SUNDAYS AT VERONIKA’S: MIKE...

…had been visiting Veronika and her apartment-mate Marina for while and also been on an excursion with them to the (relatively) nearby city of Mariinsk. Mariinsk is Veronika’s hometown and one of the best-preserved “islands” in the gulag archipelago. Mike is mild-mannered guy, a retired photographer. Not an art photographer… he apparently took scientific photographs for textbooks in a lab (I think)… but that’s over anyway. He now works and volunteers part-time as a teacher in London’s state schools.

He shared his impressions of Siberia with the growing crowd: How everyone seemed much more trusting in Russia than in England; he was surprised people would trust strangers to pass their fare up to the driver on the bus. How the ill-kept the roads in Novosibirsk are… as he explained, if you see so much as a pothole in London, you can call a local office and they’ll send a road crew to fill it ASAP; that’s as compared with the canyons and ridges you have to negotiate on any side street in this city. He read some poems he’d written. He answered questions.

Most interesting to me was when he started talking about attitudes of ownership. Most people, according to Mike, had massive debts in England… most on their homes but some on something else. He said he had the sense that this wasn’t the case in Russia… that it seemed people didn’t buy things until they could pay for them. People in the room said yes: In Russia, if you haven’t paid for something in full yet, it’s not yours. It might just show how shamefully ignorant I am about the economy here, but this had never occurred to me as a major difference between Russian and Western economies. I knew credit cards were virtually never used here. I knew people lived with their parents well into their 20’s if they couldn’t get an affordable apartment. But I had the impression that any economic woe we were dealing with in the West would be not only present, but much worse here. I’ll look into this more…

After most of Veronika’s neighbors had left, I had a chance to talk with Mike personally. I’m sure this was one of the reasons Veronika invited me. Mike might have felt a bit left out if the Russian conversation started getting too fast or deep to translate…

I asked him about British politics, and if he’d be voting Tory or Labour in the next election—I’m never shy about asking these kinds of questions, and I always tell people they don’t have to answer if they don’t want, but they usually don’t mind. He said he’d probably be voting Conservative. I didn’t comment, didn’t want to preach or judge. I just said I understood that a lot of people had been fed up with the job Labour was doing, and he confirmed.

He said his biggest concern was with the growth in membership of far-right parties. He didn’t trust extremists like that, he said, but the strange thing was that if you actually listened to what they claimed to support, it didn’t sound that bad. They claimed not to want to stop immigration altogether, just control it. And he agreed it needed to be better-controlled, because England almost wasn’t England anymore.

Mike is open-minded person. He certainly got along well with Russians and seemed happy to spend time in the middle of Siberia, something that’s certainly not true of all Westerners you might meet. If this is how a kind-hearted, moderate voter in Britain thinks right now, it probably sheds some light on why far-right parties have been gaining ground in Europe lately. Mike is probably right: the younger generation is noticing the same demographic shifts in Britain that he is. But, being young, naïve, and hotheaded, they don’t understand (or don’t care) that when a neo-Nazi talks about the need for “controlling” immigration, it should be interpreted as a euphemism for something more extreme.

It makes you worry that the progress the West has made in attitudes about race is easily reversible, especially as memories fade and people forget what Nazis did when they were in power. Enlightened attitudes about ethnicity are supposedly one of the most important things that distinguish late capitalist European (and American) citizens from post-communist citizens… and it’s true, many Russians remain frankly, even innocently, racist, anti-Semitic, or homophobic, if the ones I meet day-to-day are representative. But the Russians’ low-intensity, pervasive, traditional prejudices are just objectionable. I think reactionary racism, of the kind represented by the Western anti-immigrant parties, has the potential to be a lot more dangerous.

SUNDAYS AT VERONIKA'S

Flashback: The First Sunday

From the moment I showed up in the foreign language cathedra, the professors in the Department of Foreign Languages have referred to me as their “colleague” or “coworker.” I appreciate this respect but it makes me feel a little guilty… I’m working far fewer hours and have far fewer real responsibilities than any of them, so I don’t feel like I’ve earned the status and dignity implied by being a colleague…

But anyway, the first or second Sunday I was here (I forget which), one of my “colleagues” who has done a lot more to earn the title, Veronika, invited me to her place the next Sunday to speak English to some guests. As arranged, I met one of Veronika’s friends/former students at the main entrance to the academy. We introduced ourselves as we headed to his car. This was weeks ago, and I haven’t seen him since, so I forget his name. Pavel, I think. Anyway, I liked him; he was one of those big, bluff, unshakably cheerful young Russian men that seem to be ubiquitous here … until the Siberian winter hits in late October and everyone’s spirits plunge.

His car was a Japanese model. Almost every car-owner I know in Novosibirsk (which is not a representative cross-section, but still) has one—and they all have their steering wheels on the right side (which is the wrong side for Russian roads, just so that’s clear).
The car trip was of the kind I’ve learned to expect here but never gotten used to… we weaved through the lanes, within inches of other cars’ fenders, and barely a scythe’s-length ahead of the grim reaper... When we miraculously arrived at Veronika’s apartment, my driver was promptly sent off to schlep the next carload of people. To judge by the number of guests already in the apartment, he had been doing this all day. It had sounded like it was going to be casual and intimate, just some chatting among friends. But when I arrived, Veronika’s modestly-sized living room already had a classroomful of people in it, sitting on whatever surfaces were available—and more kept coming.

They had all showed up to hear two native English-speakers, me and this guy Mike Pritchard from London. He was a friend of Veronika’s and she had brought him to the academy a few days earlier, so I’d met him. Mike doesn’t have much Russian. He talked for a while in English. More on that in the next post.

Then Veronika asked me to talk in Russian for a bit to give all the Russians in the room a break. I explained who I was and what I was doing in Novosibirsk. Part of it, of course, was the additional research I’m expected to do on education and attitudes about citizenship here. I asked them a few questions about this… did a civics curriculum exist in Russian schools? Nope. No surprise. I had already heard this.

