Gentle reader, a piece of advice:
If you get sick, try to avoid doing it in a foreign country where you don't (yet) speak the language.
But if you do happen to get sick abroad, do it while working for a company that treats its employees as people.
Yes, I can now say I have had the experience of being under the weather on three continents. During my stay in Taiwan, as regular readers may recall, I came down with a bad cold and ended up seeing a pediatrician who gave me various unidentifiable pills and told me to stay home for two days, much to the chagrin of the unprofessional people I was working for at the time. And now, I can add to my illness resume that I have survived being sick in Russia.
Monday morning, I woke up, after insufficient sleep, with a sore throat sufficiently nasty that I called my school and told them to cancel my classes for the day. This was somewhat awkward to do, as it was not clear to whom I should make such a call, and as there was almost non one in at the time I called. I did, however, leave a message with a secretary at our central school and attempted to dial the cell phone of a Russian woman who is my director of studies, a woman I shall call Irina. As Irina did not pick up, I assumed she was on the Metro headed into work, decided I would call her a little later, and went back to sleep.
Less than ten minutes later, Irina called. I informed her of my illness and asked if she was the right person to call. She was as unclear on this point as I was but told me not to worry about it--she would make sure that the right person was informed and that my classes for the day were cancelled. Pleased as I could be under the circumstances (who can really be pleased about a crippling sore throat?), I drifted off to dreamland.
By mid-afternoon, I felt a bit better and went down to our central school to talk to a few other teachers (as best I could) and have at least some human contact for the day. I had thought that I was feeling better, but, as these things tend to happen, in the night I felt much worse. By 7:00 the following morning, when I called Irina again, I had thrown up three times.
Far from being annoyed at being disturbed so early two days in a row, Irina was as helpful as humanly possible. She said she could tell I really sounded sick and, when I said I needed to see a doctor, told me she would find one for me. At 10:00 (about as early as could be expected, given when work generally starts in our company), she called me back and gave me the name of a doctor and the address of her clinic. I promptly called and made an appointment for early that afternoon.
I suppose it's a credit to my Russian studies that I somehow managed to handle this phone call, but it seemed like hard going getting the receptionist to understand me when I tried to give my insurance information and asked what time I could come in. But eventually the appointment was made, and at 3:00 that afternoon, I walked into a clinic near the Lubyanka.
I went down a door marked "Registration" and let the same Russian receptionist I had spoken to earlier take my information all over again. She seemed surprised, though, when I gave her the name of the doctor Irina had given me. She said I could not see this doctor, for one simple reason:
The doctor in question was a gynecologist.
The receptionist did, however, agree to send me off to another doctor and told me to go two floors up, which I did. After two hours of waiting, I was at last examined by two women doctors who spoke hardly any English. For a while, we tried going back and forth with a dictionary, until it became clear that the questions they needed an answer to were beyond what they could do even with a Pocket Oxford. They called in a male colleague who spoke English better, who asked me a few questions and told me to come up for a further examination when I was through with them.
The women prescribed three medications for me, which they said would be easy to obtain at any apteka (the Russian equivalent of a drugstore). They told me I had the flu and should try to go home and rest. I thanked them and went upstairs to the other doctor, who felt around my abdomen. He agreed with the diagnosis of his colleagues and said I had nothing requiring surgery.
I made my way to the nearest apteka and purchased what I had been prescribed. As I was leaving, I heard the beeping noise from my cell phone I have come to recognize as an incoming text message (Russians are keen on text messaging even in professional contexts because the messages are cheaper than an actual cell phone call). It was my school, alterting me that my classes for the next day had been cancelled and wishing me a speedy recovery.
Being ill is never fun. But I would say that, all in all, this experience compared favorably with being ill in Taiwan. My school dealt with the situation professionally and, it seemed, with genuine concern for my welfare, something I did not experience with Eve and Ruby. Today, feeling somewhat better, I went in for my afternoon Russian lesson. There, I got into a conversation with another teacher who had heard I had been unwell. He told me that, if I needed to see a doctor again, the school had Russian staff who could accompany me. I had not even thought to ask for this, independent as I am, but if I end up needing a doctor again soon, I can avoid some of the hassle of relying on a pocket dictionary to explain medical symptoms.
