Elena Rusu English teacher

Please introduce yourself: where were you born, where did you study? What is your job at the moment? What was your most recent job before taking up your current position?

Lenuța or Aliona, as my father wanted his first child to be named, born in Chișinău, in 1980, in the family of an accountant and a farmer. I studied at the local, rural school from Budești, graduated „Gaudeamus” High School in Chisinau. I consider myself the child from post-soviet time period, the one, that started to learn reading using chirilic alphabet and in the 5th grade learnt to read again using Latin alphabet.

Nowadays there are a lot of universities offering the students the possibility to choose several specializations, the time when I was a student it was hard to study at 2 different departments but it was possible. Thus being a simple and ambitious girl in the first year at the Chemistry department, I applied to the second one - Math and Computer studies. It was a long journey through the world of knowledge with ups and downs, with chemical reactions, experiments, computer programs and English, with almost 12 hours of intellectual activity spent day by day, within the university walls.

At the moment, I work as a vice principal responsible for teachers’ instruction and educational management in a rural school IPLT „Budești”, situated next to the capital of Moldova - Chișinău. The main responsibilities I have are: implementation of the recommendations related to the legal frameworks in the field of education, guidance of 37 teachers that represent the staff of the school, planning, management and reporting of the such activities as local contests, teachers meetings, evaluations, schedule and putting into action the subjects curricula etc. This position demands strong leadership, interpersonal communication and management skills, strong attention to details, constant management of time, processing and dissemination of knowledge, information, the ability to speak with colleagues, pupils, parents and commitment.

What was your first job? Was it in teaching? How was it?

My first job….it is a funny moment with my first „official summer job”, I started to work, I suppose, when I was 15 years old and my task/duty was to run through the vineyard and to count the vine stamps. Later on, I was collecting apples, grapes from the fields. I worked as a

fruit and vegetable seller. So, my first jobs were not connected with teaching but I definitely can say that I learnt how to communicate efficiently, collaborate, and negotiate as an adult. Highly needed skills, values and attitudes, that we try to teach our students at different optional courses: financial education, intercultural education, media literacy, lobby and advocacy, etc., were acquired by me during summer time. Several times I was trying to run away and escape from the educational system, working as a secretary in a company, consultant at the Ministry of Youth and Sport, manager of Robocode school but all my attempts were in vain …. I was missing teaching, students, communication and every beginning of September was like a blessing for me. With joy, inspiration and enthusiasm I was starting a new cycle, evolving day by day and continuing my special mission.

What was frustrating when you started it? What did you like most about it?

I started the administrative activity as a vice-principal in 2018 and of course there were a lot of frustrating things and moments, maybe trifles at this moment but at that specific time they were annoying my mind shouting „solve me ...I want to be the first in your list”. The major frustrations were related to: -lack of experience about how to organise the instructional process; -insufficiently resourceful people open to share their experience; -insufficient knowledge related to the educational documents and processes; -insufficient support, mentorship and guidance from municipal educational institutions in the field of instructional management; -ineffective time management due to the additional tasks, reports; -insufficient time for lesson observation and feedback.

What are the main milestones in your career?

My career is based on 3 pillars that are worthy to be mentioned here, mainly them helped me to pursue my career are people, visited places, challenges. About me, can be said that I am a self-challenging person, if somewhere are announced competitions or job vacancies, I will definitely apply. The taste of the victory after the selection process when we got selected or nominated for an exchange program or a job position reveals usually the worthiness of the person that applied. I feel that I have valuable and appreciated professional skills needed and the people are interested to collaborate with me. Almost every competition, exchange or project I apply enhances me with new professional requirements and standards. My communicative and counselling skills helped me to participate in different international projects, trainings and seminars in such international organisations as: SIDA(Swedish International Development and Cooperation Agency), Peace Corps, ICLD(International Centre of Local Democracy), Youth in action, Pastalozzi program, etc.

