School Disipline

Before leaving for Georgia, I saw that a lot of blogs mentioned how bad the school discipline was. None of them really explained the school structure, so when I read about the kids running through the halls and calling teachers by their first names, I thought it meant disrespectful kids and lax teachers.

 Maybe all Georgian schools don’t run like mine does, but mine is a mess. Let me try to describe for you a typical school. Class starts promptly at whatever time the teachers bother to show up and/or are finished gossiping and decided to ring the bell. This is supposed to happen at 9:00am, but is usually a little later than that. 

After the bell is rung, the teachers wait a few minutes then go to their classes where the students are supposed already waiting. In case that wasn’t clear, the teachers don’t have classrooms, the students do; there is a first grade room, a second grade room, and so on (with all grades in one building). My largest class at its fullest is only fourteen students, and my next largest is ten, and the rest are five to six. Admittedly it is the last week of school, but I have yet to have a class with perfect attendance. I have had only one student present in a class of ten however. And there is no penalty for being absent and none for not having your homework either. That being the case, I’m actually pretty surprised at the number of kids who do their homework--- about ½ of them. 

Once first bell is over, the teacher leaves. Leaving eight nine year olds to do whatever they want for the next approximately ten minutes.  The time between bells is completely uncertain, however. The teachers gather in the teacher’s room again and talk and those teachers that didn’t have a first class start to show up, and eventually someone remembers that they are actually at school and supposed to be working so they ring the bell. Sometimes students even stick their head in the teacher’s room and ring it if it’s been long enough.   

Not speaking Georgian, I have no idea how well informed the student body is, but by the way the rest of the school day runs, I imagine they aren’t informed at all, and had no idea that on June 12 there was going to be a meeting of the entire faculty (18 including me) between first and second bells. So while the faculty talked about textbooks, the entire student body did God knows what completely unsupervised.

And children being left on their own for long periods of time is not unusual. In fact, it’s totally normal. Some grades don’t have lessons every bell, so they just roam the school yard for an hour or so or go home and get food. Water fights seem to be the pass time of choice this time of year. There is an old-style pump (like the kind you have to put water in in order to get water out) in front of the school and the children love to play with it, filling bottles with water then chasing and soaking each other.  

IF the teachers try to stop this, and that’s a big if, they are completely unsuccessful because there are no disciplinary measures to be taken. There is no principal or vice principle that looms over the school and has the potential to fuck up your future, or at least your weekend. Here, this is only a head teacher, and basically his only extra responsibility is ordering textbooks. He’s technically in charge of discipline, but what’s he going to do, call their mom? I don’t imagine many kids in my school are college bound, so a mark on a permanent record (do they scare kids with those in Georgia too?) is probably not too scary. 

I was told not to expect too much from Georgian schools, and all the blogs and even TLG really seemed to put it on the kids, but I feel like the kids are giving me more than I should expect. The building is falling down around them. Part of it is already condemned. There was a pile of ceiling on the floor of the first floor today, right outside the third grade classroom, and somehow there is substantial water damage on the ceiling of the teacher’s lounge which is on the second floor of the three story building and there is not running water (solid cement walls, go Soviet construction!) so it’s not like a pipe burst causing the water damage. 

Between the conditions and the lack of structure and supervision, I’m surprised there are any students at all.