Fulbright Reality Czech

Eva King is a 2022-2023 Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Alumna who taught at Purkyňovo Gymnázium in Strážnice, Czech Republic. Prior to teaching in the Czech Republic, Eva was a 4th grade public school teacher in Maryland, and upon her return to Maryland she began teaching 3rd grade. Eva King is currently still teaching 3rd grade near Washington D.C. and keeps up with one of her former mentor teachers, Dáša Lovecká, by doing a Pen Pal program. The Pen Pal program is with Eva’s American 3rd graders and Dáša’s Czech students who are in primary school in Hroznová Lhota, where Dáša works now. Eva also keeps up with her primary mentor teacher, Katrin Holubíková Jongepierová, by messaging and video calling, especially to see Katrin’s first baby, Jonáš. While Eva is also in contact with some of her former students, some of the people she keeps up with most are her lifelong friends and fellow 2022-2023 ETA alumni. Photo on the left: Eva at her mentor teacher, Katrin’s, wedding ceremon...

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...

Kateřina Kallus Brychová is a high school teacher. She teaches English at Gymnázium Brno nicknamed "Jaroška." In the summer of 2023, Kateřina participated in the Fulbright SUSI Program (SUSI stands for Study of the US Institutes for Secondary Educators) aimed at school administrators interested in  sociocultural understanding, equitable learning communities, and diversity and inclusion in U.S. education and society. Participants from 20 different countries representing five different continents spent four weeks of the program at California State University in Chico. They took part in multiple seminars and workshops facilitated by university faculty, as well as external experts, toured numerous sites throughout Northern California, and visited schools to explore varied educational paths in California. For the fifth and final week of the Institute, the participants spent a couple of days in Chicago, Illinois and in Washington, D.C. to experience different regions of the U.S. an...

Kateřina Děcká is a teacher. In September and October 2022, she spent seven weeks in the U.S. as one of three Czech high school teachers selected for the Fulbright Teaching Achievement and Excellence Program. Kateřina teaches at a college-preparatory school Gymnázium Rožnov pod Radhoštěm, located in the south-eastern part of the historical region of Moravia. The major goal of the training was to equip participants with new skills and tools to encourage their students’ critical thinking and to develop their media literacy. The major part of the training took place in Madison, Wisconsin, and, at the very end, all participants traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet American policy makers, to discuss national educational strategies and to understand how education policy is created in the U.S. How transformative can a seven-week stay abroad be? Can one experience all phases of the cultural adaptation curve within that relatively short period of time? What lessons can a teacher expect...

Anna Zittle is a violinist,  a pianist, a mathematician, a teacher and a composer. This year, she serves as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant at the oldest general education high school in the city of Pardubice, Gymnázium Dašická. Before her Fulbright grant began, Anna took a summer language course to learn the basics of Czech language. This course has certainly helped with basic communication and navigation in the host country, but her Czech language skills are far from fluency that one would need in order to communicate with Czech native speakers smoothly and free of the fear of miscommunication. Luckily, Anna possesses another language, a more universal one, that does not need any translation - music. She says that: "Once we start to play, I get lost in the connection we have when moving through the music." Her motivation to spend a year in the Czech Republic was to explore and experience the home country of Bedřich Smetana and Antonín Dvořák. Her Czech host school re...