…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.
21.12.09
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…
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.
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)