Once a week I teach in an after-school Roma center not far from Prishtina. The kids (ages 8 to 10) come to the center to do their homework, which is a way to keep them in school. It’s difficult to say exactly how many kids are in my class, since they never sit still long enough for me to count them. 12? 15? In many ways they’re delightful: their faces break into sweet smiles and they say my name with a lovely lilt. And I hear my name quite often - at least 540 times during a one-hour class. This group is a bundle of movement, noise, mischief, and energy. They have no academic skills that I can detect, but maybe this is me. I arrived 15 minutes early last week, and I found the kids quietly doing their homework. All of this changed when they trouped into my class. In my class they don’t sit still, and they don’t pay attention. Basically, it’s complete pandemonium. Every once in a while another teacher comes into class and shouts at them in Serbian. They quiet down until the teacher leaves. The kids speak no English. Combined with low motivation, this makes communication almost impossible. Our class ended early last time because the activity I wanted to do required moving chairs into the center of the room. Once I started to do this, the kids took this as their cue to start cleaning up. They began to stack up the chairs and tidy up the room. I tried in vain to direct them back to the lesson, but finally threw up my hands and let them go. The short class gave me a chance to speak with one of their teachers, though. My big question about these kids is what their lives are like. I suspected – and the teacher confirmed this – that their lives are very, very hard. Imagine parent-teacher conferences not taking place because what we could consider a fairly innocuous comment about the child (he broke a plastic chair) leads to the parent beating the child IN FRONT OF THE TEACHER. I doubt these kids will learn English, so my challenge is to think of something to give them besides the past tense and present continuous. Maybe the itsy-bitsy spider...