And, I hope, avoid the possibility of being sent to a gynecologist.
30 July 2008
27 July 2008
Wrong, Brittania
On a similar note, working with British teachers and other staff at my school has forced me to correct a few misimpressions I had of Britain and British people before I came to Russia. For the benefit of my American readers, here is what I have learned:
1) Even if it is shown mainly on PBS in America, British television is not inherently superior to American television. I discovered this in kind of a roundabout way. A fellow teacher from Scotland, who operate on the theory that Scotland is, as he puts it, "rubbish", has complained repeatedly about the quality of British television. He tells me that in Britain, a general perception exists that American television is "so much better". Having grown up with the American creed that British television is "so much better," I was shocked to hear this and told him so.
We have pretty much established that these mistaken impressions exist on both sides of the Atlantic because only the best programs in either country make it over to the other one.
If you have any doubts that British television can be just as junky as the American variety, several recent arrivals from Britain have confirmed that the most talked-about scene on British television involved a reality show on which someone had to masturbate a pig. Yes, you read that right: masturbate a pig. What could be farther from Upstairs, Downstairs and Alistair Cooke, I do not hazard to guess.
2) There is no actual law in Britain requiring people to be appalled by all aspects of American English. The same Scottish teacher who enlightened me about the quality of British television also told me that looking down on American English is largely an English preoccupation. Scotsmen and Welshmen can't be bothered with looking down on Americans when they have the English to hate. Looking down on American English is just a cultural tradition, like the monarchy or Guy Fawkes Day.
3) English people are just as keen on doing bad imitations of American accents as Americans are of doing bad imitations of British accents. One British teacher here does a spot-on imitation of a Valley Girl. I don't think the Brits quite understand that, when we Americans try to sound British, it's because we think British people are more polite, cultured, and refined.
4) Brits are not necessarily more well-travelled than Americans or more aware of foreign cultures; they do not all adore the minuet, the Ballet Russe, or a crepe suzette. This is true even though, unlike Americans, Britons have a wide variety of foreign cultures practically at their back door. Some ridiculous amount of tourism out of Britain consists of what are known as "booze cruises"--short trips to northern France to buy cheap alcohol and bring it back to Britain.
5) Similarly, Brits are not any more aware than Americans that not everybody in the whole wide world speaks English. When I told one of the British teachers here that simply knowing this fact made her smarter than 90 percent of the American public, she responded that this was equally true of the British public. Another British teacher confessed that he had given up learning Russian because he figured his chances of ever being someplace where nobody spoke English were slim to none. The scary thing is that I don't entirely disagree that this is so--only that it isn't a good enough reason not to learn the language of the country where you have been living and working for two years.
1) Even if it is shown mainly on PBS in America, British television is not inherently superior to American television. I discovered this in kind of a roundabout way. A fellow teacher from Scotland, who operate on the theory that Scotland is, as he puts it, "rubbish", has complained repeatedly about the quality of British television. He tells me that in Britain, a general perception exists that American television is "so much better". Having grown up with the American creed that British television is "so much better," I was shocked to hear this and told him so.
We have pretty much established that these mistaken impressions exist on both sides of the Atlantic because only the best programs in either country make it over to the other one.
If you have any doubts that British television can be just as junky as the American variety, several recent arrivals from Britain have confirmed that the most talked-about scene on British television involved a reality show on which someone had to masturbate a pig. Yes, you read that right: masturbate a pig. What could be farther from Upstairs, Downstairs and Alistair Cooke, I do not hazard to guess.
