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.