely committed an ecclesiastical offence, but the damage had been done.

The country was in the curious position of having become devout believers in Christ while increasingly despising the Church’s principal agents the friars, the mendicants who had grown rich and greedy. In 1858, a British visitor was entertained to a dinner which would have ‘satisfied a Parisian gourmand’ meanwhile also noting that local Spanish ‘newspapers were more pre-occupied with the lives of saints than the most stirring events of the political world’.

At the same time, the Church saw growing divides between its mostly Spanish clergy and both the local priests and their flocks. The government did make efforts to extend primary education with its own schools in addition to the clerical schools but with a focus on teaching Christianity. The friars tended to ignore government demands that they teach Spanish to the Indios fearing that it would give them access to new, often secular, ideas.

In 1870, of 792 parishes, 611 were administered by the orders while the rest were controlled by secular priests, most of whom were Filipinos. The confrontation between the two sparked a surge of local identity. Political swings in Madrid exacerbated issues as a liberal governor was replaced by a conservative. A minor uprising in a Cavite shipyard was used by the government, egged on by the friars, to accuse three outspoken local priests – Fathers Burgos, Gomez and Zamora – to be tried for plotting rebellion and executed. Others were imprisoned or exiled to the Marianas. Well-to-do supporters exiled themselves to Spain.

The deaths of the three priests were a landmark. Burgos, the son of a Spanish officer and a local mestiza, was highly educated, so too were Gomez and Zamora, mestizos educated at the University of Santo Tomas. All deeply resented the inferior position of the non-Spanish clergy.

This episode fuelled the wrath of an upcoming generation of prospering new class of mestizos, elite Indios and creoles (local born Spanish) who could be educated in Europe but who at home felt the heavy hand of racist officials and the Guardia Civil. From this elite, known as ilustrados (the enlightened) emerged the Propagandists, a movement aiming not for independence but for equal treatment as citizens and representation in the Cortes (parliament) in Madrid as Cuba and Puerto Rica had been given. They also demanded the ending of the friars’ role in government, their replacement by local priests, more mass education, the curtailment of foreign – notably Chinese – economic power and a fairer tax system – the Spanish did not pay tax.

Gathering gradual momentum from 1880, by 1889 the movement was embedded among young ilustrados in Spain who published La Solidaridad, a fortnightly newspaper. The names of those involved are celebrated by street names throughout the country – Marcelo del Pilar, a lawyer, who wrote tracts in Tagalog as well as Spanish, Mariano Ponce, Juan Luna, a painter, and his brother Antonio, a future general, but most noted even then was Jose Rizal, a mestizo from Calamba near Manila whose elder brother had been a friend of Father Burgos. Rizal, a name he adopted, was fluent in several languages, a medical doctor and a writer whose first novel, Noli Me Tangere published in 1887, was a searing attack on the regime in Manila and on the friars.

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Filed under education, migration, nationalism, Philippines, religion, Spain

by | 19 July 2026 · 8:44 am

Translating for the Royal Society

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 51-53:

At the end of 1770, the Forsters moved back to London, taking lodgings next to Reinhold’s old school friend Woide, who had moved to Somerset House Stable Yard near the Thames. On 13 December, three days after their arrival, father and son went to the Royal Society, the nexus of British scientific enquiry where, since its foundation in the 1660s, fellows met to learn about new scientistic discoveries and exchange ideas with like-minded men. Reinhold Forster knew the Royal Society well, having attended the weekly meetings during their first stay in London. But now he wanted to introduce his son and present George’s translations (though Reinhold’s name was on their covers). So they made their way to Crane Court, a short fifteen-minute walk from their lodgings in a little cul-de-sac off Fleet Street, where the fellows met every Thursday. The president directed the meetings from a large armchair at one end of a long table, with a bust of the Society’s first royal patron, King Charles II, behind him, while the fellows sat on green-upholstered benches around the table.

