Students' last day

We have come to the end of the school year. By now I've reluctantly arrived at answers to What I think of the Hungarian schooling system. I won't write about it today. More importantly, I have earned a sadness for leaving students and colleagues. How much greater an ending is this then, for Sophie, Amelia, and Maisie, in a school with 24 students they saw day in and day out, under the charge of three infectiously loving teachers? We are coming to the corner around which all this is gone. The parting ceremonies have made us face this, given us a way to thank our community, allowed us a time to cry.

After a Monday holiday (The Pentacost? Do Christians count the Omer?), students at Dráva Völgye Középiskola gathered for class outings. It's an opportunity to relax, celebrate and achieve closure with the year, and I love it. It seems like there are many opportunities for students to socialize with their teachers outside of class. I know this is a courtly society and that classes are conducted with a clear formality and rigid lines of conduct and authority, but there are often times when the normal routine is set aside and students and teachers do something else, outside, maybe playing together, eating, and most affectingly, cooking and cleaning together.

Yesterday I joined the 11th gimnázium (academic) class. They are a very smart, hard-working and polite group often reticent to speak in my class. I made breaking them in one of my goals, for a while putting them through the paces of a short 19th century love farce just to loosen them up and give them outrageous words to use and speak out loud. They didn't crack. This is the one group that never stood for me when I entered the room -- though a few times one would rise and jump back down, embarrassed. Clearly, they had thought about whether to stand up or remain seated and had made a decision together. It wasn't cheeky: this, like everything else, was done thoughtfully and quietly.

We bicycled to Lake Bok, a place my family first visited almost a year ago. Students arrived in shorts and t-shirts, bringing food, drinks, games to spend the day together. Elsewhere, students were gathering in fields and around the river for their own class trips around Barcs. None of us was prepared for a storm.

After we arrived, girls cut vegetables, sausage and bacon while others gathered firewood. Boys tended the fire and the cauldron. Later, girls would clean. Meanwhile, after remembered how grueling it is to play, I won the first game of chess I'd played in a long time. I also learned a new word, fúró, which means "drill," because I repeatedly drew a three of a kind in our five-card poker game. If you take a look at pictures of these games, you might notice the occurring gender division. Incidentally, at school students sit at two-person desks that almost never seat a boy and a girl together.

Before the rain came down, we were also playing badminton or shooting Szilárd's beautiful Hungarian bows.

Now, perhaps you will note the admirable physique on the shirtless boy, Ádám. Like many young men at Dráva Völgye, some boys in this class are body-builders. Ádám is also an exhibitionist, ready with a smile and a thumbs-up at any given moment. Mrs. Gerlecz, the form teacher, said he's like a Greek statue. Then she slapped his ass. Whacko! Earlier in the year, I'd spoken to students about gender lines in the United States, and so it was quite natural when someone asked about the slap. This would be called "sexual harassment," I said. She slapped a couple other bottoms during the day. "Szexuális zaklatás!" she hollered. Whacko! Whacko!

We ate another lovely cauldron-stirred stew. Nándor, a bright student who had engaged me all day in conversation, asked about my favorite Hungarian meals. I've loved szarvas pörkölt, deer stew, with the corded noodles, galuska. I've enjoyed the tomato and bean főzelék during school lunches, thick vegetable soup. I once ate a terrific fish soup, halászlé, in Szeged. And I will miss the cottage cheese candy, Túró Rudi. Mrs. Gerlecz  repeated the question, and I tried to explain, in Hungarian, that one of the greatest differences in cooking was the many recipes calling for zsír, which means lard.

After the meal, Mrs. Gerlecz silenced everyone and presented me with three very Hungarian items: Szegedi paprika, Pick salami, and a bottle of Unicum -- an almost unbearable spirit whose vapors eat through your face and that tastes like medicine. It's apparently used as such. And then Mrs. Gerlecz produced a last-minute addition: a jar of nice, buttery zsír. 

When the rain fell, it fell hard. People brought their bikes and motorcycles on the veranda, wrapping themselves in blankets to keep warm. In another couple of hours, the rain was light enough to bike home.

This morning, the sodden class trips behind us, we had our final ceremony. Students lined up for their last event of the school year, many carrying the grade books I will describe later in this entry, and outstanding scholars in each class were recognized with a book. 

Then suddenly everyone was gone. Some students I will see again on the streets of Barcs. Others will go back to their cities and villages and I will never see them again.

The ninth graders gave me one last group hug. We gave each other this video. But it's shocking to believe that this gathering today was the end for me.

Something tears do very well: they let you know you are here, you are present, and life -- slowing, changing, giving, hurting, passing glowing, or whatever it is that life is doing -- is palpably registering and there you are, alive. I didn't have it this morning, and the transition felt surreal. But last night, after spending the day with the 11th graders, our family drove to Szulok for our girls' last event with the schools, and there we were, the goodbye registering in the warmth of a fire, music to give it shape, and tears to give it sharpness and depth.

At the school, children lined up, much as they did today at DVK (pictured right). A couple students presented poems, or read their thanks to various members of the community. Sophie played violin. And while Éva, the principal, spoke, the fourth graders, on the edge of leaving the school forever, wept and wept.

 

Kinga, pictured left, was only able to read on her fourth start, too bereft every other time to speak. Lilla and Panka are at right.

Adri is holding the flag. Look at these girls!

The children weren't alone. Éva wiped her eyes as she spoke, and Stephanie dove into her stash of tissues and soaked them.

This morning, I told Tünde about all this crying, and she said that Hungarians simply don't like change. I don't know about that. What I think, though, is that all the flowers and chocolate and wine and ceremonial endings make people in this community cherish each other, and they live more brightly for it. 

One of the things Éva did while she was crying was describe the years' accomplishments and award books to the achievers, just as we did at DVK this morning. Then parents joined their children in one of the two classrooms for the distribution of the bizonyítvány. This is a book that provides an accumulation of marks and number of lessons from every year, grades for behavior and diligence, and an official approval for moving on. Teachers and students treat the book as a precious object. If a teacher writes something in error, he must not only correct it, but provide an explanation in a space designated specially for the purpose. At Dráva Völgye, I see form teachers working one by one on perfectly stacked bizonyítványok. So, in Szulok, Erzsébet in Sophie's room and Viktor in Maisie and Amelia's went similarly through a stack of books and gave a speech for every child named there.

Here is something else illegal for American teachers. Don't slap a kid's ass, and don't publically share grades with all the students and parents. In the U.S., self-esteem is one of a  child's most treasured qualities. It's not so here. Stephanie reported that in parent-teacher conferences a few months ago, the teacher described each child's performance in front of the assembled parents, and so it was again yesterday. As Erzsébet called a child's name and handed out the bizonyítvány, she described how each behaved and performed in various subjects. The student would thank her and take the book. There was one exception. She called a student's name, handed him his grade book, and then said she'd speak with him later. I'm pretty sure it's bad news. So it was a public moment, but it was no pillory.

Sophie's room is on the left. Maisie and Amelia's room is on the right.

After that, school was over, and it's time for pizza, campfires, a disco, singing and a pajama party. And that's Amelia in the limbo picture: she hasn't done a cartwheel in a year, but she still bends like a wire.

The very last photograph shows Mrs. Gerlecz holding on to one of her students, Péter, as he bicycles them home through the woods. Tap it and just look at it for a while.

It's the one that makes me want to cry.