Veronika said I could switch to English, and I did. I asked about religion. How many people were not religious, how many were Christians, and how many had some other affiliation? There was a mix of non-affiliates and Christians… nothing else. Did it have any bearing on political views in Russia? The short answer, which everyone seemed to agree on, was “no.” Religion here was a private matter. I explained that the reason I asked was that I felt religion had too much of an influence on politics in the United States… that it should remain a private matter, but had entered into politics to a dangerous degree with the religious right. (I’m sure that won’t surprise anyone who reads this.)

People asked me for details, made their own comments… all very interesting, but with their knowledge of English and my knowledge of Russian, we could only go so deep. Still, it felt very satisfying to have drawn even these few broad contrasts between our cultures from this one discussion…

SATURDAY AT VERONIKA’S

I’ve decided to make a series out of these posts about going to Veronika’s apartment because (1) it’s always interesting and (2) it’s about to become a regular part of my schedule. When I was there six Saturdays ago giving a presentation about art, she asked me if I’d come and teach Spanish to her and a group of her neighbors and friends every week.

So, every Sunday at 13:00 (sometimes 12:00), I show up at Veronika’s apartment building in one of Novosibirsk’s less picturesque neighborhoods (which is, basically, all of them except for the triangle between Ploschad’ Lenina, the train station, and Krasnyj Prospekt metro station)… ride the elevator up sixteen floors, and teach my six faithful pupils how to say, “Nosotros vivimos en Rusia” and “Ksenia tiene los ojos azules.” This Sunday will be our third lesson… we’ll see if people coming. So far, they’re more dedicated and hardworking than my students at the academy.

Small Triumphs (Mostly over T.S.)

In the few weeks since going to Moscow, I’ve started feeling more confident about my teaching. I think it helped that I moved to topics that are more interesting to me personally.

In my Country Studies class, I had been trying to build a lesson plan around the passage from The Grapes of Wrath which describes burning crops as people starve. It’s written in pretty simple English, it’s one of the few canonical American novels I’ve actually read, and I figured I could draw interesting connections to other American memes (the “grapes of wrath” line in The Battle Hymn of the Republic, Woodie Guthrie’s “Tom Joad,” Springsteen’s “The Ghost of Tom Joad” and the cover by Rage Against the Machine).

But, for whatever reason, this didn’t wow my students. Some didn’t get the politics implicit in Steinbeck (it was either too remote from their experience or impossible to understand in English). Some just didn’t like country music, so they didn’t like Woodie Guthrie. I was hoping they would take more to Springsteen or Rage (most Russians, like Americans, in this generation prefer rock to country), and tried a listen and fill-in-the-blank activity with them. But even with most of the lyrics in front of them, they couldn’t (or didn’t want to) pick out the words.

So I changed course. I told them about party politics in the United States, which was all new to them. We started with a discussion of how to define left-wing and right-wing, which yielded some interesting opinions (more on that in the next post). A few of my students stayed pretty listless, but there were some very encouraging days: I assigned a presentation to each of them on one political issue in the United States and each party’s position on it. On the first day of presentations, not only did the presenters find good information, but every student joined the discussion and had at least one comment to make… At the end of those 80 minutes, I was bursting with pride.

I didn’t know how to make sense of this very quick improvement, but I figured it might just be that these were, after all, students at an academy of public administration. Maybe they just took naturally to discussions of politics… I found out later that I was wrong. But this post is supposed to be about good things…

Another good thing happened around this time:

I mounted a successful democratic revolt against my tutor’s authoritarian style at my Russian lessons.

I had been getting more and more frustrated with Tatyana Sergeyevna’s techniques. She just didn’t seem to get what I needed… a native speaker to practice conversation with. I think she even knew she wasn’t helping me much, but her solution was to become more severely Soviet in her teaching style, rather than just relax and be my Russian conversation-buddy.

I know it will sound arrogant and bratty to say this, but it’s frustrating to feel like you’re smarter than your teacher. And no, I don’t think I’m smarter than TS in most respects, I just think I’m a better linguist. We once got into a stupid argument about subject and object where she tried to tell me that just because a noun was in nominative case in a sentence, that didn’t make it a subject. I’m sorry, but if you think that, then you don’t understand the concept of nominative case or subject. I used the example, «Им нравится мороженое», and she мороженое was an object, not a subject, in this sentence. I said that couldn’t be right, that мороженое was clearly the subject. She said no.

I said, “But, grammatically speaking…”
And she said, “Oh, well, yes. Grammatically speaking, you’re right, it is the subject.”

Um… what the hell else could I have meant?

It becomes even more obvious when I’m able to stump her with questions about grammar in her native language.

We were talking about the verb ждать once… (It means “wait for” or “await”) I mistakenly thought that it usually took the accusative case. So when we were looking at the expression «Ждать у моря погоды » (“Wait for weather by the sea”), I asked why “weather” was plural in this example. She told me it wasn’t, it was genitive singular. So I asked when the verb ждать took the accusative case, and when it took genitive. She said, “It always takes genitive,” and, as was her habit, adopted a Jehovah-like tone of authority in her voice and began rattling off a list of examples where ждать governed nouns in the genitive case, to show me how mistaken I was.

I said, “What about ‘Я жду подругу’?”

She stopped dead. Her eyes shifted side to side, her lips pursed. I had just used a perfectly grammatical example that directly contradicted her rule. She looked so flummoxed, I almost felt sorry. She dithered a bit, before saying, “Well yes, that’s the conversational variant, but it’s not the best way.” Yeah, right. Inflexible, Soviet-trained philologists might not know it, but any first-year linguistics student will tell you that prescriptive rules like this are total bunk. If everyone breaks a certain grammatical rule, then it has ceased to be a rule. And I bet even Pushkin would have said, “Я жду подругу”, not, “Я жду подруги.”

