Heather
Worley Living in St. Petersburg, Russia
Vol 3: School
Hi everyone!
I just got back from a truly fabulous weekend at the dacha...the weather was fabulous,
the company was great, and I got to breathe fresh country air for a full 24 hours!
I'm still sort of processing everything that happened this weekend, so I'll
write all about that next time. For now, it's what I wrote last week and
never got around to sending. :)
Love to all -
Heather:)
********
A little bit about my classes.
My class schedule is as follows.
Mondays: no class.
Tuesdays: private tutoring (time varies). 15:20-16:40 History of St. Peterburg.
Wednesdays: 10:30-11:50 Russian History. 12:20-13:40 Russian language.
13:50-16:40 (that is not a typo) French.
Thursdays: 13:50-15:10 Practical Course in Translation.
Fridays: 10:30-11:50 Helping Session for Practical Course in Translation.
12:20-13:40 Russian language. 15:20-16:40 French.
As you can see, I'm not in class very much. But as Emily Johnson put it,
the purpose of a study abroad program isn't really so you can study, it's so you
can experience life in another country. No one really wants homework to
get in the way of doing touristy things and meeting actual Russian people.
We can do homework in America. For this reason, we are theoretically in
class or doing homework only about 20 hours a week - realistically, it's more
like twelve hours.
In the Russian higher education system, students spend a lot more time in class,
and take a lot more classes, but generally have less homework per class than we
would. I think the amount of time they spend studying about evens out.
At the end of the semester there is usually one big written test and one oral
exam for each class. To pass these, you basically have to know every single
bit of information in the textbook and the lectures. However, since they
have significantly less mindless homework and ridiculous little quizzes to prepare
for, this is only difficult, rather than actually impossible. It's also
a lot easier if you get sick, or just feel like skipping class - you have to catch
up on learning, but not on busywork.
This system works greatly to our benefit. We take half as many classes as
the Russian students do, we're not really expected to perform as well as they
do, we get extra helping sessions so we can sort of figure out what's going on
in class, and our tests are easier. This means a lot of what you get out
of this program is what you put into it. You can float by, not really going
to class, not really doing homework, never really meeting any Russians, and still
receive credit for the study abroad program. Or you can do everything you
possibly can think of to learn Russian, using the classes as a jumping-off point,
and learn a whole lot.
Mondays I have no class because it just sort of worked out that way. Also
because for our second semester we have the option of working on a paper instead
of listening to a lecture, and I chose that. I'm currently working on something
linguisticky with a fifth-year student named Olya who studied at OU last year.
She's comparing Russian and English texts and looking at syntax and the use (and
absence) of articles. Beyond that, I can't be too specific, because I still
have a lot of background reading in functional grammar to catch up on before I'll
even be able to understand exactly what she's looking at. Plus, she and
Marina Igorievna were discussing all this in rapid, terminology-filled Russian,
and I wasn't taking notes, so it's all swimming around in my head.
Tuesdays I have a private tutoring session I elected to do to occupy more of my
time. More than killing time, though, this is a great chance to learn Russian
from a native speaker who is also very interested in linguistics, as I am, and
is an excellent teacher. We are currently looking at Russian art history
and Evgeny Onegin. After that I go to the History of St. Petersburg class,
which is all exchange students. It should probably be called "Myths
and Legends of St. Petersburg," because that's really what we learn.
St. Petersburg's myths are virtually inseparable from the real history - I'm not
entirely sure the average Russian knows the difference. It's much more
interesting than any Russian history class I've had in the US.
I'm not actually enrolled in the Russian History (Otechestvennaya Istoriya) lecture
I sporadically attend on Wednesdays. I just go so I'll have something to
do Wednesday mornings. I was in it last semester, and once I could understand
fast speech I realized our professor is an interesting lecturer and a good historian.
I get the feeling sometimes that he's really excited about all the cool new things
he can research and actually write about now that the communist party no longer
dictates official history.
Our Russian language classes are kinda scattered. Our teacher doesn't want
to teach grammar, because he says we can get that in America, but on the other
hand, without it we're just drowning in a sea of words that end in "-skii."
So he does grammar every once in a while if in our texts (which are short stories
and poems, for the most part) we run across something he feels we really need
to work on.
You will notice with my French class, if you do the math, that I am actually spending
more time here studying French than Russian. But that's okay. Why?
Because our French class is all in Russian. The translating from Russian
to French and from French to Russian is not as hard as I thought it would be.
It took a week or two to get the hang of it, but since then it hasn't been difficult.
Plus, I learn a lot of Russian words I should have learned a long time ago, like
"ponytail" and "hairclip." I have problems, though,
with using Spanish words in the middle of French sentences, and sometimes I know
what a French word means but I don't know the Russian word! Yi.
