Well, summer's officially coming to a close here in Sisian. As students are getting ready to return to classes, parents (okay, moms) are working to clean the school up and get it ready for the First Bell Ceremony on September 1st.
One interesting thing I learned during this process is that most of the classroom improvements are not financed by some sort of school-wide maintenance fund, but rather from contributions of individual parents for students who will have that classroom as their homeroom. Thus, today, in my school, some teachers were excitedly talking about the new wealthy student they have in their homeroom, and the improvements that such a student's family would mean for that teacher's working environment. One of the classrooms, which will be homeroom to a local military leader's child, had young soldiers making repairs to the floors and walls today.
I found this whole system very strange. It seems especially odd that, in a country which still espouses so many communist social values, improvements to the school would be made in such a small, nepotistic fashion. On the other hand, when there aren't enough resources to go around, I suppose it's only natural to want to make sure that *your* offspring get as much as you can give them, even if it means that improvements aren't distributed equally among the classrooms, or even in some sort of triage-based system where the worst equipped classrooms get the improvements they need most.
I tried asking my counterpart and the mothers who were working in her classroom today about this, but they didn't seems to understand why I was asking- to them, this seemed like a very logical system, and challenging it was frowned upon. So I didn't push. But it still doesn't sit well with me...
No comments:
Post a Comment