To do her credit, TS had enough self-doubt to look it up when she got home, and at our next lesson, she told me she was wrong. The verb could govern nouns in either accusative or genitive case. (Actually, she didn’t have to tell me, because I’d looked it up myself, but I didn’t tell her this.)

Another day, she was trying to teach me about command forms. She decided to give me an exercise where she would give me the infinitive, and I would give the command form. This is sometimes a bit tricky in Russian, but in my second year, I had learned a foolproof way to form the imperative of any verb by using the stem of the third-person plural form (они), and the stress from the first person singular (я). It’s in the В пути textbook and is a very useful technique.

So I asked if we could conjugate the verbs into these forms so I would know how to form the imperative. She said OK.

This worked fine for a while. But then she started asking me why I wanted to know these first- and third-person forms when the imperative was clearly related to the second-person forms (ты and вы); A command is “Go you!” or “Go thou!” not “Go they”. This was too complicated to explain, so I just told her it was the technique I had learned. She would have none of it and started telling me it was incorrect to form imperatives from anything other than the second-person conjugations.

This really pissed me off. The method I’d learned worked fine, but because she couldn’t understand the logic of it, she was making things more difficult for me. I cast around for examples to show her why my way was more helpful. Finally, I hit on the verb “бежать.” If you try to form the imperative from this second-person forms of бежать, you end up with бежи, which is wrong. If you try to form the imperative from the first- and third-person forms (the technique from В пути), you get беги, which is right.

TS considered this example for a minute, and then backed down. She let me use the В пути technique for the rest of the lesson.

OK, so this wasn’t exactly Gettysburg, but I had won an argument in Russian, and found that TS, however stubborn she seemed, was willing to listen to reason. It was good to know that I could actually convince her to ease up if I was persistent.

But even since then, she has still been an insufferable know-it-all. When I told her I would be taking a test at the end of our lessons to gauge my progress, she insisted we practice questions. She would ask, I would answer. And she stopped me to correct every mistake, as was her habit. I told her that when I’d taken my pre-test, the test-giver hadn’t stopped me to correct me, so TS refrained… for a while. She started again, and I told her, “You know, I think the people giving this test are more interested in fluency than flawless grammar.” She said, “Oh no, I think they’ll be more interested in grammatical errors.” And you would know this how, TS? All I could do was sigh and submit.

The lessons with TS just ended this past week, and I have to say I’m glad. Up until the end, I never got over the sense that the many, many evenings I spent with TS were basically a waste of time. I could have been chatting over tea with Dima or YeG, but instead I was doing stupid exercises out of a book, and talking to someone who wouldn’t let me complete a sentence. Her teaching just seemed not to be informed by any consistent sense of my level in Russian. One minute she would assign me an exercise designed to help me understand words I already knew, and the next minute she would assign one that was clearly meant for native Russian-speaking schoolchildren with a much bigger active vocabulary.

I’ll stop rambling. The only thing I have left to say is that Tatyana Sergeyevna is a lovely person but a bad teacher of her native language. I guess it could have been worse. She could have been a total ogre both personally and professionally. But I can’t say that, based on my experience, I would recommend the CLEA to the next Fulbrighter in Novosibirsk.

Евгения Горн (Genie Furnace)

Jevgenija Gorn (or Yevgeniya Gorn, hereafter Jevgenija, YeG, or Genie Furnace) is the only Russian person I’ve told about my blog. I guess it’s because, as much as I’ve liked people here, she’s the only one I feel like I can trust to be totally honest with me at this stage, and therefore the one person with whom I can be unself-consciously honest. And there are a few good reasons for that: One is that she’s been nice to me over the past few weeks, but a better reason is that she wasn’t that nice when she met me. She’s one of the few people who didn’t act over the moon to meet me on the day I was first introduced to everyone in the Foreign Languages Cathedra (Кафедра Иностранных Языков, called InYaz for short). When I first saw YeG, she was animatedly discussing some scheduling problem with Natal’ja Mikhajlovna Grishina, the head of InYaz. She had a harassed expression on her face, which I’ve seen a lot since then.

Natal’ja Mikhajlovna had invited me into her office, and she stopped Yevgeniya to start proposing a tentative schedule to me and another faculty member in English. Although YeG was in on this discussion, she never looked at me, and only used Russian when asked for her input. The expression on her face just got more exasperated. After that conversation, I went out into an adjoining room and was getting ready to leave, and YeG came out and introduced herself in very good English. She said we would need to discuss preparations for class, and she would need to meet with me to talk about it, so we agreed on a time and place. She said sorry for being rude (I waved it away) and told me she was normally a nice person but had a lot of reasons to be stressed, and I said it was OK because she seemed stressed. I said some of this in Russian, and she approved of my accent, which made me proud.

I was worried that it was a little shady to be setting up meetings deliberately in the absence of the department head, but when we did meet, she clarified for me that she was going to share/supervise my teaching for one of the subjects that had been assigned to me. And this time she was a lot nicer, not that I’d been too fazed the first time I met her. I figured it was good to know I’d met someone who would be candid if she had something bugging her. It’s understandable, too. Yevgeniya is only 24 (that’s just a year older than me! My God, I’m old) and in her last year as a junior teacher which, as I gather, is a pretty stressful thing to be in Russia. You basically make about enough to pay for transportation between home and work, feed yourself if you’re lucky… and that’s about it. And they’re usually completing a thesis at the same time to become senior teachers. Plus you have senior teachers delegating tasks to you left and right, which may have to do with their classes, or their research… Basically, I think Yevgeniya is pretty pleased that this is the last year she will have to take all this crap.

As planned, we’ve been sharing teaching duties for the “Listening” groups of second-year students going for an extra qualification as translators. To get this qualification, they need supplemental classes in each area of language skill (I think the division is speaking, listening, writing, and reading). It’s been going pretty well. Yevgeniya is a good source of moral and professional support. She’s gradually having me teach one of the groups more and more on my own, and offering advice to help me improve. And it is genuinely helpful advice, not the busybody variety which is so common here. The one drawback is that it’s very tempting to speak English with her, as her English is better than my Russian. It usually isn’t a problem if I start the conversation in Russian, because she’s very patient while I’m groping for words, so I’ll just have to be stricter with myself.

