Dear Roosevelt,

How are you doing? How are the kids? The bears? The Source? The Honor Code? Have you missed me?

It’s now a third of a year that I’ve been gone, but I haven’t forgotten about you. I think of you fondly, sometimes with wistfulness, sometimes with all-American irony.

Many things are different here. Barcs is very small, with 12,000 people and two miles of narrow streets shared by cars, bikes, tractors and horse-driven wagons. But many students are from villages far smaller, and I was confused in early classroom conversations when students referred to a crowded, well-provisioned city: while imagining the clamor and bustle of Budapest, where a fifth of all Hungary lives, students meant Barcs, with its many grocery stores, smoke shops and bars.

School is different for me too. The daily schedule changes every day of the week, and it’s shared by every student within a grade level and program, which, at Dráva Völgye Középiskola, includes an academic program, Drama, Marketing, Forestry, and Water Management. Groups stay together with three dozen classmates every day, every hour, for four years (and six in the Academy, which starts at 7th grade). Having the same daily schedule also means that students do not choose their courses, except for their first and second foreign languages, usually German or English, but also Russian, Croatian and French.

A typical day has seven to nine 45 minute classes, some double-blocked for greater depth. The school rooms, unadorned but for desks, chairs and a blackboard and pictures, belong to student groups, while teachers travel every period. Meanwhile, breaks between classes are ten to fifteen minutes -- and effectively longer, because teachers don’t head for classes until breaks are over. And I can tell you, this is not a hurried rush through the halls. When teachers do arrive, however, students are expected to be in the classroom, by their seats, standing, attentive, and courteously waiting for the teacher to give permission to sit. And once class begins, no one leaves until dismissed at the bell. A downside of the longer afternoon breaks is that lunch -- which includes a walk to the cafeteria, a wait in line, mastication, ingestion, and the walk back -- is expected to occur all in this 15 minutes, and lunch is the big meal of the day, including a big bowl of soup, bread, and a heaping pile of noodles or meat or stuffed vegetables.

There are assessment differences as well. While you put students through credit paces and hundreds of little assignments and projects and the HSPE and Senior Project, students here must pass five major exams in Literature, History, Maths, Foreign Language, and a fifth chosen subject, each exam containing a written test lasting between two and three hours and an oral examination occurring a few months later. Meanwhile, teachers cannot, by law, grade homework because of plagiarism concerns. Take these together, and it means the burden of learning falls directly on the student.

Scores and tests also account for who goes to what schools. Barcs has three high schools. To choose between DVK and the bilingual high, students need good marks in elementary school; otherwise, they go to the trade school. But school choice extends far beyond regional borders. Many schools have dorms, enabling access to villagers and choice of schools all over the country. DVK, a magnet with one of only three forestry programs in the nation, has two dorms, and one third of the 600 students live here on the weekdays.

People live here, which is how we can call an assembly that lasts two and half hours ending at 5:30, or decide that next week students will attend for six days rather than five.

I’m not ready to say what’s better, Roosevelt, but I can tell you that some of the most fundamental relationships are the same. Teaching is still a delight one day and the next a chore; teenagers still laugh at peculiar times; and, as always, students can be energetically curious or stubbornly bored.

I think of you, dear Roosevelt -- your crowded halls, your exuberance, your pizza and chocolate milk. I hope you think of me sometimes.

I miss you! Don’t forget to write.

Affectionately yours,
David Grosskopf