At only sixteen George now found himself in the same room with some of the greatest minds in England. Almost every Thursday he accompanied his father to the Royal Society, where he sat under the watchful eyes of the portraits of illustrious previous fellows: the periwigged former president and mathematician Isaac Newton; the philosopher Francis Bacon in a lace ruff and embroidered velvet coat; and the architect Christopher Wren, who rebuilt London after the Great Fire of 1666. At these meetings George heard scholars talk about the physics of light, rare birds in the East Indies, new comets, the latest telescopes, tumours in pregnant women and subterranean geological formations. He saw animals preserved in spirits, pinned insects, a stuffed sea lion and a 24-foot snake, as well as the skeletons of a crocodile and an ostrich. He was receiving instructions unlike any other sixteen-year-old. As father and son attended the weekly meetings and published translations, their names soon spread across the scholarly world. Then, in February 1772, a little more than a year after their return to London, Reinhold was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and became officially part of the British scientific establishment.

George continued to work, translating eight volumes in total, while his father wrote and published numerous essays on botany, insects, zoology, antiquities, geography and mineralogy. ‘If I didn’t have a son of seventeen who helped me with translating,’ Reinhold admitted, ‘I couldn’t possibly do all this work.’ George began to feel like a ‘translation-machine’, but the reviews were glowing. ‘He writes our language,’ the Critical Review applauded (praising Reinhold, since only he was credited), ‘with propriety; always with perspicuity, the great requisite in the communication of scientific learning’. Another critic even declared George’s translation of Bougainville’s A Voyage Round the World ‘superior to the original’.

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Filed under Britain, education, language, science, travel

by | 18 July 2026 · 8:15 pm

George Forster’s Early Youth

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 27-28:

George Forster was ten when he went on his first expedition.

He was a slender boy, small for his age, but what he lacked in physical strength he made up for in tenacity during the five months that he and his father travelled through Russia. In charge of collecting and identifying plants, the ten-year-old would wander off alone, eyes wide open, searching for new discoveries—sometimes climbing trees, at others keeping his head near the ground to study the vegetation with a magnifying glass. When he returned to the tent with full bags, he would press the samples he had found between paper, carefully arranging blossoms and leaves so that he could classify them later. Soon his collection had risen to 700 specimens.

While other children sat on hard benches in orderly rows at school, learning by rod and rote, George found himself galloping on small Kalmyk horses across the Russian steppes and wading through marshes on the banks of the Volga river. He watched a violent wildfire race across the vast grasslands to the east, its ravenous flames consuming everything in its path. He remembered the terror he felt that day for the rest of his life. Instead of studying arithmetic or conjugating Latin verbs, he observed flocks of black herons, wild boars and wolves, and huge Bactrian camels used by the nomadic Kalmyks as pack animals, which evoked the stories of the Arabian Nights and Ali Baba. He met Muslim Tatar traders along the Volga, fierce Cossack warriors from the open steppes to the east who wore sheepskin hats, baggy trousers and colourful caftans, and German settlers so destitute that they lived in earth dugouts in the ground. Near today’s Russian border with Kazakhstan, he marvelled at Lake Elton, a huge shallow salt lake with a shoreline encrusted in a thick white layer like snow, against water which algae had turned blood red. And in the Ryn Desert just north of the Caspian Sea, he felt piercing winds whip across the dunes, as wild as the land itself.

Russia was on a different scale from the flat gentle countryside where George had been raised near Gdansk, in today’s Poland. Everything here was vaster and emptier. The skies, lakes and land were bigger, the distances immense, and the weather extreme. He feasted his eyes and tasted new foods. He ate wild asparagus, drank fermented mare’s milk—‘of a nauseous or disagreeable Taste’—and enjoyed the refreshing juice of bog cranberries mixed with water and honey after the long dusty days on horseback.

This was not like learning from the books he loved. He could see, smell and feel that he had entered another world. The food had a different flavour, the languages were unfamiliar, and the people looked nothing like those at home. In Russia, he absorbed a new and very foreign country for the first time. At the age of ten, he became a traveller.

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Filed under education, Germany, language, migration, Russia, science, travel, Ukraine

by | 5 July 2026 · 2:45 pm

Romanian Realia: Online Investing

This flyer is from a bank in Moldova:

Ai Grijă unde investești ONLINE!
Take care where you invest ONLINE!
Nu te lăsa păcălit de promisiuni false.
Don’t let yourself be fooled by false promises.

STOP investițiilor false
Stop false investments

STOP! Informează-te înainte să accepți oferte “atractive” de învestiții online.
Stop! Inform yourself before accepting “attractive” offers of online investment.

Cănd sună prea frumos să fie adevărat, e momentul să te OPREȘTI.
If it sounds too attractive to be true, it’s the moment to STOP.