2) There is no actual law in Britain requiring people to be appalled by all aspects of American English. The same Scottish teacher who enlightened me about the quality of British television also told me that looking down on American English is largely an English preoccupation. Scotsmen and Welshmen can't be bothered with looking down on Americans when they have the English to hate. Looking down on American English is just a cultural tradition, like the monarchy or Guy Fawkes Day.
3) English people are just as keen on doing bad imitations of American accents as Americans are of doing bad imitations of British accents. One British teacher here does a spot-on imitation of a Valley Girl. I don't think the Brits quite understand that, when we Americans try to sound British, it's because we think British people are more polite, cultured, and refined.
4) Brits are not necessarily more well-travelled than Americans or more aware of foreign cultures; they do not all adore the minuet, the Ballet Russe, or a crepe suzette. This is true even though, unlike Americans, Britons have a wide variety of foreign cultures practically at their back door. Some ridiculous amount of tourism out of Britain consists of what are known as "booze cruises"--short trips to northern France to buy cheap alcohol and bring it back to Britain.
5) Similarly, Brits are not any more aware than Americans that not everybody in the whole wide world speaks English. When I told one of the British teachers here that simply knowing this fact made her smarter than 90 percent of the American public, she responded that this was equally true of the British public. Another British teacher confessed that he had given up learning Russian because he figured his chances of ever being someplace where nobody spoke English were slim to none. The scary thing is that I don't entirely disagree that this is so--only that it isn't a good enough reason not to learn the language of the country where you have been living and working for two years.
26 July 2008
Out of the Mouths of Brits
I recall that, during my brief stint in Taiwan, I wrote a bit about my experience meeting teachers from other parts of the English-speaking world. Whatever prompted me to do so was pre-mature; the experience I have had, and am continuing to have, with non-American teachers in Russia far outpaces the only occasional meetings I had with non-American colleagues on the eastern shores of the Pacific.
When it comes to TEFL teaching, Britain and America have carved up the world between them (I half wonder if the Pope had to be called in for this). American teachers and American English predominate in East Asia and Latin America. But Britain, by and large, gets the coveted prize of the Continent. where the local languages are easier to learn, the local culture easier to understand, and the local women...well, we won't go there.
There are two main, fairly obvious reasons why British teachers and British English predominate in Europe. The first is that Britain is much closer to Europe than is America. I imagine that being a relatively short flight home (even far-away Moscow is closer to England than New York is to Los Angeles) makes teaching in Europe more appealing to at least some British teachers.
The other reason British teachers are more readily found in Europe is that, because of European Union rules, it is much harder for American teachers to work legally in Europe. Newbie teachers from America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa do not head to France or Italy, even if these countries are their ultimate goals; they head first to Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, build up their resumes, and then--if they decide to stay in EFL teaching and if they are lucky--snag a job in Europe after two or three years. Brits, being bearers of EU passports, have it much easier, as they can (at least I understand it) work in the EU without so much as a working visa.
Not being part of the European Union, Russia is one of the few countries that does not fit into the neat carving up of the world outlined above. Unlike in the rest of Europe (heck, unlike even across the border in Latvia), Britons, Irishmen, and Irishwomen have no advantage over Americans in terms of the Russian visa regime (actually, Brits have a slight advantage in that their visa application is only one page, whereas ours is two--but this is merely due to Russia's responding to a longer and more expensive visa application imposed by the U.S. on Russians, and has no bearing on how easy it is to get a visa). So both Yanks and Brits come to Russia to teach. I have seen no hard and fast statistics on the matter, but if my school is at all typical, I gather that the Russian TEFL world has Americans and Britons in rougly equal numbers (plus a few odd New Zealanders, Australians, and South Africans thrown in for good measure).
To my delight, I have befriended many of the British teachers at my school. I am part of a regular crowd that gets together on Thursdays for a few beer before the weekend (many teachers, including myself at present, have no classes on Fridays). The topic of differences between British and American English naturally pops up, and I have started joking that, while I may or may not come out of Russia fluent in Russian, I am certain to come out fluent in British English.
