Life in Bosnia: A Day in the Life of an English Language Teacher in Sarajevo

Life in Bosnia: A Day in the Life of an English Language Teacher in Sarajevo

This article is submitted by a former English teacher in Sarajevo.

I wake up at 9:30 and walk to the bakery five minutes from my door. I pay half a KM, about 25 cents, for a buhtla cokoladna – a warm roll with chocolate inside that I buy regularly but can never pronounce correctly. Returning home to eat, I watch an older episode of Oprah, which, as with all television programs in Sarajevo, is in its original language with local language subtitles. This has been a useful way to improve my vocabulary.

I leave home at 11, stopping by the Internet café to check email – there are two computers with dial-up connections at work, but there are usually teachers in line to use them. I take a shortcut through the outdoor market, and when I arrive at the school, I make photocopies and short notes for my one-to-one lesson. I head across the street for lunch. That will be my main meal of the day because classes run from 15 to 19:40. Dinner will be yogurt and fruit at my desk during the twenty-minute break.

I look forward to my one-to-one lesson every week, and it goes well. The student I work with is around my age, and she has chosen to go through the nuts and bolts of grammar with a local teacher and to focus on conversation with me. After nearly a year of this arrangement, I sometimes worry about coming up with interesting topics to discuss. Today we both take a personality test and agree that it does offer some insight into our respective characters.

When the one-to-one ends, I have about two hours to prepare for four hours of classes. I’ve taught similar lessons before, so I can get ready quickly, but usually I would need most of that time or more. I run out the door to buy my dinner at 16:45.

My first class is an elementary level group. I can speak enough of the language to translate if I need to, but I try not to. The book is designed so that translation shouldn’t be necessary, and the students signed up for the course knowing they would be “forced” to communicate in English with a native speaker. Occasionally we have trouble with instructions, but we always figure it out somehow. I like teaching this level because students can see their progress so quickly after each class.

The next class is an upper-intermediate group, and most of the students are teenagers. Only a few have done their homework, so we spend ten minutes working on that and then check answers together. Whispered conversations and giggling are not infrequent in this class. Sometimes I interrupt by calling on one of the chatters, and sometimes I ignore them. One student is a high-profile attorney in his fifties or sixties. I know this because I’ve seen him on television. He tries to help me keep the class in line.

After classes end, I record what I covered in the register so the teacher who works with the group the other day will know where to begin. I feel rushed because the front desk manager wants to go home. He keeps coming in to check if we are done. I finally finish and as I pass by him on the way out, I tell him my co-worker is writing “Rat i Mir”, War and Peace: she is writing a lot, more than me, even. He high fives me for the joke and I head out for the end of my night.