VERIFICĂ! Dacă ai dubii, consultă o persoană de încredere sau un angajat bancar.
Verify! If you have doubts, consult a trusted person or a bank employee.

EVITĂ completarea sondajelor care cer informații sensibile și nu oferi datele tale personale sau bancare pe site-uri necunoscute.
Avoid completing surveys that ask for sensitive information and don’t offer personal or bank data on unfamiliar sites.

Ferește-te de “juriștii” de pe internet care promit că îți recuperează banii rapid. În realitate, poate fi doar o altă înșelătorie.
Protect yourself from “lawyers” on the internet who promise that you can quickly recover your money. In reality, it may be just another scam.

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Filed under economics, education, language, Moldova, Romania

by | 30 June 2026 · 12:06 am

Building a Ukrainian National Language

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 215-218:

AMONG THE UKRAINIANS prepared to fight Napoleon with arms in hand was the founder of modern Ukrainian literature, Ivan Kotliarevsky. A native of the Poltava region in the former Hetmanate, he formed a Cossack detachment to join the struggle. The son of a minor official, Kotliarevsky studied in a theological seminary, worked as a tutor of children of the nobility, and served in the Russian imperial army, taking part in the 1806–1812 Russo-Turkish War. In 1798, while on military service, the first part of his poem Eneïda appeared in print, a travesty based on Virgil’s Aeneid, whose main characters were not Greeks but Zaporozhian Cossacks. As one would expect of true Zaporozhians, they spoke vernacular Ukrainian. But the choice of language for the poem seems logical only in retrospect. In late eighteenth century Ukraine, Kotliarevsky was a pioneer—the first to write a major poetical work in the vernacular.

…

Kotliarevsky wrote the first part of Eneïda when the shell of Church Slavonic, which had dominated Russian imperial literature of the previous era, was crumbling and falling apart, allowing literatures based in one way or another on the vernacular to make their way into the public sphere. Russia found its first truly great poet in Alexander Pushkin; Ukraine got its own in the person of Kotliarevsky. Whatever his original motives for using Ukrainian, Kotliarevsky never regretted his choice. There would be five more parts of Eneïda. He would also author the first plays written in Ukrainian, among them Natalka-Poltavka (Natalka from Poltava), a love story set in a Ukrainian village. The language of Kotliarevsky’s homeland, the Poltava region of the former Hetmanate, would become the basis of standard Ukrainian for speakers of numerous Ukrainian dialects from the Dnieper to the Don in the east and to the Carpathians in the west. With Kotliarevsky, a new literature was born. The language received its first grammar in 1818 with the publication of the Grammar of the Little Russian Dialect by Oleksii Pavlovsky. A year later, the first collection of Ukrainian folk songs by Mykola (Nikolai) Tsertelev appeared in print.

…

The birthplace of Ukrainian romanticism was the city of Kharkiv, where the imperial government opened a university in 1805, inviting professors from all over the empire to fill vacant positions. Being a professor at that time often meant taking an interest in local history and folklore, and Kharkiv had a rich tradition. It served as the administrative and cultural center of Sloboda Ukraine, settled by Ukrainian Cossacks and runaway peasants in the times of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this land was often referred to as “Ukraine.”

…

The centrality of the Cossack past to romantic literary interests, already manifested by Kotliarevsky’s Eneïda, was further evidenced by the Kharkiv romantics’ readiness to embrace and popularize by far the most influential Ukrainian historical text of the period, Istoriia rusov (The History of the Rus’).

Well, my Kindle app has informed me that I’ve nearly reached the publisher’s limit in copying from the text of this book, and this seems a good place to end this series of excerpts—at the point where a national language begins to develop. So I have decided to buy the latest book by the same prolific author, and begin reading and posting excerpts from The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History (W. W. Norton, 2023), the first chapter of which summarizes many of the highlights that I have excerpted from this book.

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Filed under education, language, literature, nationalism, Russia, Ukraine

by | 23 June 2026 · 12:10 am

Polish Realia: Dogs & Computers

Psine.pl, a computer repair shop in our Kielce neighborhood, has some interesting word usage.

