International Contacts

I have been lucky enough to establish two contacts who, to date, have been willing to spend time conversing with me over email.   My first contact, Ms. Gabby, is a former elementary teacher from Romania who is in the states because her daughter won a scholarship here.   My aunt and Ms. Gabby work in the same school in New Jersey; my aunt as a teacher, and Ms. Gabby as part of the janitorial staff.   Her English is broken, but understandable.  I learned that she comes from a small village in Romania named Ruginoasa, which has a population less than 10,000 people.   In Romania, she said that formal schooling does not begin until age 7, when it is believed that children’s intellectual and emotional development is sufficient to allow them to sit in class for 7 hours and learn.   She used the words kindergarten and preschool interchangeably, leading me to believe there was no distinction between the two.  The curriculum in kindergarten/preschool did not focus on any learning of the alphabet or of numbers as it would be “harmful” to young children.  I hope to follow up with her on the focus of the preschool curriculum in Romania.  As to issues of poverty, Ms. Gabby felt strongly that poverty in the United States was just “indifference” and “an excuse not to work”.  She spoke of teaching in a communist school (Romania used to be a part of communist Russia) where heat, food, and electricity was rationed, and running water was not always available.  She said, “I taught in a school with a pen and notebook,” where the desks were scratched, walls were plain, and books were so overused they were almost unreadable.  She said children learned even in this environment because their parents taught them that education was of primary importance.  She noted that in the States there is much waste of school supplies, and a non-appreciation for the good physical quality of our schools.  She also asked “what are we to think of other countries if we call America poor?”   She claimed that a child who has gold bracelets on her arm or a video game at home cannot be poor.  The culprit to earning an education was indifference, and not poverty, according to Ms. Gabby.

My second contact is Ms. Carrie, who is the director of a preschool in Nova Scotia.  We share a mutual friend, which is how I came into contact with her.  Ms. Carrie has a BA in French and an Early Childhood Diploma, as she calls it.  In October of 2010, she opened her own preschool which employs 11 full-time staff and has 54 children.  She sits on the board of her province’s child care association.  The most pressing issue of the association is to professionalize the field through educational requirements of the professionals.  At the moment, the regulations in her province require that teachers have “a minimum two year diploma” and maintain at least 30 hours of professional development every three years.  I am awaiting her response as to how she would like to see the regulations changed, and to hear from her about any issues she may have experienced relative to poverty.