“Gorn” is a German name. The nice thing about German surnames in Russian is they don’t change by gender and they don’t decline. In Russian it means “furnace”, but it’s probably derived from another language, because it’s just like horno (“oven”) in Spanish, and that’s too close to be a coincidence. So maybe if “gorn” were a Slavic word, Yevgeniya might be Gornov, but since she’s not, I don’t have to worry about case when I’m talking about her in Russian. Another plus.

At the chalkface

I should really say “at the dry-erase face” because most of the classrooms have white-boards with pre-dampened rags and erasers… no markers though. Teachers bring their own from the department. I’ve definitely left behind at least one dry-erase marker in a classroom. I’m not supposed to do that. Tsk tsk.

My experiences as a teacher so far have been pretty mixed, but I’m feeling better about it in general now than I was before leaving for Moscow. My last class before that trip was in the early afternoon on October 2^nd, a Friday. I had instructed my group of second-year students to give oral reports about Malcolm X. Even though they were supposed to have prepared these at home, I knew most of them would have, as usual, neglected their homework completely. So, rather than subject one student to a humiliating public punishment for something of which the whole class was guilty, I decided to split the class into groups, have each group prepare a speech together, and then choose its most ready and able member to actually deliver it.

Even after I made these allowances, the first two speeches which turned out to be just shy of abysmal, and the last one was read (not even recited by memory) straight from the information I’d given them as a guide. Grammar-wise, content-wise, style-wise... they just obviously hadn’t prepared. I know I was more visibly disappointed than I’d ever been in front of them, but it was hard to tell if they would react by getting huffy or by stepping up their work. I just cut the last student off, and told everyone sternly that I was very cross and they’d all better be prepared next week or else… Or else what? Time-out? No recess? Principal’s office? The thing is, I have very little say in their final grades. In fact, that group of second-years is one of the ones I’m sharing with another cathedra-member, a 24-year-old junior teacher, Jevgenija (of whom more in the following post). She knows and I know and the students know that she’s the one who will have the final word in how they’re evaluated, and she couldn’t be there that day.

I was worried that I’d already been too lax with them and couldn’t credibly change that dynamic now. I’d already noticed that most of the students I’d taught or guest-taught greeted me in the halls by saying “Privjet”, which, generally, is too familiar for a student to use with a teacher. I would feel ridiculous telling them to address me formally, especially since my social life is already uneventful enough that I don’t want to discourage people from being friendly. Is that unprofessional? Maybe not if the goal is “mutual understanding”, as stated in the Fulbright literature. But anyway, I wondered how I could possibly motivate them if they just saw me as a peer.

Also discouraging was the embarrassingly low rate of attendance at my lectures that week. Only two students had showed up to the elective course I’m teaching on the American party system. (That was out of fourteen in the whole class, which seems to be a normal class size here.)

I’m feeling a little better about these things now. This week I had nine students come (actually not a bad showing) to the same class where I’d had two the week before, and although attendance was down for the second-year group (the oral reports group), their work was much better that day. It might have been because the other teacher, Jevgenija, came and observed that day, but I like to think it’s just because they didn’t want to disappoint me again.

I’ve also observed some other teachers’ classes, and I feel like I’m getting a better sense for what makes these students tick. We’ll see if that wisdom does me any good by the time I post again.

Moscú, güey (In-Country Orientation)

A “turkey drop” is apparently a favorite technique among Moscow robbers that exploits a foreigner’s sense of chivalry. The procedure is to drop a bag or wallet full of money in front of a well-meaning naïf, wait for him to pick it up to return it to its owner, then go back to claim it. Another guy comes up, saying he’s a militia officer and asking to see your wallet to make sure you haven’t taken any of the other guy’s money, and maybe demanding to look at your documents into the bargain. Amounts are discussed, your wallet gets passed around, they hand it back, and you leave only to realize two minutes later that your own wallet has been cleaned out and the nasty thieves are long gone.

I’m glad I learned this the easy way last Monday, and I guess that’s the kind of thing in-country orientation is good for, even though I won’t be in Moscow, and I’m not sure the turkey drop is a popular technique out my way. For all I know, the Siberian thieves have their own tricks for unsuspecting marks like me. I also learned a lot about the Russian economy while I was there. They gave us a lot of general background on conditions in the RF… and that was very interesting, but I’m also not sure how or if any of it will help me adapt to life in Novosibirsk.

Actually, it’s a little absurd to call the three hours I spent in the U.S. Embassy last Monday “orientation” after the five weeks I had already spent negotiating the tortuous straits of class-scheduling, tutor-locating, Russian pedagogical method, and so on at home (that is—Novosibirsk). As I explained to a few people in Novosibirsk who asked what my conference in Moscow was about: “It’s called orientation, but in my opinion I’ve already oriented myself pretty well here” (sorry for the clumsy translation… actually, it probably sounds just as stupid in my Russian).

Anyway, I was in Moscow for two days before the actual meeting. As soon as we got word of the date (October 5^th, a Monday), Helen (the ETA in Krasnoyarsk for you outsiders) put the word out on facebook that she wanted to fly into Moscow early and spend the weekend there. She invited any and all ETAs to join her. I didn’t have to think about it too hard. Helen is an Oberlin alumna and… uh… even cooler than that normally implies. She was also one of my winter term students a-way back in 2006, and probably the one who made me feel best about my teaching.

Four other ETAs and I would eventually decide to meet up early with Helen and stay at the same hostel near Kitaj-Gorod. I’m glad now that I jumped on that bandwagon, because the weekend in Moscow turned out to be exactly what I needed. That’s not to cast aspersions on Novosibirsk’s irresistible charms. As I’ll explain in the next post, I was just feeling discouraged about my work there, and it was good to get a break.