In 2010, after being selected for an international youth exchange in Poland , with all the costs for the trip and accommodation covered I understood that the desire to travel and learn about different cultures, educational systems, issues and possible solutions can be fulfilled by being active, learn constantly and being aware of the global issues related to social, educational and cultural spheres. Almost every year I had chances to see new places and to learn about new cultures, thus I have traveled to different countries like Sweden, Germany, Ukraine, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Poland. Last three summers I provided translation for World Friends-IT Korea courses, held with the support of Korean volunteers in our community. Also I volunteer as an expert in Drop out issue, in international partnership projects implemented by Local Public Administration from Budești in collaboration with partner Communities (GhanziBotswana, Ale-Sweden, Budești-Moldova). This very last project included multiple trips to Botswana, I was discovering Botswana step by step, at a specific moment I was thinking that we are in a similar way discovered by the American or European visitors. Moreover every next visit I was impressed by the cultural heritage the Bostwanian people have and their desire to learn new experiences and to change the reality they struggle with. After my first visit to Botswana I was so thankful of being living in Moldova, that I was ready to kiss the land when we arrived back. The school conditions with an extremely large number of students coming from different tribes, being unable to socialize because of the regionalisms of Tswana language, the school hostels where children are brought from the remote areas since they are five, living alone becoming victims of bullying, lack of simple utilities and cuttleware for eating breakfast and lunch, the poverty I have seen there made me to change my mind about school conditions we have in Moldova. The next trips made me to discover the people, I have noticed that due to the fact that Botswana was an English colony, a lot of people understand and can fluently express themselves in English (except the bushmen). Majority of the officials use specific vocabulary in the field of education on the level of a scholar, they are interested to learn and to implement new recommendations, thus with little steps they have achieved great results, diminishing the rate of dropouts, especially through the girls that were for a long time exposed to sexual assaults. Project activities that we have done envisaged elaboration of community strategies and actions plans on prevention of drop out and problematic absenteeism, bullying and teenage pregnancies, improving efforts for early and good support, creating systems

for absenteeism and bullying control and follow up, undertaking training program (on dropouts, bullying and study motivation) for teachers, administrative leaders, learners, farmers, parents and hostel staff, improving atmosphere, security and dotation at schools, interest clubs and hostels, procurement of bus, student and parents surveys, meetings with parents, additional activities for students at risk of dropout, promotion of interest in formal education.

The most valuable and precious milestones are connected to people, some of them taught and inspired me, some of them helped me to identify the priorities and set new goals, to move forward and constantly to improve my skills. I am really thankful for meeting them. I collaborated with Peace Corps volunteers: Dave Bugayong, Ricardo Sneed, Romy Roaming, and Linda Pinkus teaching together English lessons; organizing extra-curricular activities and involving our students in different projects as: Trust for Sustainable future UN Essay contest, iEARN projects, Let girls Learn aiming to improve sanitary, learning, and professional conditions in school, Technovation challenge - an international app-making and coding competition for girls, I co-mentored 2 teams of girls in 2017 and 2018; different campaigns as Anti Bullying, Anti-violence etc. Strong cooperation and great and fruitful results made me eligible for the position of mentor teacher for novice English language Peace Corps teachers during Summer Practice School in 2017, 2018, 2019. A place apart in my career is taken by META-Moldova NGO, an organisation that promotes educational values, standards of performing teaching. Its members and administrative board encourage novice teachers to share their experience and to pursue the career in teaching providing different CPDs and contests aiming to help and guide the teachers.

What inspires you in your career?

The most inspiring thing for me is the moment when people or students I collaborate with or teach get to the point, understand the meaning and say to themselves that „I am ready to act, ready to do this”. I suppose it is the moment when I make myself useless offering „my wings” to the learners, making them able to continue the exploration. Thus, my daily activity includes reading a lot of educational documents, setting the priorities, analysing the needs and planning the steps for future changes I foresee regarding the school community I work. The reciprocity, willingness to progress of my colleagues, motivation to study inspires me to improve collaboration and to look for additional tools to reduce the burn out, to set a better organisational format related to the processes and manage efficiently the time.

Some of the tools and approaches that are helping me are: -use google forms, google docs, google sheets for collaborative statistics required on the local, municipal level; -provide teachers with charts, schemes, required documents and guidance when needed; -ensure transparency of the instructional process, publishing the results of monitoring and evaluation -use programs for the schedule generation in order to fit teachers needs, expectations requirements and to minimize time for generation. -post the explanatory steps, announcements for the processes via FB group or messenger; -motivate teachers for self-improvement and self-development through participation to different CPDs; -analyse the students’ results, risks of dropping out the school, reasons of missing school; Our duty as administrators is to enhance a positive and collaborative atmosphere where teachers will be open to learn, practice and share their teaching experience, to promote emotional intelligence and to diminish teachers burned out in this hard epidemic time of COVID-19.

If you had a chance to start your career over, what would you choose? Teaching or anything else but teaching?

