Bulgaria with Noodles

We are now in Veliko Tarnovo and that gives me an excuse for including a few old photos of VT, most of which were taken by my friend Peter Adams.  Recently I received an email from Thomas Hughes, a new recruit for the teaching staff at St. George's School. Hi Simon, I hope you are well. I managed to get back to the UK after much trouble getting out of Mexico, and Elena managed to get back to Russia a couple of weeks back. Phew. I asked the school a couple of weeks back what age range they thought I would be teaching, and they said that I would most likely be teaching year 5 & 6.  I think you mentioned that you were willing to pass over your work from last year which would most likely help myself transition and teach next academic year. That would be a great help if you are still willing to do this. Also, I have 28 days in quarantine to look forward too in the UK and Sofia it seems, so this would help me to stay sane. Let me know if this offer is st...

Last Saturday, it came round again: the World Scholar's Cup. (Why can't the apostrophe be after the "S"? Is there only one scholar in the whole world?)  Although the WSC wants to get into the Guinness book of Records for the most tacky trophies given out to children, it is a lot of fun and the young people who take part do get to debate some very tough motions. In the Junior Rounds, we had some tough motions and in the Senior Rounds they were even tougher: "Resolved: That schools should teach classes on how to make mistakes", "That only the original writers of a movie should be allowed to write the sequel" and "That leaders of big countries should first practise being leaders of smaller countries." I did not have to do any judging in the morning, as we had quite a surplus of judges. I went along to the training session for the judges, up in the "penthouse" at St. George's, and then I went along to see a few...

There is no need for the Birling family to be worried, as this inspector came to St. George’s and she was suitably impressed by what she saw. Actually, she was not even called an “inspector”, but a Leading Improvement Partner (giving us a bit of LIP, I suppose, or was it just LIPservice?) Anyway, the inspector was in the school for three days and she certainly talked to a lot of people: students, JKN, teachers and parents. She did not come into any of my lessons, but she did have a look round my classroom and she asked me a few questions about what I teach and how I teach it. At the moment I am feeling pretty blooming exhausted and being woken up at three in the morning, in order to take a naughty little dog outside to do her business, has left me feeling run down all day. Thank goodness it is Friday and the weekend has now started. The flowers I bought for our Wedding Anniversay last week have lasted rather well. Another thing that has lasted quite well is my bl...

I will wake you up by walking on your face. Dear John, How are you, my dear chap? I was sorry that I could not invite you to come to Bulgaria this summer, as we were off to Zakynthos in Greece and then some friends of ours from Qatar were supposed to be coming. Anyway, Irena put her pretty foot down when I mentioned your name as well!   J.C. in Kalotina, looking down the valley  The good news is that next summer she is off to the Crimea again (probably early in July) and that will be for about a month or so. Therefore I am planning a Grand Reunion of the Gang of Three – except that actually it is going to be the Gang of Four, as there will be an important addition to the likes of Peter Adams, John Cann and Simon Hill. Tina is a very naughty little Jack Russell and we love her very much. Her main interests are food, eating, and finding something to scoff. In some ways, she does look a bit like dear Zoika. Her speciality is waking me up in the morning by wa...

A blogger at the opening ceremony for a new school year The most important thing we’ve learned As far as children are concerned Is never, ever, ever let Them near your television set. In fact, just don’t install The idiotic thing at all. Well, that was one of my greatest heroes, Roald Dahl, in that modern classic, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But Dahl’s words of warning about the pernicious effect of the TV on young children’s minds seems quaintly dated, irrelevant and out of all proportion to the dangers for children that can be found on the Internet. And some of those dangers are not passive, like a television. They will coming looking for your son or daughter, 24/7. Yes, you can switch off your family’s TV, but how do you turn the Internet off? Recently my school, St. George’s in Sofia, has had a blitz on Safeguarding. All of the staff have been doing online training with a company called Educare. Some of the courses have been pretty explicit and not exac...

There has been a lot of hullabaloo in the UK about a Maths question that appeared on this year's Year 6 (Grade 4) SATs paper for Mathematics. There was a big article about it in the TES. It's not that hard. It took me about a minute to solve. The trick, of course, is to understand that the two squares should not be the same size. Maybe that is why the examiners put the word "different" in bold type . (Do teachers ever tell their students to read the question, I wonder? Maybe they do.) The students should also know that there is not much point in panicking, crying and wasting a lot of time on a question that only carries one mark if they really have no idea what the answer is. This is just common sense and good exam technique. All of the exam papers that were ever written have had some questions that were harder than the others, so there were some that could have been done quickly and easily, while there were some that were more challenging and time-consu...

Okay, here comes the good news. The Bulgarian Minster for Education has wisely and judiciously decreed a week’s holiday for all of the students of the schools in Sofia because of the influenza epidemic that has hit schools all over Bulgaria. (What a good and sensible chap!) Yes, I know that this might seems a bit crazy, dear reader, as I have only been at St. George’s since the beginning of January and now we have ten days of holiday. That is not bad, eh? Yesterday I was terribly busy, even though it was a Saturday. Yes, we had the Sofia round of the World Scholar’s Cup at St. George’s. Justin Kilcullen-Nichols, my new headmaster, looked very pleased as he welcomed hundreds of students (and their parents and teachers) from all over Sofia. I must say that St. George's new theatre looked super-swanky and very impressive.  I was one of the judges for the junior and the senior debating competitions. In a nutshell, you have two teams making speeches about a particular motion a...

The lounge, but it could be a squash court. I have not written a lot of blog posts recently because we have been very busy, moving into our new apartment in Sofia. Well, I say that it is "our" apartment, but of course St. George's School is paying the rent, the utilities and just about everything.  We will have to bring some logs from Kalotina for the fire. As you can imagine, Irena and I are very happy all of this! Our apartment is HUGE. You could probably have fitted all of our flat in Shenzhen into the main room of our new apartment in Sofia. Our kitchen in China was almost like a big cupboard and the bathroom was pretty horrible.  In our Sofia apartment, the kitchen is a fair old size, big enough for a large table and lots of cupboards, plus we have TWO rather nice bathrooms. Regular readers of my blog will know that we used to live opposite Lianhuacun Park in Shenzhen and that was really convenient and very good for walks. Here in Sofia, our apartment i...

I promised you a big piece of news and here it is: I have a new teaching job in Sofia, starting in January. Yes, yes, I do know that I am supposed to be retired and in many ways I was looking forward to being retired. Now, however, I miss the buzz of school life and there is not much for us to do in Kalotina in the winter. Blogger in interview mode On Monday I went for what was supposed to be an “informal chat” with the headmaster of St. George’s School in Sofia. The photos on the school website make the new school building look quite posh (and huge) and the head also has quite a posh name, Justin Kilcullen-Nichols. The salary is not quite so impressive, alas, but the important thing is that we are going to get an apartment in Sofia as part of the deal. There is no way that I can commute from Kalotina each day. (It is at least an hour and a half’s drive from our house to the far side of Sofia.) The not-quite-finished-but-still-amazing theatre at St. George's School ...