I will not bore you with a recitation of the more common differences between British and American English; there are books aplenty that will tell you that what is called a truck in New York is a lorry in Newcastle, that what is called a hood (on a car) in Miami is a bonnet in Manchester, and so forth. I have, however, noticed a few differences in British English that are not widely known on my side of the Pond, and felt I should share them here. These can be divided into three categories, grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation:
Grammar
1) Use of the present perfect: The British tend to favor the present perfect (I have done something) in situations where Americans are morely likely to use the past simple (I did something). This most commonly comes up when the adverb just is added into the mix. In America, we can say, "I just washed the car." In Britain, you can only say, "I've just washed the car."
2) First-person shall: Once something Americans considered as quintessentially British as toad in the hole, use of first-person shall in Britain had undergone rapid decline in Britain over the past 50 years. Partly, this is because Received Pronunciation, and the prescriptive grammar that went with it, are no longer fashionable in Britain. And partly it reflects the influence (some Brits would say invasion) of American film and television. Nonetheless, Brits do favor first-person shall in polite requests more than Americans, who instead tend to say, "would you like me to"?
3) Should do, may do, might do: I can't tell how common this is overall, but I have noticed more than one British teacher say I should do where an American would simply say I should. Typical exchange:
American teacher: Maybe you should look for some cheap tickets on the internet.
British teacher: You're right, I should do.
I have never heard an American use should do this way.
Similar constructions can be made with might and may, i.e.:
Yank: Are you going to go see the Indiana Jones movie this weekend?
Brit: I don't know, but I might do.
Vocabulary
1) Brilliant: In America, the word brilliant is used of exceptionally intelligent ideas or people, and more rarely for bright colors and lustrous gemstones. Among Brits, however, the word seems rapidly to be losing its brilliance. For Brits, Albert Einstein was brilliant, but so is your friend's suggestion that you pop round to your local pub. Similar to what has happened to great and awesome in America.
2) Posh: Though I don't think of it as "British English" the way I do using the word wee for small or vest for undershirt, Brits also seem to favor the word posh much more than Americans do. In America, this is a somewhat old-fashioned word applied to upscale restaurants, hotels, and (its origin, after all) ship accomodations. In Britain, it is a fairly common synonym for fancy or upper-class and is applied not just to things put also to people (and not only to Mrs. David Beckham).
Typical example: Who wants to see a show about a bunch of posh people in Brighton?
I think the closest American equivalent would be high-falutin'.
3) Tack: For Americans, this is something you use to pin posters to a wall. For Brits, it's the noun form of the word tacky, or an example of something that is tacky--i.e., "Oh yes...when I go to Paris, I shall be sure to buy the biggest piece of tack I can find and bring it back as a souvenir for the teacher's lounge."
4) Grott/Grotty: First, the Brits shortened grotesque into grotty. Then they decided grotty could also mean greedy (particularly with respect to food). After that, they decided that, when used in the sense of grotesque, grotty had the noun form grott. Americans prefer to leave the word grotesque alone.
5) Pissed: in America, this is a vulgar term meaning "extremely angry". In Britain, it's a vulgar term for being extremely drunk.
6) Brawly: Short form of umbrella. I have heard this said by teachers whose accents are Received Pronunciation, Yorkshire, Scottish, Geordy (more on Geordies later), and general British working-class, so I gather it is common throughout Britain, and among all classes in Britain.
7) Youse: Scottish/Northern English second-person plural. Compare y'all. Actually, scratch that. In Scotland, using youse shows that you're proud of your Scottish heritage. In America, using y'all just shows that you're the kind of voter Howard Dean wants the Democrats to reach out to.
8) Cinema: Yes, British people actually say cinema for movies/movie theater. The EFL textbooks didn't make this one up.
9) Hoover: what Americans call a vacuum cleaner. Can also be used as a verb: Would you mind if I hoovered the floor?
10) Tip-ex: What Americans call White Out or liquid paper.