It’s hard to say what, in particular, felt so good about this break. We didn’t see much (or, frankly, anything) outside the normal tourist spots, unless you count the inside of the U.S. Embassy. In fact, I’d be sort of surprised if everyone there agreed with me about how enjoyable it was, so don’t take my impressions as gospel. But that exhilarating feeling of being so close to so much history came back when I was in Moscow… it’s one of those things I miss from St. Petersburg that’s lacking in Novosibirsk. I liked the bustle in the metro, which just makes Novosibirsk look sleepy. It was also great to finally see (I know that’s a split infinitive, sue me) the old Tretyakov Gallery, which lived up to the hype (I didn’t see the new one, but that wasn’t a top priority).

I saw Lenin in the mausoleum. One of the other ETAs told me he’s submerged in a chemical bath of which one of the ingredients is paraffin every eighteen months… which I just confirmed on the incontestable authority of a book about mummification on google books. He’s probably more wax now than flesh. So did I really see Lenin, you may well ask, or just a big Lenin-shaped candle? A question for the philosophers…

And it was good to compare notes with the other ETAs in person. I’m not, as it turns out, the only one feeling discouraged about the pace of my progress in speaking Russian, or finding that most of the written material I’ve tried using is way beyond my students’ level (even with supposedly advanced students), or concerned about my ability to motivate them, or trying to answer two different departments’ demands/requests simultaneously, or subject to spells of loneliness (although those have gotten rarer as the lecture hours, class visits, English club hours, Russian homework, and so on have accumulated on my schedule).

One of my friends just wrote me asking for more pictures. Moscow is the most picturesque place I’ve been in this country this time around, so I hope you like what I got from there, Jon… Those statues you see at the top of this post are depictions of Russian fairy tales in the fountains at Manezhnaya Square, put up in the’ 90’s. Kitschy, yes, but as an outsider, I liked seeing them and identifying the ones I knew. Anyway, I don’t feel like I have anything very fresh to say about Moscow, so just enjoy the pictures if this post has gotten boring...

More about Tatjana Sergejevna

Not one to be discouraged, Tatiana Sergejevna found a way to secure an institutional affiliation. She talked to her friends at a language school (called “Boston” as it turned out).

Basically, they could give me what I needed. Ten hours of Russian per week for thirteen weeks, for less than the equivalent of US$4000, with receipts presented upon payment.

One thing I did have to clarify, though, was that I needed ten real hours (that is to say, 600 minutes), not ten academic hours. An academic hour, in Russia, is defined as forty-five minutes, so the first draft contract that the school drew up was actually for 450 minutes per week. Also interesting: Not knowing what else to call them, I used the phrase «солнечные часы» (solnechnyje chasy – “solar hours”), and Tat’jana Sergejevna corrected me: Apparently the correct phrase for real, 60-minute, non-academic hours is «астрономические часы» -- “astronomical hours.” Sun, stars… whatever. I’d just pulled the phrase “solar hours” completely out of my… um… hat, so I was happy with how close my guess came…

One of T.S.’s first homework assignments for me was to write about myself, what I was doing in Novosibirsk, and why I wanted to learn Russian. I wrote about how I was in Novosibirsk working as a teacher, and that outside my teaching duties and other Fulbright duties (are you reading this, Becca Dash?), my highest priority was to improve my Russian. I said I was most interested in learning to understand spoken Russian and speak Russian fluently, and that I also wanted to read better in Russian, and I believed this would be easier as I developed the other skills became more fluent. Finally, I said that improving my writing was my lowest priority, because I didn’t see myself ever needing to write much in Russian, and, more to the point, I didn’t think it would be possible for me to learn to write well in Russian from a stylistic point of view. Maybe I could with a lot of practice and commitment and a total immersion experience… Joseph Conrad, after all, didn’t learn English until he was in his twenties. But it’s not like I’m planning to be for Russian literature what Joseph Conrad was for English literature. Writing is good exercise and a good vocabulary-builder, but I won’t be devastated if I fail to master the subtleties of Russian style before I leave Novosibirsk.

I figured this was so she could get an idea of how to plan her lessons to suit my needs.

Not so.

When I brought back my composition the next day, I was surprised to find that before we got around to looking at it, we spent almost an hour (out of the three hours we had) on phonetics. This was after she had told me herself that she didn’t think my pronunciation needed much more work. She had me do tongue-twisters, which was fine. We got hung up for a while on pronouncing и as ы in the phrase «перед играми», or something equally trivial. Basically, it was the kind of negligible phonetic imperfection that would never prevent anyone from understanding you.

As I’ve had more time studying with Tat’jana Sergejevna, I’ve come to realize that this kind of intense fine-tuning is characteristic: Her lessons seem to be designed not with the goal of helping me communicate better, but with the goal of making me pronounce Russian exactly like a Russian, or communicate as perfectly idiomatically as a native speaker. Frankly, this is a totally unrealistic goal, but to be fair to T.S., I suspect it’s an attribute of traditional foreign language curricula in Russia rather than a peculiarity of her teaching style. It’s like the texts and methods she’s using are aimed at improving a Russian’s use of his own native language (e.g. explaining grammatical features and rules) rather than at helping a foreigner become more fluent (e.g. scenarios and dialogs).

Here’s another example: Whenever she asks me questions, and I give perfectly comprehensible but idiomatically awkward answers, she corrects me before I even finish the sentence, sometimes several times. It doesn’t seem quite fair to expect me to say something in a perfectly idiomatic way the first time. It would make sense for a Russian older than five who already had a good command of his first language and could be expected to express himself in an idiomatic way automatically. But for someone still learning the language, it’s just discouraging. In the U.S. they advise language teachers against correcting a student in the middle of a sentence, I think rightly. It’s been found that if children are corrected constantly when they’re learning to speak, they develop stammers. Although the consequences obviously aren’t nearly as dire for a foreign-language learner, it’s discouraging, not to say counterproductive, never to be able to express a complete thought before someone jumps in and makes you retread the last two words. It’s about as much fun as a traffic jam.

