He traveled western Europe a couple of times, wondering what it would be like to live there and teach for a year.

She visited the United States and toured a Michigan classroom that her Bulgarian peer taught in as part of an exchange program. Her friend had been pushing her ever since to apply to the program.

Back then, Bismarck State College teacher Tom Stein and Stefka Atanasova, a teacher in Pravets, Bulgaria, didn't know each other. But last year their paths crossed when they applied to the Fulbright Exchange Program - a program that sends high school and college teachers to classrooms around the world and is sponsored by the United States Congressional Exchange for Students.

Fulbright accepted both into the program and, in August, the exchange took place.

Stein flew to Pravets and Atanasova landed in Bismarck. With them they brought ideas of what it would be like in the classroom, while leaving behind the classrooms and students they were accustomed to.

Empty streets

When Atanasova first arrived in Bismarck the streets were bare. There weren't people walking down the middle of them, stopping to chat with passersby. In Pravets, everyone walked everywhere. But here, the streets were filled with cars passing by an occasional pedestrian on the sidewalk.

"When I ask, 'How are you?' in Bulgaria, I am prepared for an hour talk," she said. "We mean it when we say it. Here it is, 'Hi, I know you.' It takes two hours sometimes to walk home because I talk to people."

But she's noticed people in Bismarck are more reserved than back home, she said. They don't just drop in at friends' and neighbors' houses to say "hi" whenever. And in the classroom, students are more guarded and private.

"The privacy is more important here," said Atanasova, who teaches composition, effective reading and self-paced composition literature classes at BSC. In Pravets, she taught English at the Language School and the Computer Technical School.

Atanasova came to the classroom at BSC with some preconceived notions of American students. They didn't work as hard in high school and weren't as prepared for college as the students in Bulgaria. Kids in her high school classroom stayed until midnight sometimes to finish their homework. They were prepared to take the 14 entrance exams it took to apply at one college.

As Atanasova spent more time with her students at BSC some of those preconceived notions faded, but others held true.

"The students are hoping just to get the diploma and a better job," she said. "Students I teach and the writings I go through - the sentences they write, I wouldn't say they know too much. When I tell them what a noun is or an adjective, they don't know."

Also, grades don't seem to be that important to her students at BSC, she said as she pointed out the stack of folders on her shelf that students never came to get at the end of the semester. It took one girl until almost the middle of spring semester to come ask Atanasova why she earned a D in her class the previous semester.

"My impression was they didn't care about their grades here," she said.

Despite that, Atanasova said she's been happy with her students' performance in the classroom and she's learned from them. She's also impressed with qualities students have here.

"Students do what they are told to," she said. "They know if they miss they have to catch up," Atanasova said. "Our students, when they are sick, don't have to make up."

Her students also have helped her learn more American English. Atanasova was taught British English and she inner-mixed that with the American English people around her used. One of her goals coming here was to learn better English, and her students do that for her.

"I could read on the students' faces they couldn't understand what I was telling them when I pronounced a word and pronounced its British form," she said. "I will write it down and they read it back to me. Then I know how it sounds."

The language difference caused a small wall in the classroom between Atanasova and her students, but she's worked to tear that down. A few adjustments in teaching helped, she said. Initially, Atanasova taught directly out of the textbook because that's what she thought she was supposed to do. But she learned that wasn't the case.

"I don't need to follow the coursebook," she said. "I will do it my own way. I decide how I am going to work when I go into the classroom and see the students and figure out what their needs are. I try to see what I can help them with. It's not forcing myself to teach them something they don't need."

Overcoming barriers

While it sometimes takes Atanasova more than two hours in Bulgaria to walk home because she stops to talk to people, Tom Stein is lucky if he can find one person on the street to talk to. The BSC English professor doesn't speak Bulgarian and a majority of natives older than 30 don't speak English.

"The biggest challenge to overcome is the language barrier," Stein said. "Bulgarian is based on a different alphabet than ours, and although I have acquired enough vocabulary to get by, I will never converse with Bulgarians who speak no English."

Fortunately, Stein doesn't have to worry about that in the classroom. He teaches American and British literature at the Language School and English at the Computer Technical School to high school students in Pravets.

The schools are private institutions that prepare students for entrance into colleges abroad, Stein said. Although they are supposedly some Bulgaria's "elite" schools, there's a mix of students. There are those who are highly motivated and those who are lazy, he said.

"Many of them are extremely intelligent and motivated - full of high spirits and inspiring to be around," Stein said. "Then there are others who are lazy and have little imagination or attention span or behavior skills."

Cheating is a big problem at the schools that leads to few consequences for participants.

"There are few, if any, consequences for those who cheat, don't attend school or pass in assignments," Stein said. "A fact of life here that many Americans who come to teach school find completely demoralizing."

Stein said during a quiz or test, students openly talk to each other. When he asks them to quiet down, his requests are disregarded. Authority figures turn the other way and pretend it isn't a big deal, he said.

Despite that, Stein said students at the schools work together well and aren't overly competitive. Students in Pravets don't change classes throughout the day - they remain in one room with one group of classmates. Not only are they with those classmates all day, they are with them for their five-year high school career.

The students take weekend trips - called excursions - to the nearby mountain range and celebrate birthdays together. Over time they become like a family.

"Their interactions are more convivial, personable and open than NoDak (North Dakota) youth, who can come across as a bit remote," Stein said.

Since arriving in Pravets in August, Stein said the biggest thing he's learned from his students is never to underestimate them. He remembers one student in particular who translated poems from Bulgarian to English, which his colleagues told him was impossible to do.

"I receive daily jolts of this sort of intelligence and initiative," he said.

When it's all said and done, Stein said he'll be happy to get back to Bismarck because of the resources that are available. In Pravets, classrooms contain desks, chalkboards and a few posters. Resources are stretched, he said.

"I am asked here in Bulgaria to teach literature to 100 students, 12 hours a week without a textbook - a surreal situation that would not occur back home," he said.

(Reach reporter Sheena Dooley at 250-8225 or sheenadooley@ndonline.com.)