If I had a chance to start my career over, I would probably choose to be a theatre actress. Theatre is probably the place where I would reveal all my skills, because I suppose we as teachers, many times feel ourselves being on a stage, playing the main role in our important performance, we are waiting for our students’ praise, recognition, approval and acceptance. Every lesson, we deliver, has an input connected to our heart, to our soul, to our brain, to our whole life, that we release and create links and ties with our student’s future. As every performance has its unique decorations, actors and audience, every lesson we perform has its own objectives, impact, output, style, methods and strategies. Ben Jonson’s famous quote “Our whole life is like a play”, I suppose is about teachers, especially about those that are playing the main sophisticated, controversial and inspiring role models in our society.

What inspired you to start the Hippo contest in Moldova?

In my teaching career I was facing a problem related to the young learners, usually they were not motivated enough. Moreover, there were no English language contests and competitions aiming to boost young learners' interest. Thus, I started to search online for international competitions. I found several but as we know, the prize is that specific, unique worthy thing for children. Later they understand that recognition of own skills, gained experience, selfacceptance and the never stopping motivating to learn engine are the aspects children gain through participation at different competitions. In 2018 with the help and support of META-Moldova NGO the first 200 participants, aged 6 till 19, took part at the preliminary stage. Two of them had the very chance to compete at the final stage in Venice, Italy with other participants from different countries around the world. It

was an amazing experience for the teachers too, due to the fact that they were attending several professional seminars delivered by the Gatehouse Awards professionals in the field of EFL teaching.

What would you advise teachers from our country to do in order to improve their career?

I would advise them to be strong in this difficult time, to pursue their own goals, to continue to dream and to inspire their followers. To be exceptional and phenomenal teachers able to create a productive and fruitful atmosphere that would offer opportunities and equal chances for development of the students. Finally, to be open to changes, to learn from the challenges and to share their professional and life experience.

English for a dancer

Written by Josan Mihaela

IPLT ”Budești”

The 8th form student

When I was a small kid and I started to learn English I didn’t think that English is going to help me with something useful. I thought that English is just a language and I will never use it somewhere in my life. I grew up and I started to think about how important is English. I’m 14 years old and I am a ballroom dancer. I have been practicing ballroom dances since I was 5 years until now. My dream is to become a famous dancer, to have own dance club and to be a dance teacher. Now I’m trying to do my best to be a champion and to make my parents, my coaches proud of me.

Ballroom dances appeared for the first time in UK and latino dances in America and every thing, name of movements, name of dances are in English. Ballroom dance is a very expensive sport. The dancers ought to have a new dress at least every half year and this dresses aren’t cheap, besides the dress they have a special type of shoes, thus when we dance they are comfortable but sometimes they cause problems with legs or back. At the competition dancers also must have a special hairstyle and girls older than 13 years need to wear makeup. Usually when I have a competition I wake up 2 hours earlier and do my hairstyle and makeup. I have made a lot of friends during these years and also I have learned English due to dance.

I started to be a better dancer and my coach said that I have to go to the international competitions and to represent our country. My first international competition was in Bulgaria and it was terrible because it was so different from our competitions and everyone spoke in English and I didn’t understand what I have to do. That day was a very messy day. Do you think that I started studying English after what happened? No, I still didn’t care about learning English. I went to a lot of international competition knowing only some easy words that didn’t help me but it was okay because I didn’t communicate with a lot of people. Suddenly I felt so bad. All my friends knew how to speak in English and I still knew nothing. I started to translate English songs, watch movies with subtitles, be more attentive at lessons and do some exercises that helped me to grow up. My coach also started counting in English. After 1-2 months I really felt that I grew up, and my English was better but not as good as I wanted. I carried on working hard, continuing to do my homework at English without google translate, watch movie without subtitles. I understand the name of the movements I do when I dance because they are also in English. Last summer our coach invited an international dancer to give us some lessons about how to be a better dancer and things about ballroom dancing. That professional dancer was speaking in English and I discovered some new things about dancing and some new English words, of course after classes I could not lose the chance to speak with him about dance. I usually watch interviews with my favorite dancer and I discover new things about dance, on the Internet are a lot of dance lessons in English and at the weekend I watch them and realize how useful is English. Every time I stay in front of my phone and practice my dance I mix it with my English, too. These dancers give me a lot of inspiration and I wish to be like them.