11) DIY: short for "do-it-yourself," this has replaced queuing as the national pastime in Britain. What Americans--and not just Tim Allen--call "home improvement."
12) Queue (as verb): Well known by Americans as a Briticism, queue has to do double duty in Britain. Americans distinguish between standing in line (waiting in a queue) and lining up (forming a queue). Brits only get one word for both concepts.
13) Penultimate: in America, this means "dazzingly good". In Britain, it means "the next to last" item in a series and makes no judgments as to quality.
14) Series (television): in America, series is a lesser-used synonym for a program or show. In Britain, it refers to one year of a program or show, what Americans call a season. An American DVD package of a "complete series" is all years of that show; in Britain, "complete series" would only be used if the program ran for only one year.
15) Stone (weight): Although America may be alone in not having adopted the metric system at all, Britain has only half-adopted it. Traditional "English" measures are used in Britain alongside metric ones, including some that have passed out of use in America. The Brits still measure very heavy items in stones (one stone is 14 pounds). References to stones are often made when someone is described as being very fat.
16) Chav: Chiefly Geordy word for a low-class, poorly educated person. Similar concept to "white trash" in America, without the Confederate flag.
17) Char: Yes, the Brits still use charwoman and this charming shortened version of it. Americans make do with cleaning ladies.
18) Pudding: in America, this is sweet, slightly liquidy dish served as dessert. In Britain, it can refer to any kind of dessert. Ice cream and fruit salad can be "pudding" in Britain.
Pronunciation
1) Shit/Shite: In America, what comes out of a person's derriere always rhymes with the word hit. In Britain, it can be used as an adjective as well and--especially in this sense--can rhyme with the word kite.
2) Mobile: In America, the stress goes on the first syllable, except when referring to the city in Alabama: MOH bill, moh BEEL. In Britain, the stress goes on the second syllable: mh BIGHL (rhymes with while).
3) Wine/Whine: In America, we pronounce these words the same. In Britain, the "h" in while is said by many people. The common joke about a Jewish American Princess's favorite whine falls flat in Britain.
Things That Are Not British English, That Americans Mistakenly Think Are
1) Knock up: Americans, especially Americans writing for sitcoms, labor under a mistaken impression that in Britain, this verb means, "to wake someone up by knocking on the door." It does not. On both sides of the Atlantic, when a woman gets knocked up, the shouts of pain come nine months later, not immediately.
2) Wireless: No longer used in Britain to refer to radio except by people who can remember hearing Churchill speaking on the wireless. In the UK, as in America, the word now chiefly refers to mobile telephony.
3) Bobs Your Uncle: From what I gather, has not been said by any British person within the last fifty years.
4) Bob (as unit of currency): No longer used in Britain. The farthing has likewise been gone since 1960.
5) Saloon (car): I don't know if the British teachers I know are representative, but if they are, Brits no longer use this word which means bar or pub in America to refer to a four-door automobile.
6) Seldom: once the British aristocracy's preferred word for "rarely", seldom is seldom heard in Britain today. Even more seldom is heard a discouraging word. The only time I hear the word is from Russians who got this word out of stuffy, 1950s British grammars.
7) "The Times of London": as The Times in now considered Britain's national paper, it has dropped London from its name and in Britain is known simply as The Times. Calling the paper The Times of London stamps you an American as swiftly as walking around dressed up like Uncle Sam.
8) looking-glass: Only Alice bothers with the looking-glass in Britain these days. Ordinary Brits make do with mirrors just like Americans.
9) "U' and "non-U": Terms invented by Nancy Mitford for upper-class and non-upper-class English, these words had a brief vogue in Britain but are no longer popular. Brits still use vocabulary and accent to determine who belongs to the upper class, but are much more guilt-ridden and self-conscious about it than they used to be. Regional accents are now heard even on the BBC.
When it comes to TEFL teaching, Britain and America have carved up the world between them (I half wonder if the Pope had to be called in for this). American teachers and American English predominate in East Asia and Latin America. But Britain, by and large, gets the coveted prize of the Continent. where the local languages are easier to learn, the local culture easier to understand, and the local women...well, we won't go there.
