Wednesday, 3:10 pm. Only one class today, spent discussing the comparative lack of symbolic value of the Russian constitution when it’s been rewritten five times in the past ninety years. We had the first meeting of the American students’ Russian-language chorus today – only about ten minutes long, but we received a song to sound out by next week! This looks like great fun, or at least it will be once my throat’s back to normal. :P Now it’s time to head home and catch up on some history reading regarding Ivan the Terrible. My host mother’s having guests this evening, and indicated that it would be really nice for me to meet ANOTHER “ochen simpatchni malchik” (very nice boy) and his mother, a friend of hers. I do wish she’d stop hinting about Russian boys, but I know she means well, so I promise to at least give Dmitri (Dima) a chance this evening. :)
11 pm. As it turns out, I was spared trying to flirt in Russian after all; I got home after classes to find a text message from Professor Yarushkin, the English language teaching coordinator. I ate a quick dinner and headed over to the main campus, not quite sure what to expect – his message gave me no clue as to our meeting at 6 was to be a half-hour interview or a two-hour group information session. As it turns out, I walked into an actual three-hour class! Olga Vladimirovna (she told me to just call her Olga) teaches upper intermediate English to a group of seven university students and recent graduates on Monday and Wednesday evenings. (I will only be present for the Wednesday classes, because the orchestra meets on Mondays and Thursdays.) The students all seemed happy to meet me and asked me many questions, both about the current topic (travel and migration) and about American life and my impressions of Russia in general.
I’m very impressed by the level of English in this class, actually. As far as I understand, English is taught in the public school system in St. Petersburg, even in grade school; however, the quality of the instruction leaves something to be desired. Some of the students have been studying English only since they entered the university, while others have been studying since they were kids, but their instruction was seriously lacking. As it stands, though, they all speak at least middling English, and the grammar concepts I was explaining today are really fairly minor details. I’m happy to find out that there are equivalent proverbs in Russian for most of the common ones we bandy around in English; “Rome wasn’t built in a day” becomes “Moscow wasn’t built in a week.” :)
It takes me about an hour by public transportation to get from the apartment to the campus on Vasilievsky, so it was fairly late when I made it home, and it’ll be later tomorrow. Even with my gloves, my hands were red and probably dangerously cold when I made it home (yes, Mom, I know), so I sat and nursed a cup of very hot tea for a while, then came in to blog and go to bed. Hooray for only having two classes tomorrow! :D
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment