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)

Какой красивый вид!

This is the view from where I live -- the seventh floor of the SibAGS dorm. I was looking for an excuse to try out the panorama feature on my new camera, and I found one. It's not quite like the view from the Colonnade on Isaakievskij Sobor, but who cares? It's like you're here, isn't it?

Postscript to Побратимы

I didn't think there would be much use in publishing this text without the picture. (Go ahead! Click on it!)

P.S. At my dad’s sixtieth birthday party last Saturday, the 22^nd, one of his guests, Trilby (I don’t think she’d mind being identified), showed up with an old something-or-other (what is the doo-dad in this picture exactly? A bannerette? A mini-sash?) acknowledging cooperation between the two blood-brother cities. Back in the ’80’s, she had apparently hosted an engineer from Novosibirsk studying in Minneapolis on a research stipend, and he’d brought this over. I don’t think that this is meant to commemorate the inception of the Sister City relationship because I think she hosted him before that…

Nonetheless, I thought it was pretty awesome.

Trilby offered to try to find this guy and see if he’s still in Novosibirsk. If he is, how cool would it be to talk to someone else with a connection to both places? (Pretty cool, if ya ask me.)