Fulbright Reality Czech

Zdeňka Zvoníčková teaches English and Italian language at Gymnazium Tišnov. During the last school year, Zdeňka was one of the four high school teachers, who represented the Czech Republic at the six-week Fulbright Teaching Excellence and Achievement (TEA) training program in the U.S. Together with a colleague from Děčín Nursing School, Zdeňka returned home in the middle of March, few hours before Czech borders closed as a result of the pandemic outbreak. Coincidentally, the U.S. training came in very handy when Czech high schools suddenly closed down, and education moved to the online world. Dear readers, I am a Fulbright TEA alumna and I would like to dedicate these few lines to my experience at Kent State University, where I participated in a training program on media literacy and critical thinking during last spring. I would like to share how I managed to implement what I had learnt at the training into my lessons and how I passed it on. It was a special time in my life, which bri...

Chloe' Skye  is a Word Magician and avid traveler who served as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant at Gymnázium Tišnov from 2014-2015. Originally from New York, Chloe' has also taught ESL in the U.S. and Israel, and while she currently lives in Denmark, she considers Czech Republic her second home. Her sustainability writing and creative work has been published in Earth911, Pangyrus LitMag, Standart Mag, Hanging Loose, and more. She records her adventures on travel, culture, and language blog  Chlohemian . This is an adapted version of a Chlohemian post that originally appears here . All photos are used with the author, Chloe’ Skye’s, permission. When the pandemic hit Europe in early March, Czech Republic took proactive steps against Covid-19 transmission, including a national movement to sew and wear masks called Celé Česko šije . Since Monday, October 5th, however, the country has gone back to a state of emergency due to the intensity of the second wave of the novel co...

Teal Vickrey was an English Teaching  Assistant in 2016/2017 at Gymnasium Vimperk, located in South Bohemia, on the edge of Šumava National Park. During her time in Vimperk, Teal hosted a weekly writing club, encouraged her students to participate in a national writing competition, helped her students to put together a journal with original poems and short stories, and assisted a student with the translation of her comic book. Today, Teal works at a non-profit that focuses on youth leadership. Her organization switched to home-office mode in the middle of March. During the last six months, Teal has adopted similar coping strategies that she learned during her time in the Czech Republic in order to maintain her well-being. A few weeks ago, a friend of mine, also a former Czech English Teaching Assistant, mentioned how much her year as an ETA had prepared her for working at home. An outsider listening (luckily there were none), would have assumed that our time abroad was horrible- if...