Fulbright Reality Czech

Elise Wright is an English Teaching Assistant. During this academic year, she teaches English at Gymnázium Jakuba Škody in Přerov, a town of 42 thousand, located in the Olomouc Region, in the eastern part of the Czech Republic. With an MA in Liberal arts studies, a goal to become a European history teacher and a life-long passion for running, Elise was placed at a general college-preparatory high school. Throughout the school year, however, Elise has discovered another passion - when traveling across the county, mostly by train, she has developed a habit of sketching the places that she wanted to keep in her mind. When Elise shared some of her sketches at the Fulbright mid-year conference, her fellow grantees were amazed by her talent. Later in the year, Elise hosted a painting workshop at a school of her fellow Fulbrighter Bea Voorhees in Ledeč nad Sázavou. Dozens of students managed to paint a “typical Czech countryside” within a regular 45-minutes long lesson. Their results were qu...

Usually I wake up at the first sound of my alarm in the morning: 6am. Sometimes, on Tuesdays, it takes me longer to wake up. I always say Tuesdays are the most difficult day of the week. Everyone prepares for Mondays to be bad days, but Tuesdays are more tiring to me. I also have the most classes to teach. I should mention that I’m a teacher. I teach History, but I’ve been teaching English in a Czech Secondary School this year. I am from the United States and here working with the Fulbright Program. I walk to school from my flat each morning. It takes about 20 minutes to walk anywhere in my city, I joke. It helps wake me up, but it also makes me look like I just ran a marathon. So, I need about 15 minutes to relax before my first lesson. The students aren’t really awake until the third lesson anyway, so I try to be extra excited about everything we’re learning, even if it isn’t interesting at all. Sometimes they enjoy the effort, sometimes I might as well be teaching t...