Hearing about the experiences teaching so far that the other ETA Fulbrighters here are having, I am realizing that there are a lot of unique benefits in the situation I have. The fact that I am not teaching a formal class for credit means that my students are in general very mature, motivated, and interested. I can't imagine trying to extract answers from 150 people who don't want to be there. If people don't want to come to my class, they just don't which is a pretty nice situation to be in. I also don't have to give grades or demand consistant attendance or do any of those mean things. The downside though, is that I am not teaching in an English department: I am the English department. This not only means that I get all 150+ students to myself (though I expect (hope?) numbers will dwindle) but because it isn't a formal class, I'm not going to be getting any of those fun days off or nice holidays thrown into the semester. I had a wave of sadness sweep over me when I heard that I will only be getting one week and half long vacation between now and the end of June. In many ways I am not ready to be an adult. As a student I would be working on various things at all hours of my waking life during the semester, but even Yale with its vendetta against public holidays gave us an extremely generous amount of time off. The lack of department also means that I don't get to enjoy the same tea sipping community of 40 year old women that so many others of the ETAs do, and I still get yelled at at least half of the time when I try to get into the institute where I teach without an official ID.
In general though, I don't think the short winter break will be too problematic. Once I get through sorting everything out I will only be teaching 12 hours a week, and even with prep time that isn't very much. I have three different ideas in the back of my mind of projects I'd like to do, and I've already started making some headway on one of them. One of the English teachers from the local school came to my lecture on Wednesday and asked me if I would like to come talk to the kids sometime! She teaches pretty much every age, and that was something that I was really hoping I could make work so I was very glad to meet her. She also complimented me on being a good teacher which was very encouraging to me, as this whole teaching thing is new and quite challenging. Teaching is hard!! To all of my former teachers reading this blog, either high school or college, I would now like to apologize a) for bad handwriting b) for getting things in late and c) for turning in assignments that were scribbled in between other assignments and which involved lots of arrows pointing in different directions all over the page.
It has been fun though, and at least so far, I am really looking forward to the class everyday. Whether it has been because at the moment it is my only contact with other people, or because I get to act out random words because I don't know the Russian equivalent (ambush any one??) so far it has been very satisfying. The students seem happy to be there and willing to do all the weird stuff I ask of them. My dad told me to think of it just as "choreography for the mind." So, maybe it isn't so different after all from making 8 otherwise dignified Yalies climb and jump over each other fighting over an imaginary piece of chocolate that dangles over their heads in the basement of Morse/Stiles. Except this time, instead of chocolate, we talk about UFOs stealing the Pacific ocean. (By the way, the class was divided on that. Half of them thought that human ingenuity would preserve our species' chance of survival while the other half though the climate would be thrown off too much to support any life that exists now. It somehow all boiled down to how quickly the fish could swim away from the UFO.) I really love that most of them are science PhD candidates, it makes our debates very interesting.
But, alas, the tests aren't grading themselves and I really must finish them all today as I will be on an excursion all day tomorrow to one of the towns in the Golden Ring. You can expect pictures from that! And in the mean time I will give you this picture of a giant snail that I almost stepped on. Snails and slugs seem to be everywhere here, though they are far outnumbered by cats and babies. If you really love either cats or babies, then you should definitely come to Pushchino!
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| I am no snail expert, but after some help from google, I'm pretty sure that this is Helix pomatia, aka escargot. I am not interested in learning how to cook it. Or eat it. It is just fine where it is. |