There are two main, fairly obvious reasons why British teachers and British English predominate in Europe. The first is that Britain is much closer to Europe than is America. I imagine that being a relatively short flight home (even far-away Moscow is closer to England than New York is to Los Angeles) makes teaching in Europe more appealing to at least some British teachers.
The other reason British teachers are more readily found in Europe is that, because of European Union rules, it is much harder for American teachers to work legally in Europe. Newbie teachers from America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa do not head to France or Italy, even if these countries are their ultimate goals; they head first to Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, build up their resumes, and then--if they decide to stay in EFL teaching and if they are lucky--snag a job in Europe after two or three years. Brits, being bearers of EU passports, have it much easier, as they can (at least I understand it) work in the EU without so much as a working visa.
Not being part of the European Union, Russia is one of the few countries that does not fit into the neat carving up of the world outlined above. Unlike in the rest of Europe (heck, unlike even across the border in Latvia), Britons, Irishmen, and Irishwomen have no advantage over Americans in terms of the Russian visa regime (actually, Brits have a slight advantage in that their visa application is only one page, whereas ours is two--but this is merely due to Russia's responding to a longer and more expensive visa application imposed by the U.S. on Russians, and has no bearing on how easy it is to get a visa). So both Yanks and Brits come to Russia to teach. I have seen no hard and fast statistics on the matter, but if my school is at all typical, I gather that the Russian TEFL world has Americans and Britons in rougly equal numbers (plus a few odd New Zealanders, Australians, and South Africans thrown in for good measure).
To my delight, I have befriended many of the British teachers at my school. I am part of a regular crowd that gets together on Thursdays for a few beer before the weekend (many teachers, including myself at present, have no classes on Fridays). The topic of differences between British and American English naturally pops up, and I have started joking that, while I may or may not come out of Russia fluent in Russian, I am certain to come out fluent in British English.
I will not bore you with a recitation of the more common differences between British and American English; there are books aplenty that will tell you that what is called a truck in New York is a lorry in Newcastle, that what is called a hood (on a car) in Miami is a bonnet in Manchester, and so forth. I have, however, noticed a few differences in British English that are not widely known on my side of the Pond, and felt I should share them here. These can be divided into three categories, grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation:
Grammar
1) Use of the present perfect: The British tend to favor the present perfect (I have done something) in situations where Americans are morely likely to use the past simple (I did something). This most commonly comes up when the adverb just is added into the mix. In America, we can say, "I just washed the car." In Britain, you can only say, "I've just washed the car."
2) First-person shall: Once something Americans considered as quintessentially British as toad in the hole, use of first-person shall in Britain had undergone rapid decline in Britain over the past 50 years. Partly, this is because Received Pronunciation, and the prescriptive grammar that went with it, are no longer fashionable in Britain. And partly it reflects the influence (some Brits would say invasion) of American film and television. Nonetheless, Brits do favor first-person shall in polite requests more than Americans, who instead tend to say, "would you like me to"?
3) Should do, may do, might do: I can't tell how common this is overall, but I have noticed more than one British teacher say I should do where an American would simply say I should. Typical exchange:
American teacher: Maybe you should look for some cheap tickets on the internet.
British teacher: You're right, I should do.
I have never heard an American use should do this way.
Similar constructions can be made with might and may, i.e.:
Yank: Are you going to go see the Indiana Jones movie this weekend?
Brit: I don't know, but I might do.
Vocabulary
1) Brilliant: In America, the word brilliant is used of exceptionally intelligent ideas or people, and more rarely for bright colors and lustrous gemstones. Among Brits, however, the word seems rapidly to be losing its brilliance. For Brits, Albert Einstein was brilliant, but so is your friend's suggestion that you pop round to your local pub. Similar to what has happened to great and awesome in America.