I’m far enough along in learning Russian that I’m not worried about this crippling my ability to communicate, but it’s frustratingly far off the track I was hoping to take with a tutor. Basically, I want to learn by doing, by trial and error. I want to use Russian copiously, to practice talking, writing, and reading out loud as much as possible, as freely as possible, without someone interrupting to explain grammar and phonetic rules to me that I already understand in theory. I do want to be corrected, but I want to have a chance to express my thoughts fully without someone cutting me off to correct negligible errors. I think if I had a chance to write that first composition again, I would be clearer about this…

Writing

When we did get around to reading the composition, she edited the hell out of it. Like I said, my Russian writing style leaves a lot to be desired, so this was expected. I was actually glad, because this was what I had wanted – to learn through practice, to learn by trial and error, to express myself and then have someone suggest how to improve my expression.

What I wasn’t prepared for was what happened when she got to the part about writing. When she read that I considered improving my writing the least important of my goals, she gasped and her eyes bugged out. “Njet!” she cried. “How can writing be unimportant?” She scolded me for this grave heresy and scribbled corrections on my paper, saying, “This is what you will say: ‘Writing is, for me, the most important of my goals.’” She then proceeded to change the rest of the paragraph to correspond to this line of thinking, and slashed all the sentences I had offered by way of explanation for the relatively low priority I assigned to writing. Hmm. OK, so it seemed that for Tatiana Sergeyevna, editing a student’s paper doesn’t just mean correcting grammar, style, and spelling, or checking for factual errors. It means changing the whole meaning of the statement if she disagrees with the opinion it expresses. Wow.

Let me stop here and clarify that I wasn’t as indignant about this as it might seem. First of all, her shock at what I had said was half-joking; she was smiling a little when she told me I couldn’t say writing was unimportant. In fact I would have thought she was ribbing me if she hadn’t then shown how serious she was by revising my entire argument.

At an earlier time in my life, when I was a little more hotheaded, this might have really pissed me off, but I’ve become more patient and besides…

I really like this woman. She has a huge heart and a great sense of humor. At our first lesson, she’d brought me vegetables from the garden at her dacha. She’s also one of these Russian women who seems ready, by instinct, to help someone in need in any way she can. Later, when we were doing lessons at her house, we took a break in the middle to eat and she actually cooked for both of us. At a later lesson, when I mentioned offhand that I was having trouble finding a jacket at a reasonable price, she went out on a walk with me afterwards, took me to three different stores and actually found me a really nice, name-brand jacket that I bought for the equivalent of $35. These last two things hadn’t happened yet at this stage, but I already had a strong inkling of how kind and generous she was.

Also, before coming to Novosibirsk, I resolved to be as patient as possible and just go with the flow, and that’s how I’m dealing with this. I’m not happy with all her teaching methods, but I’m content to chalk this up to cultural differences. I really just have to accept that in a Russian classroom, even in a private tutor-pupil dynamic, whatever the teacher says goes. Apart from my experience with her, I’ve heard things elsewhere to suggest that in Russia the teacher is accustomed to having control, and makes little effort to tailor the curriculum to the students’ interests. I remember hearing about a Russian chemistry professor at Tufts who told the parents of a prospective student, “I hate the students here. I hate them. They’re always trying to tell me what they want to learn about. I’m the professor!”

Fair enough, I guess.

You want to spend twenty minutes perfecting my pronunciation of the word чьему, even though there’s no way someone could misunderstand me the way I’m saying it? Sure. You want to edit my paper to say the opposite of what I meant, just because you disagree with me? That’s fine, you’re the teacher. You want to correct me five times before I make it to the end of a sentence, even though it’s perfectly clear what I mean? That’s your prerogative.

Besides, it’s not like I’m getting a final grade for these lessons, so the stakes aren’t high enough for me to raise a stink about these differences of opinion with my teacher.

Anyway, even if T.S.’s curriculum has had very little to do with my particular goals in using Russian, it hasn’t been a waste of time, either. I’m learning some stuff, although it’s not as much as it could be. Basically, T.S. might spend forty-five minutes on an unnecessary rehash of some grammar rule that I already understand, but then she’ll spend the next forty-five minutes editing and discussing a composition I’ve written for homework, which is genuinely helpful. It’s a mixed bag.

So I’ll just take the best I can out of it.

Sunday with Paul/Лебединое Озеро

I spent a good chunk of Sunday, September on a quest for internet with Paul. It would have been a simpler matter if I hadn’t, by some weird mishap, forgotten my adapter plug in the Foreign Languages Cathedra (actually the Foreign Languages Subdepartment, but the literal translation, “cathedra” sounds way cooler and more medieval) the day before. Typical. My first thought was that the охранник who handles all the office keys might let us through so I could get my plug out of the cathedra or, alternatively, use the internet in the International Connections Department, but it turned out that offices had to stay closed as a matter of protocol on Sundays.

So we marched across the foot-bridge and on down Serebrennikovskaya Street to Megas, the Western-style mall by the river. All the while, Paul was stopping and taking pictures, which is a hobby of his, and I was encouraging him to practice reading Cyrillic by asking him what different signs said along the way.

I’d noticed two things at Megas before that might potentially save our bacon on a Sunday when we needed internet: 1. a big electronics shop, which might, just might, sell adaptor plugs, and 2. a café in the middle of the central floor that advertised wi-fi. Neither of these delivered the goods. The shop was closed til 10:00, so we decided to grab a cup of coffee at the café in the meantime and see if we could use what was left of my battery. While we were there, though, we noticed that a) the café had no electrical outlets anyway, and b) a 200 mL cup of coffee cost the equivalent of four dollars. So screw that. At the electronics shop, we asked a guy at the repair desk, who was nice enough, but unfortunately could only show us three different things that were incompatible with my laptop or cord in three different ways. We asked one of the younger staff out on the floor if we could buy laptop cords separately from the laptops, and he seemed pissed to be asked such an impertinent question and couldn't or wouldn't tell us where we could get one. Thanks, buddy.

