Bulgaria

[Richmond Mathewson]

Peter Alcibiades wrote:
> One does hope the Bulgarians appreciate what Richmond is doing.  Its really 
> impressive, how to do wonders in educational terms on an absolute shoe 
> string.  Well, whether or not the Bulgarians as a whole do, the children 
> and their parents certainly will look back later and realize how lucky they 
> were.
>
> The slightly sad part is that it would be impossible to do anything similar 
> in the UK, regulation, and the time constraints of the state curriculum 
> would never allow it.  Its become a country where IT education means being 
> taught by barely literate teachers how to use social media and little bits 
> of MS Office....  
>   
I do my "stuff" in a tiny little room in my cellar - and 'reach' a 
handful of kids.

The Bulgarian curriculum re computers consists of:

WINDOWS ONLY (including a section where other operating systems are 
disparaged);

Primary School:

Web-Browsing
Using MS Word
Using MS Excel

Secondary School:

More of the above
programming in PASCAL

Personally I believe that 90% of EFl teachers and "IT" teachers here in 
Bulgaria
should be taken out and shot (or, if one feels soft and humane, perhaps 
given jobs
such as cleaning school toilets). In both cases they know little or 
nothing about their
subjects (the vast majority of Primary School EFL teachers cannot 
sustain 2 sentences
in English) and successfully turn off 99% of their pupils.
> But Richmond's stuff is really inspirational.
>   
But, as my wife points out; it's my job to teach EFL, and parents
would have every right to object on my spending time on programming.

As usual the whole IT thing revolves around vested interests.

The last 2 governments have been "in bed" with Microsoft; leading children
to suppose that any OS or program that is not a Microsoft product is in
some way useless.

The new government doesn't look as though much will change (well, if
you consider exchanging ex-Commies for ex-Mafia as an improvement, this
might well be the place for you).

Good EFL teaching as well as good IT teaching presupposes highly trained
and motivated teachers, as well as, in the case of IT, something other than
tatty old computers full to the brim with viruses and rubbish installed 
on them
by kids.

These come with MONEY and WILL. Neither of which are forthcoming in 
Bulgaria.
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Something that is absolutely hilarious is that, here in Plovdiv, we have 
an extremely
good technical University, where all those who are studying IT, study 
UNIX and
LINUX, and then , on qualifying, have to work with Windows.  One of them 
came
round to see my school and couldn't quite believe what he saw - not because
using Linux is rocket science, but that my setup was such an OBVIOUS 
solution
to a problem.  Mind you, come to Bulgaria, and try to find anybody who knows
what common sense is or walking in a straight line.
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To a lesser extent the same thing goes on in Britain. 5 years ago, in 
Scotland, I saw
a Primary School IT room containing 25 Pentium IIIs, of which:-

10 didn't work (i.e. didn't boot),

10 kept crashing for unknown reasons,

5 worked - with Paint and Word and a few Dorling Kindersley CDs that 
(owing to the
illegality of making backups of CDs) were ruined from kids' sticky 
finger marks.

These machines had Windows 98, XP and 2000 installed.

There potential was entirely wasted, both because of the above, and that 
there was no
proper IT teacher, and teachers had no incentive to improve their 
knowledge of the
capabilities of these machines.

It would have taken a week's work, at most, to have installed something 
such as Edubuntu:

http://edubuntu.org/

and RunRev :)  and the machines would have run like hot knives through 
butter.

Couple that with a properly trained IT teacher on a half-way decent 
salary (teachers'
salaries are another of the bees in my bonnet).
> Peter
>