2) Posh: Though I don't think of it as "British English" the way I do using the word wee for small or vest for undershirt, Brits also seem to favor the word posh much more than Americans do. In America, this is a somewhat old-fashioned word applied to upscale restaurants, hotels, and (its origin, after all) ship accomodations. In Britain, it is a fairly common synonym for fancy or upper-class and is applied not just to things put also to people (and not only to Mrs. David Beckham).
Typical example: Who wants to see a show about a bunch of posh people in Brighton?
I think the closest American equivalent would be high-falutin'.
3) Tack: For Americans, this is something you use to pin posters to a wall. For Brits, it's the noun form of the word tacky, or an example of something that is tacky--i.e., "Oh yes...when I go to Paris, I shall be sure to buy the biggest piece of tack I can find and bring it back as a souvenir for the teacher's lounge."
4) Grott/Grotty: First, the Brits shortened grotesque into grotty. Then they decided grotty could also mean greedy (particularly with respect to food). After that, they decided that, when used in the sense of grotesque, grotty had the noun form grott. Americans prefer to leave the word grotesque alone.
5) Pissed: in America, this is a vulgar term meaning "extremely angry". In Britain, it's a vulgar term for being extremely drunk.
6) Brawly: Short form of umbrella. I have heard this said by teachers whose accents are Received Pronunciation, Yorkshire, Scottish, Geordy (more on Geordies later), and general British working-class, so I gather it is common throughout Britain, and among all classes in Britain.
7) Youse: Scottish/Northern English second-person plural. Compare y'all. Actually, scratch that. In Scotland, using youse shows that you're proud of your Scottish heritage. In America, using y'all just shows that you're the kind of voter Howard Dean wants the Democrats to reach out to.
8) Cinema: Yes, British people actually say cinema for movies/movie theater. The EFL textbooks didn't make this one up.
9) Hoover: what Americans call a vacuum cleaner. Can also be used as a verb: Would you mind if I hoovered the floor?
10) Tip-ex: What Americans call White Out or liquid paper.
11) DIY: short for "do-it-yourself," this has replaced queuing as the national pastime in Britain. What Americans--and not just Tim Allen--call "home improvement."
12) Queue (as verb): Well known by Americans as a Briticism, queue has to do double duty in Britain. Americans distinguish between standing in line (waiting in a queue) and lining up (forming a queue). Brits only get one word for both concepts.
13) Penultimate: in America, this means "dazzingly good". In Britain, it means "the next to last" item in a series and makes no judgments as to quality.
14) Series (television): in America, series is a lesser-used synonym for a program or show. In Britain, it refers to one year of a program or show, what Americans call a season. An American DVD package of a "complete series" is all years of that show; in Britain, "complete series" would only be used if the program ran for only one year.
15) Stone (weight): Although America may be alone in not having adopted the metric system at all, Britain has only half-adopted it. Traditional "English" measures are used in Britain alongside metric ones, including some that have passed out of use in America. The Brits still measure very heavy items in stones (one stone is 14 pounds). References to stones are often made when someone is described as being very fat.
16) Chav: Chiefly Geordy word for a low-class, poorly educated person. Similar concept to "white trash" in America, without the Confederate flag.
17) Char: Yes, the Brits still use charwoman and this charming shortened version of it. Americans make do with cleaning ladies.
18) Pudding: in America, this is sweet, slightly liquidy dish served as dessert. In Britain, it can refer to any kind of dessert. Ice cream and fruit salad can be "pudding" in Britain.
Pronunciation
1) Shit/Shite: In America, what comes out of a person's derriere always rhymes with the word hit. In Britain, it can be used as an adjective as well and--especially in this sense--can rhyme with the word kite.
2) Mobile: In America, the stress goes on the first syllable, except when referring to the city in Alabama: MOH bill, moh BEEL. In Britain, the stress goes on the second syllable: mh BIGHL (rhymes with while).