Despite these discouraging developments, my good opinion of the helpfulness of strangers in Russia was restored by the end of the day. Back out on the street, we asked a friendly-looking, dapper old guy in a white suit if he knew where there might be an internet café. I didn’t hold out much hope, because he looked like he was about 75 and not likely to be entirely caught up with recent trends in communication.

That’ll teach me to be age-ist. He suggested asking at the sushi restaurant a little farther up, saying they might have internet, and if they didn’t, they’d know where to find it. He was spot on. The waitress there told us they had wi-fi but not computers, and if we wanted a computer we should check at the Traveller’s Coffee by the Globus…

On this advice, we headed to the enormous glass globe-shaped Traveller’s Coffee right outside the Globus Theater, still decorated in the Interra rubber band motif. There's a picture at the top of this post.

Paul is a good photographer.

And we finally tracked a computer down right where she said it would be: as it turned out, it was a big, shiny, white Apple computer with internet access, the only desktop Mac I believe I’ve seen since coming to Siberia.

While Paul was catching up on work and e-mail, it occurred to me that he might want to see something at Novosibirsk’s famous Opera and Ballet Theater a few blocks away. I gather that the companies performing at the Marijnskij and Bolshoj are slightly more prestigious, but if you happen to be in Siberia anyway, Novosibirsk is the place to go for ballet. He was leaving on Wednesday, so our time was limited. I suggested going to see what was showing at the Opera and Ballet Theatre before then. When we got there, I saw that there was a performance that night there wouldn’t be another one until Thursday, which meant we had one option. When I got close enough to read it, I saw that it was Swan Lake.

I’m really not wild about Tchaikovsky, but I didn’t want Paul to go back to Moscow and have people asking him why the hell he’d gone to Novosibirsk and missed the only thing worth seeing there (poor fools don’t know what kind of charm they’re missing). So we decided to ascend to the heights of cliché by watching a Russian ballet company perform Swan Lake. I admit I was a little disappointed that it was the only thing left, and when we arrived back at the theater three hours later, I was bracing myself to be patient for a few hours.

But…

Twenty minutes into the first act, it was already obvious that this theater’s reputation was well-deserved. I saw the Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet at the Mariinskij in 2007, but I don’t think it was a match for the kind of grace and coordination I saw on stage that night. According to the program, the leads had won all kinds of major awards. The woman who played Odile was amazing... Actually, everything I saw on stage that night was stunning. (Also, the woman in the seat next to mine smelled nice…)

I’d say the only drawback of the evening was the seats. If you’ve been to stage theaters in Russia, you might recall that the seats are not the most ergonomic. Basically, you’ve got a couple of straight, flat boards (one is the seat, one is the back) with a circle of velvety cushion on each that doesn’t do much in the way of cushioning. The same is true in Novosibirsk. It’s truly a testament to the quality of the dancing that I got absorbed enough to stop noticing the ache in my lower back and butt.

So I ended up enjoying myself way more than I thought I would. By the end of the first act, it was truly impossible not to be impressed, and when the curtain went down on the fourth act, I was actually bummed that it was over. Wanting more ballet is an entirely new experience for me. When Paul and I left the theater, and started the half-hour process of walking off the numbness in our caudal regions, we agreed it had been a really good idea. I’ll have to go back one of these days.

Tatyana Sergeyevna

During my first week here, I asked Lena where I could find someone to give me private Russian lessons for my CLEA. Lena recommended a teacher she knew personally and gave me her number. I called Tat’jana Sergejevna (also Tatyana Sergeyevna, Tatiana Sergeevna, Tat’jana Sergeievna, and so on; hereafter T.S.) and we arranged to meet at the café at Krasnyj Prospekt metro-station the next Monday. Saying everything in Russian and then translating, she told me she was blonde and middle-aged, and would be wearing “black glasses.” “Black glasses” (чёрные очки) is the literal translation of the Russian phrase for sunglasses.

On Monday, there was an embarrassingly prolonged comedy of errors which ended happily when I realized (after more detailed directions from Tatyana Sergeyevna on her cell phone) that she had meant the café over one of the entrances of the station, not actually something inside. Silly me. She was waiting outside the door, and was, as described, blonde (with short hair) and middle-aged (born the same year as my dad, I found out later), but the lenses in her sunglasses were red, not black. My first lesson with this natural-born teacher began three seconds after I met her, but it had nothing to do with Russian language:

Tatyana Sergeyevna took me by the elbow and directed my gaze to each of the four station entrances, one on each corner of the Krasnyj Prospekt/Ulitsa Gogolja intersection. Speaking in Russian, she identified the buildings at each corner (the Officers’ Building, an universam, and so on) and helpfully drew my attention to the fact that only one of them contained a café. I said I understood that now. She wondered aloud how I could have missed it. I didn’t have an explanation that I could articulate in Russian, but I doubt she was really expecting one. This methodical review of everything I’d done wrong has since turned out to be one of T.S.’s favorite teaching techniques.

We went into the café, but didn’t spend much time there, and didn’t order anything. I’m not sure if this was why, but I told her I didn’t think it would be possible for me to hire her in a private capacity. Under the conditions of the grant, I needed someone with an institutional affiliation, who could provide me with an official-looking receipts to show IIE. I would have to ask, I told her, but I didn’t think the prospects were good. It was too bad, I thought as we left, because I liked her a lot and thought she would be a good teacher.

Since there was still some chance we would be working together, T.S. walked me through a park and showed me her apartment building, where lessons would be held if we did manage to arrange something. The whole time, she was asking me questions about what areas of my Russian I most needed/wanted to improve (I told her I thought I needed most work on listening comprehension, but after the way I’d bolloxed up the meeting arrangements, that pretty much went without saying). I was happy to hear her say my pronunciation probably didn’t need much more work. This conversation, all in Russian, continued all the way through the park and back. I knew she’d come from work to meet me and, even though I wasn’t sure if she had expected to start rendering her services that day, I was planning to pay for Russian conversation anyway, so I offered to pay her for her time. Even as I made the offer I knew that she would refuse, like all honorable Russians in such situations. So I thanked her and promised to ask IIE if there was a way I could hire her, then left.

