My classes

I realized last night that I haven’t written anything about my classes yet. As class time occupies a significant portion of my day, I’ll give you a quick run down.

Fall semester I have class five days a week. Our group is split into two sections of 6 students (plus Berney, who’s doing his own thing), with whom we have all our classes. Every day Monday through Thursday we have two classes which run an hour and a half apiece, followed by a 45-minute one-on-one tutoring session and lunch. Twice a week I have phonetics, literature, and oral language practice. Once a week I have composition and grammar. Fridays are a bit different: the first period is listening practice, but it’s optional, so if I want to sleep an extra hour on Fridays I can. Second period is a language and culture class (unfortunately not optional), which our professors take turns leading and which covers a variety of topics. So far we’ve learned about the Christianization of Russia by Prince Vladimir, speech etiquette, and theatre in Petersburg. After Language and Culture we are either free, or we have an excursion, depending on the week.

Phonetics – some of you may remember that I hated this class last time I was in Russia. Olga Valentinovna is proof that the teacher makes or breaks a class – I absolutely love phonetics with her. She’s young, has a quick and dry sense of humor, and effectively explains how we need to form our mouths to make sounds that we don’t make in English. The class is a nice mix of theory, practice, and off-topic but interesting conversations about tangentially related things. I don’t do my homework as thoroughly as I should, but I’m continuing to work on this, because the more I can automatize phonetics, the better my accent will get without even trying during regular conversation.

Literature – Jamiliya Ruzmamatovna is another stupendous teacher. She doesn’t much care to follow the book we have and often brings in materials of her own for us to work on, particularly poetry (and thank goodness. Our textbook was written so that we discuss the same topic in all our classes for two weeks at a time. While this is an excellent way to ensure we’re hearing the same new words over and over, it can get to be a little much). Russian literature classes differ from American ones in that the teacher asks for our interpretations much less frequently, one might even say never, and instead tells us what each metaphor, symbol, or allusion means. In some respects this is actually helpful, because we don’t have the literary background to catch all the references in the texts we read. However, it’s more passive than I’m used to and has taken some adjustment. On the up side, Jamiliya Ruzmamatovna, I think, would not be opposed to hearing our opinions, if we ever decided to express them.

Oral Speech Practice – Our teacher, Irina Mikhailovna, has a finely nuanced understanding of the Russian language, and is adept at explaining differences between closely related words (for example, this week she explained when to use нет места and when to use нет мест). We get plenty of speaking time, although I still feel at times that she talks more than we do – an irony in a speech practice class. I write down more new vocabulary in this class than in any other, and I have no idea how I’m actually going to learn it all, but I’ll try.

Grammar – This class is unfortunately a bit of a disappointment. For one thing, once a week is not enough grammar for me; I tend to lose track of what we’re working on between classes. Secondly, our teacher, Kira Anatolievna, is amazingly smart, but she’s 72 years old at still teaches like she did forty years ago, using lots of grammar jargon that I’m not comfortable with even in English. She wrote the grammar sections of our textbook, and they unfortunately make little sense to me because of all the jargon. For example, our homework for Tuesday involves familiarizing ourselves with some abstractly stated grammar rules, and then somehow magically knowing from those rules how to change sample sentences provided so that they’re grammatical. Trust me, it’s harder than it sounds. So far I’ve simply resorted to looking in the dictionary, but that doesn’t always help, since the dictionary doesn’t always list all the different cases a verb can take. On the up side, Kira Anatolievna doesn’t collect homework (we discuss it in class. I think she can’t see very well, so it’s hard for her to read our handwriting), so any befuddlement on my part is not going to result in a bad homework grade. But basically I would prefer more grammar the way it was taught in Middlebury: focused on syntax, with a new structure explained and then exercises given for practice. Although it’s not the most interesting way to learn, it is effective for me, as I found several times over the course of the summer that I’d use the sentence structures we were working on in class in my conversations. Thus far here, I’m not even sure what exactly we’re working on in grammar.

Writing – Thus far this class has been devoted to teaching us how to write various documents. Russia loves bureaucracy: have a request? Write a document. Have a complaint? Write a document. Want to officially thank someone for something? Write a document. Without a document, nothing will get done. We’ve also spent some time looking at the stylistic fine points of business, academic, and creative writing. Darya Vladimirovna is kind but intimidating – she doesn’t hesitate to tell you when you’re wrong, and demands preciseness in answers (a good trait, but frustrating when you’re already doing the best you can to describe what you want to say because you don’t actually know the words you need).

Tutoring – I work with Olga, and our sessions are different all the time. We’ve spent some time working on day-to-day vocabulary I need (like shoe repair vocabulary), a lot of time on phonetics, and often work from materials she brings in for me based on things we’ve talked about. It’s much more formal than my tutoring from Nadya was; in effect, Nadya was paid to hang out with me, while Olga is much more in a teaching role. Doing one-on-one after three hours of class can be a bit exhausting, particularly if Olga decides we should work on phonetics on Wednesday, when I have phonetics right before tutoring (my tongue just can’t handle the workout!). But it’s a fantastic opportunity to get my individual questions answered and to focus on areas I feel need more work (I know tomorrow I’ll be taking my grammar questions to Olga – I really have no idea what my assignment is asking me to do!).

So that’s about it. Throw in an internship Monday and Thursday afternoons and my elective class Thursday evening, and aerobics classes at the gym all other evenings (there’s a great language learning opportunity – I have no idea what my work out instructors are shouting at us about half the time), and you’ll have a pretty clear picture of how I spend my time here. Other than the fact that it’s all in Russian, it’s not that different from home, actually.