The first item is the name of the company itself. Google translates psine as ‘doggie’. (It also translates Eng. doggone as Pol. cholera, which it translates back into Eng. ‘damn’.) Polish pies ‘dog’ has a very irregular declension: psy ‘dogs’, do psa ‘to the dog’, do psów ‘to the dogs’, z psem ‘with the dog’, z psami ‘with the dogs’, o psie ‘about the dog’, o psach ‘about the dogs’.

Pol. szczeniak ‘puppy’ is a little bit more regular: szczenięta ‘puppies’, do szczeniaka ‘to the puppy’, do szczeniąt ‘to the puppies’, ze szczeniakiem ‘with the puppy’, ze szczeniakami ‘with the puppies’, o szczeniaku ‘about the puppy’, o szczeniętach ‘about the puppies’.

The recent loanwords listed on Psine’s storefront have very regular nominative plurals: laptopy, smartfony, tablety, komputery. Other recent loans have similar plurals: bestsellery, burgery, filtry, gofry (< gaufre ‘waffles’), pantsy, szorty, (jar for) tipsy, toalety, turysty.

But, in construction with serwis ‘service’ or naprawa ‘repair’, the same tech loans take different plurals: (serwis/naprawa) laptopów, smartfonów, komputerów. 

For ‘game console’, Psine.pl writes singular konsol do gier and plural konsoli do gier. Google translates ‘console’ into singular konsola and plural konsole. The word translated gier is related to a whole etymological rabbit-hole full of nouns and verbs: gra ‘game’, gry ‘games’, gracz ‘gamer’; grać ‘to play (games), graj w gry ‘play (at) games’, graj w piłkę nożną ‘play (at) football, wygrywaj mecze ‘play matches’, graj na skrzypcach ‘play on a violin’ (lit. ‘on horsetails’?), etc.

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Filed under education, language, Poland

by | 10 June 2026 · 12:38 am

PCV Exit Interviews in Moldova

From Lenin’s Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 239-241:

The COS [Close-of-Service] conference convened on a spring weekend at a campground that wealthy Russians used as vacation property. The Peace Corps staff had reserved us several cabins that overlooked the river separating Moldova and Ukraine. For the first time in two years, the entire group of remaining volunteers was in the same place at the same time. Our original class had dwindled from thirty-seven to twenty-two. The meetings were brief and confusing. Our boss, the Country Director, described how we should avoid areas like shopping malls and rock concerts when we returned to America; large groups of people would probably unnerve us. He read updates from the previous volunteers who had quit or been evacuated; Callie was teaching English in Turkey and Paul was completing his first year of law school in Cincinnati. They were happy. We listened less to their advice for readjustment, and more to where these people lived. America was a big place. Jesse would live in Minnesota, Colin in Virginia, Will in North Carolina. And Sadie would be in New Jersey. I wouldn’t be anywhere near those places. The medical officer asked that those of us who’d contracted ailments continue our medications when we returned home. Jesse—in direct relation to his refusal to ever seek medical treatment—was awarded recognition as the group’s healthiest volunteer over the two-year period. The safety officer asked that we not celebrate our final days in country with binge drinking; our final benefit package would be delayed if we were arrested and deported from the country at the last minute.

The lecture portion of the conference now concluded, the necessary advice for readjustment into American life dispensed, the Country Director congratulated us and excused us to our exit language interviews.

* * *

The Country Director’s secretary was the only one in the office who spoke Russian well enough to test Jesse and me. I waited outside as Jesse spoke with her for ten minutes. He came outside smiling and said, “Piece of cake.” The secretary had given him an advanced mark.

Inside the cabin, I found the secretary sitting on the bed, her feet not touching the floor. She pointed to a chair in the corner and asked me to sit. She asked me to spell my name and then we began. We talked about transportation using verbs of motion, of food preparation, of my likes and dislikes and specific events in the past and future. It took five minutes to finish her checklist of language proficiency.

“So,” said the secretary. “We have some time to kill. What shall we talk about?”

I shrugged my shoulders and said, “It’s all the same to me.” The secretary giggled.

“Your accent is good. Your body language is good, also. Very Russian, it seems to me.”

I nodded, brushing aside the compliment.

“You live with Russians, I must guess. Is this true?”

I nodded.

“Tell me about them.”

“Not much to tell. Very good people. They treat me well.”

“Do you respect them?”

“Of course.”

“What do you mean by, ‘Of course?’”