The Lull

For about a week, my life here in Novosibirsk was drifting in the doldrums, both socially and at work. I had made a few friends, but they were all busy for reasons that seemed not to affect my schedule. Apparently, grad students and administrative staff have a lot more to do than a junior/guest teacher during the first week of term at SibAGS.

There are a desk and computer in the international office to which I have priority, if not exclusive, rights of use. Unfortunately, with only a vague idea of what subjects I would be teaching over the next few months, and an even vaguer idea of my students’ likely level of advancement, knowledge, and so on, I could only outline tentative syllabuses (syllabi?) and look for material on the internet that might or might not be useable in my classes. I could also answer the phone, listen politely to the callers’ questions, ask them to excuse my utter uselessness, and assure them that a real office employee with the competence to help them would be back soon; could I pass something along? Almost all of these luckless supplicants just said they would call back… as much as I doubted my own ability to relay a semantically accurate version of their message, I’m guessing they had even less confidence in me. I couldn’t blame them.

I don’t usually care too much about my level of output on a given day. But it’s one thing to be a bum in blissful solitude, away from the world’s judging eyes, and another thing to be the only stuck cog when everyone around you is working at a furious pace. The week from the 7^th to the 14^th of September, Lena and Julia were preparing for some kind of conference being hosted by SibAGS, and had to juggle the responsibilities related to that along with the usual beginning-of-the-year process of registering foreign students’ passports. The atmosphere in the office was tense, and I had the distinct feeling that my totally unproductive presence there was only exacerbating the general stress. I know from experience that it’s sometimes difficult, when you’re swamped, not to resent any able-bodied person nearby who evidently has too much time on his hands. Of course, Julia and Lena knew that with my limited Russian and total ignorance of visa rules, I wasn’t in much of a position to lighten their burdens, so it might just have been me, but I couldn’t get over feeling like an encumbrance for those few days.

Paul

Luckily, Irina gave me some news that would quickly lead to a way out of this predicament… She told me that another American would be arriving soon, a Fulbright scholar and public relations specialist about the same age as my dad (discretion and etiquette forbid me from being any more explicit on this point). In the U.S., he worked as a professor of PR at UNC-Ashville. He’d also worked at the URALs academy in Yekaterinburg and had lately been doing his thang in Moscow on Fulbright money.

While he was in Novosibirsk, there just weren’t enough hours in the day, which was a nice change from waiting for something to teach and feeling like a total waste of space. I led Paul around to events he was expected to attend as a visiting scholar, most of them making up part of the conference that had been pushing Lean to the edge of a nervous breakdown for the past week. It was called…

«Интерра»

The Interra Forum, as it turned out, was a Big Meeting being hosted by Novosibirsk this year to discuss possibilities for advancement and innovation in Russian industry and technology, particularly in the context of the crisis. SibAGS has had some role in hosting the proceedings, and Lena and Julia were juggling more “international connections” that you would ever want to handle. All I knew about this event was that its logo looked like a rainbow wad of rubber bands, but in my capacity as guide and interpreter for Paul, I learned about it in more depth over the next few days.

Paul and I were each given tickets to two “Interra” events, one at the Opera and Ballet Theater and one at the Globe (Globus) Youth Theater. At first I wasn’t too impressed. Showing up at the first one at nine-thirty, we were treated to an hour of bromidic speeches by regional and local politicians, and prefab comments delivered by 20-year-old baby yups from some kind of G8-junior: one each from Great Britain, Canada, Japan, Germany, Italy, the United States, France, and Russia. This was followed by readings of equally banal letters of encouragement from Medvedev and Putin (whose gigantic, Mao-like portraits were projected onto big screens while their letters were being read).

The comments and readings were accompanied by swirling multicolored spotlights (the same colors as the rubber bands on the logo), and interspersed with snatches of heavy, percussive music that sounded like a cross between a Prodigy set and the “News Hour with Jim Lehrer” theme. The buzzword of the event was “innovatzia,” and, as far as I could tell, none of the “respectable participants” to whom the speakers kept appealing had any more specific goals to suggest. What we need is innovation. Innovation. Sure, that sounds good to me.

It might have just been my lowered expectations, but I was a lot more impressed with the substance of the next event, at the Globus Youth Theatre. Two panels of experts gave their opinions (one expert at a time), on where the best opportunities for innovation lay in Russia. After the triteness of the first event, it was refreshing to see people having civil but heartfelt disagreements with one another, offering and their own in-depth opinions and contesting others’. One was saying we (oops, I mean, Russians) need to bear Russia’s comparative advantage in mind, another saying there needed to be more interaction between corporations and engineering schools… I don’t know, a lot of it went over my head in Russian.*

*(Paul can’t speak or understand Russian, and both of us got headsets that let us listen to simultaneous interpretation in English, but I felt like that was cheating, so I took mine off after a while.)

But anyway, my general impression was that all of them had good points to make; none of them insisted on a particular agenda, and none seemed interested in harping on the same old strings...

I don’t think Paul knew this before he came, but the presentations he was planning to give were billed as part of this forum. Unfortunately, I had to miss them. He gave a short lecture to a conference hall full of well-dressed students from SibAGS (and, I believe, a few other places) and was apparently, a big hit, but I had to leave before he started talking to go to a Russian lesson.

And that brings me to… (see next post)

Sorry

I have three rock-solid excuses for not having posted on this thing for like a month: 1. Nothing worth posting about happened for a while. 2. Everything happened at once and I had no time to post. 3. I got sick. Nothing serious, just a bad cold, but it weakened me enough that I only did what was absolutely necessary for a while. Permit me to elaborate. (See next post)