When I was 13, in summer I went in Bulgaria for 10 days for a ,,training vacation’’. We had dance classes every day for 7-8 hours per day. It was a little bit difficult because my partner didn`t know very well English and I had to translate almost everything, I had like a job. There I made a lot of friends from different countries. We spoke in English and I discovered new things about their META Magazine -Volume 6. Issue nr. 1 -March 2021

countries. That was a really nice ,, vacation ’’. I have learned a lot of new things , about dance, about bulgarian people and English. Also this summer, we went in Greece for a competition, without parents only with our coach. At the reception I was like a translator for my coach because she doesn’t understand very well English. The person from reception said that our rooms will be free at 12 p.m. and we had to wait like 3-4 hours and we decided to go at the beach. On the road to beach we stopped to have lunch and we used English to ask for food. The next morning we went to have breakfast and started to prepare for the competition. The start was at 11 a.m., we got third place at one category of dances and the fourth at other category. The organisers were speaking in English and for me it was really easy to understand what it was required to do. This experience was something new and memorable for me. I had a lot of fun with my friends and this trip made us more united.

In conclusion, I’m very happy that I’m a dancer because the dance is a part of my life and this is what makes me happy every time when I’m sad or just want to relax and forget about my problems or school. I can’t explain the feelings that I feel when I dance but I can say that these are the best feelings a human can feel. Thanks to dance I started to learn English and realized that English is the most important language for me. I’m ready to learn more and to have a better English.

Learning English at “SPARTA”- horse riding club.

written by Andreea Rusu IPLT “Budești” the 8th form students English is the most amazing language, that enhances the possibilities and enriches our skills. Majority of extracurricular activities, that we teenagers have today, deal with the knowledge of English. So, how to learn English from extracurricular activities? A good question I think. But I know what to answer. Maybe for some people it seems crazy but I have learnt English at the stable. I have got there with the help of my cousin who worked at the horse club and now, I spend my free time being accompanied by my favourite animals - HORSES. The first challenge, I had to face practicing this activity, was on the one hand specific vocabulary borrowed from English that I didn’t learn before and on the other hand was the lack of special equipment that is not sold in Moldovan markets like Green Hills or Fidesco. We have no horse riding specialized markets in Moldova so I have started to surf online in order to buy needed equipment from the internet markets like eBay, Amazon and others. All these markets exhibit their goods and have the description in English. What could I do? So, here started the real challenges because I didn't know words about horse equipment. At that point, YouTube channels like This Esme and Claire Eventing helped me and watching them I learned what mean saddle, bints and bridle, breeches, saddle, pad, stirrups, reins, protection boots, etc.

Firstly, let me tell about the horse club that is situated in my village - Budesti, its name is "Sparta horse riding club" . My trainers Simion and Ecaterina are really nice, they are youths so it is more interesting and I really like how they train me, because they play tricks and treat me more like META Magazine -Volume 6. Issue nr. 1 -March 2021

friends. Day by day after classes, I work there with them grooming and tacking up horses for others lessons and for this, as a reward, I am offered free of charge riding lessons every day. In 4 mounts I have learned to trot, to gallop and to jump. My biggest jump was 110cm. Thus horses are like my best friends I really love them. Now I'm like in a dream I can't believe that I ride horses.

Secondly, this activity offers me the possibility to meet new people and because some of them are native English speakers, I have plenty of chances to speak with them, improving my English. I have met nice English speaking people and what a coincidence - my mom knew majority of them even she doesn’t have horse riding activity in her hobby list. I continuously learn about breeds of the horses that are at Sparta Club. There are Lithuanian horses, dutch horses, mustangs, haflinger, olden burgers and ponies. My favourite horse is Delta, she is a black Lithuanian horse with a white spot on her head, she is 18 and she is so kind and so beautiful. I made my first trot, first gallop and first jump with her. So, for this, I really love her. I don’t know what I will do if she dies. But now I’m trying to be positive and to spend more time with her. So, I have learned English at the highest speed I can say, asking my mom about all the words I didn’t know, because she is my English teacher at school and at home. Besides horse riding, I like to watch movies, my favourite movie is "Windstorm " and the most favourite tv show is " Stranger Things”. After I have seen these series I fell in love with them. I started a fan page for the main character Millie Bobby Brown. There a lot of fans of Stranger Things spoke about their favourite character, about the favourite season and about mentioned theories. Interned is the 21st century addiction of nowaday society, so I am not an exception, thus I posted a lot of comments, and I have reached 3k followers and a seen from Millie in a group chat. There I made new friends who helped me to learn English, I had really good friends from Portugal, Dubai , America, France and Italy. Many of my friends left the groups and the fan page because their parents think that it is dangerous and we can be bullied but I take care of what I post and with whom I speak.

In conclusion, I feel blessed having my dream becoming true, being near to the most charming animals-horses and practicing the most inspiring sport-horse riding, that helps me to overcome difficulties and to improve my relationship with nature. On the other side my English teacher is satisfied of my motivation and desire to learn new things. So, this is how I have learnt and still continue to learn English.

UP-Coming