We sat in silence for a moment as the secretary allowed me to compose my thoughts. My mind returned to my imagining Dima working across the border in Romania, taking orders in a language he hated. And in Bulgaria the women drank coffee on the street corners, I thought. Dima would never be happy anywhere else.

“I spend most of my time in family with the father, Dima. He’s a baker and enjoys working, perhaps not the amount that he must, but the work itself.”

I paused to see if the secretary understood me. She nodded encouragement and waved her hand in a rolling circle to keep me going.

“Like this there is happiness, which I respect. In Riscani, where we live, the streets are clean and pleasant; there is always someone to stop and chat with along the way on these roads. The purpose of life is open and understood, I think. Every day, life has a simple and direct purpose. Walk to work, don’t hurt anyone along the way, and get back home at night for a drink and a sleep.” The secretary nodded and then dismissed me from the cabin. She scored me advanced as well.

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Filed under Bulgaria, education, labor, language, migration, Moldova, Romania, Russia, U.S., Ukraine

by | 9 June 2026 · 2:10 am

Patron Saint’s Day in Moldova

From Lenin’s Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 193-195:

Riscani’s town birthday, a day festival called hram, fell on a Tuesday.

Only a handful of students had come to school; none of the kids higher than sixth grade or any of the village classes showed up that day. I was thankful that my older kids had taken the day off. They would have certainly arrived to class intoxicated. Instead, they wandered the streets with cans of beer, toasting anyone they recognized.

My fifth grade girls asked if I’d be celebrating in the town center. I assured them I wouldn’t be drunk.

“Why not?” asked Olia. “It is hram.”

“Do you realize that drinking so much can damage your health?”

“You are not little,” the class explained. “You can drink without problems.”

After school, I called my friends. I wouldn’t be going out into the hram without backup. Michael was in the capital, so he couldn’t help. With such short notice, Colin was the only one who could make it there in time. He was in Riscani an hour after I called, ready to take on the best the Russians could offer.

Colin was in the apartment for ten minutes before I realized he’d arrived. Dima had met him at the door and taken him to the kitchen for a shot of vodka in honor of Riscani. I walked into the kitchen and found Dima talking to Colin in broken Romanian. Dima pushed out a chair for me, explaining that he and Colin had started while I finished my nap. “Dude,” said Colin, his cheeks flushed. “I really like your father.”

Dima poured three more shots of vodka. We drank. Then Dima reached down to the cabinet below the sink and produced five different bottles: apple garilka, Moldovan samagon [самогон, self-distilled, i.e., homemade moonshine], cognac, high-class vodka, and red wine. We took a shot from each bottle. Then Dima took a bottle of cold beer from the ice box and we drank that. Colin had been a bartender in Virginia before joining the Peace Corps. Now he offered his professional commentary: “Dude, we just drank ten shots of alcohol in twenty minutes.”

“Go enjoy yourselves in the street,” said Dima. “It’s a party.”

…

Colin was already something of a celebrity in Riscani. The town folk who’d met him on his first visit recalled meeting the tallest man in the world. Those who hadn’t seen him carried in their minds an image akin to Big Foot.

From my front door we followed the techno music to its source at the Lenin statue. A crowd of a thousand cheered when we arrived. People hugged me and shook Colin’s hand, took pictures of us with their cell phones. In Russian, Colin said, “Good evening, Riscani,” and the crowd lost it. Students appeared holding beers for us to drink. I refused and told Colin not to accept anything from a minor—even former students like Edgar. Soon enough adults gave us drinks. The Riscanians gyrated to the techno music in disorganized, Russian-head-bobbing, non-circle dancing. Dariya appeared, only the second time I’d seen her since she went off to college. She’d dyed her hair black and wore even tighter clothes than she’d worn in high school. She kissed me on the cheek without her previous childhood awkwardness, whispered she’d see us back at the apartment, and then disappeared into the crowd.