I really like the way our French class is taught, by the way. No silly fill-in-the-blank
sentences. In class we go over homework (which is usually either short compositions,
passages to learn, or sometimes grammar exercises), we do listening exercises,
or, most of all, we speak in French! What a novel idea: speaking French
in a French class! We started out the year with the French sound system
(vowels, etc.), so we can read and pronounce things correctly from the get-go:
something American classes never do. The American education system really
needs to get their hands on this. I really hate that in America, they spend
two years (three hours a week) pounding grammar into your head, making you do
inane, time-wasting exercises, all the while railing against rote memorization,
and then in the third year they put thirty of you in a conversation class and
you are supposed to miraculously start speaking. And then AFTER your first
conversation class, you have the option to enroll in phonetics to correct three
years of bad pronunciation. Or you can just skip that part, if you want.
Not only is it ineffective, it's incredibly counter-intuitive.
Moving on. Thursday a large group of us attends the practical translation
course, which is for third-year students who are studying to be translators/interpreters.
This course is rather difficult, because right now they're working on the intricacies
of translating participles and gerunds, and it's all English-to-Russian.
They have about seven different categories of each, and since we started a month
late, we're a bit behind. Besides which, we don't know all the grammatical
terms to describe English verbals, because we've never needed to. So while
we can sometimes translate things correctly, we can't tell why we chose that method,
which is half the battle. It's very difficult to learn the grammar of your
own language. I think the fourth-year course I had last semester, which
involved translating real-life UN speeches, was easier, because I didn't have
to mess with all of this grammar terminology.
Friday, we have a helping session for the translation course, in which a Russian
classmate of ours is helping us get caught up in learning our own language.
Then Russian, then French again.
Also, on Monday and Wednesday afternoon, I go to the Vodokanal Children's Ecological
Center. The International Department at the Nevsky Institute arranged a
volunteer internship for me there . Vodokanal is the water company here
in SPB. The center focuses on interactive ecological education (specifically
water conservation) for elementary-age students. The directors firmly believe
in cooperative, hands-on learning. It's quite a novel approach for Russia.
They're actually the only center quite like this in the entire country, I think.
Most of what I do for them is translation - text for their website and brochures,
for example. They also have some joint programs with similar organizations
in England and Finland, so I help the kids translate their projects into English
- which is the common language they use with the students from other countries.
Other than that, I just sort of hang out and speak Russian. I don't do much,
really...although the director has said when I get back to the US I should set
up an exchange for them with a similar organization in America. (In Russia,
everything is about connections and who you know.) I told her I'll work
on it.
So that's my academic life here.
*****
One thing that studying in Russia has done for me is give me an understanding
of the Russian department at OU. For instance, why Rachik only started assigning
homework two years ago, and only after he was told he had to or it was his
job. And why, when he had to start giving us a syllabus for the same reason,
it was always a piece of paper with a detailed study plan that we completely ignored.
In fact, he usually gave us a retro-active syallbus, i.e. the third week of school
we'd receive one that covered the first month. We were, of course, already
behind at that point, so he'd act like that meant we needed to catch up, and assign
about ten assignments due by the weekend. He'd take up these assignments,
act indignant if we didn't have them, but actually accept all work clear up until
the final test. However, it usually took over a month to get back even the
smallest homework assignment, so the homework wasn't really useful for instruction.
After that, we'd never look at the syllabus again. We'd have the first chapter
test a week before the mid-term (which was usually two-thirds of the way through
the semester), and then a test every week and a half from there on out.
About a month before the end of the semester, he says, "We're supposed to
be through the first half of the book by December, and we've only done two chapters!"
as if it was our fault, so he'd start racing through the rest of it so he could
test us over it finals week. I used to think Rachik was just neurotic, but
now I understand that it's kind of normal. My Russian language teacher here
"structures" our class exactly the same way.
Likewise, when Dr. Karriker holds "elections" for Russian club officers
by walking into class one day, saying, "we need officers," and assigning
every student there that day a position. Things here are generally very
top-down like that - not like normal clubs that have an actual vote and people
who actually want to do it running. She also teaches the history of literary
movements in Russia in a non-chronological order, jumping back and forth between
Bulgakov, Chekhov, third-declension nouns, Acmeist poetry, and Dostoevsky.
And then, every once in a while, just to keep us on our toes, we'd watch Mr. Bean
in class.
I also understand why Emily Johnson's classes are always so work-intensive: there's
a lot to learn about Russia! Russians appreciate it more than a lot of other
cultures I've encountered if you know their poetry and music and literature and
history, so the work is worth it. (And they're even more impressed if you've
read it in Russian.) Besides which, the language is really difficult.
Which brings up another point. I've had several very kind Russians tell
me that it is a known fact that the hardest subject in school for Russians is
Russian language. One guy I know, who actually seems to be pretty smart,
told me he always got C's and D's. I'm not really sure what I think about
this. I've heard it takes little kids a while to sort out the case system,
but I think it might also be the difference in conversational speech and the educated
standard. For instance, in my Russian language class, we were studying past
passive participles on Friday, and about half the ones I got wrong, I'd given
the "common-people" version of the word, as it's called. I think
it's great that the mistakes I'm making are starting to be Russian mistakes instead
of foreigner mistakes, but on the other hand, I think if Russian people actually
talk that way and understand each other, it shouldn't really count as a mistake.
(This is my OU lingustics training coming out again.) That must be why kids
have such a hard time with it.
Next story: The
Dacha. Time is on my side. It's a Free Country