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...