…

Soon after hram, a well-known student from the Moldovan lyceum passed away from illness. My ninth graders had played with him as kids and weren’t in the mood to study, so I let class out early. With a handful of sunflower seeds, I walked down the main street. Live music carried through the air, trumpets and drums. I said hello to Katya at the bazaar and ate one of her sugar rolls. Outside the bazaar, I stepped into a tractor-trailer that had been converted into a shooting range, and I paid five lei to shoot twenty bee-bees at paper targets. I only hit one. Back on the main street, I decided to have a beer. As I walked toward the lake, the live music grew louder. The drumming vibrated my stomach. Then the funeral procession for the dead boy turned a corner into my view. Pedestrians stopped walking and removed their hats; I did the same. The casket was carried on the back of a flat-bed truck. His body was open to the air and slightly blue. Some type of jelly made his face look shiny. The priest walked directly behind; he made eye contact with me and smiled, placed his hand over his heart and bowed his head. I mirrored him, placing my hand on my heart and bowing my head. Several of my students were in the procession following the casket and the priest. They waved to me. Everyone looked sad, but no one cried. I continued on to the lake. The sounds of the trumpets and drums diminished until I only heard them in memory. At the bar they only had liters in the fridge, so that’s what I drank.

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Filed under education, language, Moldova, religion, Russia

by | 7 June 2026 · 6:27 pm

New Year, New Classes in Moldova

From Lenin’s Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 182-184:

The first week at school passed without any major incidents. There weren’t any fires or drunk students or kids challenging me to fights. As they had the year before, the students hesitated to participate—even the pupils who’d been in my classes the year before. I might have felt stress if I were a new volunteer. In retrospect, my comfort level with craziness was the only difference between the beginnings of the first and second school years. This time nothing fazed me, not even when a boy went after his classmate with a belt.

Several parents and guardians had requested the school keep their sons and daughters under my tutelage. Natashka’s class—the class that had started the trash fire—were now sixth graders. Two boys I knew from basketball, Vova and Alexander, were now in my ninth grade class. And the rambunctious pupils belonging to Lyudmila Petrovna’s homeroom, a different class of sixth graders, also remained with me.

The group of ninth graders from the previous year had moved on; there weren’t enough left to justify a space in my schedule. Edgar and the other boys who’d preferred drinking to English lessons had “graduated” to the work force or technical school to learn tractor mechanics. Nadezhda had absorbed the remaining girls into her own tenth grade class. In exchange she’d given me a new group of fifth graders—all girls. They listened to me, they conjugated, they played nice, they thanked me when class ended, never asked about grades and surrounded me in an awkward group hug when the bell rang.

The final class on my schedule, a village class, would prove to be my greatest challenge during this second year.

After watching me teach for a year, the school director had decided I was tough enough to handle a village class. A third class of sixth graders came into my room and began throwing playful punches while they waited for the bell to ring. I screamed for them to respect the classroom and they grew silent; this was the only time all year they’d respond to my yelling. They arrived in Riscani each morning on a bus from Novi Balan, a nearby village without a school. Their clothes were plainer than the town kids, with muted colors. Most had brown finger nails. The boys shaved their heads to keep dirt away, and the girls appeared to eat no more than once a day. Two of the boys called themselves gypsies, Artem and Maxim, of the Roma ethnicity. I soon learned that because of these two boys, Nadezhda had talked the school director into passing this class on to me.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s learn English.”

“As soon as you kick Artem and Maxim into the hallway,” said one of the girls. “Then we’ll begin.”

The class laughed.

Maxim calmly nodded his head to Artem, pushed his chair out, stood up, took off his belt and lunged after the girl. Two Russian boys promptly tackled him. The girl smacked Maxim over the head while the two boys held him down.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess that’s enough.”

I pulled the two boys off Maxim and got everyone back to their seats. The kids watched me silently, waiting for me to dispense punishment. Instead of yelling at Maxim, I directed my anger toward the girl. “Listen, little missy,” I said. “In English class I’m the only one allowed to hit people!” The class laughed. I tapped the girl on her forehead with her own text book.

I switched into English.

“Who wants to talk first?”

The room remained silent.

“What is your name?” I asked a girl.

Silence. “Who speaks English?” I asked. “Any words at all.”

Continued silence. Artem took out a cell, which I confiscated immediately.

“Give it!” he yelled in Russian.

“Ask me in English!” I said.

Artem laughed. The class laughed. This was a sixth grade class, so they’d studied English for three years.

I pointed at a girl, indicating it was her turn to speak.

“Not a word,” she said. “We usually draw in English class.”

“I know a word,” interrupted Maxim. “Motherfucker.”

The class laughed.

“Who has a textbook?” I asked. “Raise your hands.”

Only one girl in the class of fifteen raised her hand.

“Only you?” I said.

“Yes, Mr. Aaron. Don’t you remember hitting me over the head with it?”

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