High school teachers

I went out to the Slovak Fulbright offices Friday to participate on the interviewing team for the High School Teacher Exchange program. Teachers in the U.S. and another country literally trade jobs and even apartments for one year. This year two U.S. teachers are spending the year in Slovakia.

This is the building at Levická 3 housing the Fulbright offices and several other educational organizations. The flags in front are the Slovak and the European Union flags. There's a lift to their offices on the third floor.

We learned that this high school program is being discontinued after the 2008-09 exchange. Instead, shorter exchanges of six weeks for high school teachers will be instituted. That seems to have the advantage of making it easier for more people to participate. A year is a long time, especially with complicated professional and personal obligations for so many.

But it also struck some of us that six weeks is not a very long time. You still feel like a tourist. With exchanges of at least a semester, as we have enjoyed, you get more of a sense of what it is like to live in these other countries – finding an apartment, figuring out the transportation system, learning where to shop and how to solve emergencies. We also have the luxury of getting to know colleagues and students well enough to discuss in depth wide-ranging issues, from the differences in educational systems to the perceptions we have of each other’s countries.

I had the privilege this fall of participating on three interview teams, with other Fulbrighters, representatives of the U.S. Embassy and Slovak educational groups, and Fulbright staff: the programs for Slovak students, Slovak academics, and now Slovak high school teachers. I have learned more about the subtleties important in making these selections, and I look forward to advising colleagues on my home campus in California on their own Fulbright applications in the future.

For more information about the Fulbright program in the U.S.: http://www.cies.org/