3) Wine/Whine: In America, we pronounce these words the same. In Britain, the "h" in while is said by many people. The common joke about a Jewish American Princess's favorite whine falls flat in Britain.
Things That Are Not British English, That Americans Mistakenly Think Are
1) Knock up: Americans, especially Americans writing for sitcoms, labor under a mistaken impression that in Britain, this verb means, "to wake someone up by knocking on the door." It does not. On both sides of the Atlantic, when a woman gets knocked up, the shouts of pain come nine months later, not immediately.
2) Wireless: No longer used in Britain to refer to radio except by people who can remember hearing Churchill speaking on the wireless. In the UK, as in America, the word now chiefly refers to mobile telephony.
3) Bobs Your Uncle: From what I gather, has not been said by any British person within the last fifty years.
4) Bob (as unit of currency): No longer used in Britain. The farthing has likewise been gone since 1960.
5) Saloon (car): I don't know if the British teachers I know are representative, but if they are, Brits no longer use this word which means bar or pub in America to refer to a four-door automobile.
6) Seldom: once the British aristocracy's preferred word for "rarely", seldom is seldom heard in Britain today. Even more seldom is heard a discouraging word. The only time I hear the word is from Russians who got this word out of stuffy, 1950s British grammars.
7) "The Times of London": as The Times in now considered Britain's national paper, it has dropped London from its name and in Britain is known simply as The Times. Calling the paper The Times of London stamps you an American as swiftly as walking around dressed up like Uncle Sam.
8) looking-glass: Only Alice bothers with the looking-glass in Britain these days. Ordinary Brits make do with mirrors just like Americans.
9) "U' and "non-U": Terms invented by Nancy Mitford for upper-class and non-upper-class English, these words had a brief vogue in Britain but are no longer popular. Brits still use vocabulary and accent to determine who belongs to the upper class, but are much more guilt-ridden and self-conscious about it than they used to be. Regional accents are now heard even on the BBC.
An Arresting Topic
Out of all the students I have, I would say that, currently, two are tied in the race to be my favorite. The first is Volodya, the mild-mannered tax attorney I have now mentioned and twice (and will henceforth refer to without introduction or explanation). The other is a woman whom I shall call Luda, a woman in a class I teach at a Moscow publishing house. But as Luda is currently visiting her mother in the Crimea, my attention this past week has been focused on Volodya.
When I began working with Volodya, I understood his needs as follows: he was seeking to improve his English for corporate correspondence and occasional travel (he told me he was going on holiday to South Africa in August and had used English during various European vacations). He told me he wanted a program of general English for about two months, followed by ten months of business English, and that he hoped to move up a full level in the course of our studies. I told him I thought this was a reasonable goal and that I would be more than happy to help him reach it.
Since I began working with Volodya, I have had the opportunity to learn only a little about his work. He is in-house counsel at a Russian steel company. The work he does concerns compliance with Russian tax law. Although he takes business trips on occasion, they are almost exclusively within Russia.
Naturally, finding English teaching material directly related to Russian tax situations is not a realistic possibility. Instead, I have taken the tack of having him do a lot of Wikipedia research about various topics. The other day, after a long discussion of how the Russian court system works, I had him research Miranda v. Arizona and tell me how it compared to the Russian situation. I had expected things would work differently on this side of the Baltic; many things come to mind when contemplating the Russian police, but the words "you have the right to an attorney" are not among them.
I was surprised to learn just how misinformed I was about the Russian criminal justice system. Although there seems to be no exact formula Russian police are required to use when arresting someone, all of the rights enshrined in the Miranda warning now exist in Russia (they existed on paper in Soviet times, too, but needless to say were never enforced). Russian defendants have the right to remain silent, the right to know that what they say can and will be used against them, and the right to an attorney even if indigent.
Volodya said that these rights are now mostly followed by Russian police. When they are not followed, blame can be attributed to the poor education of many Russian police officers. But when these rights are violated, attorneys are able to get arrests thrown out.
The most interesting fact Volodya brought up is that, in Russia, an arrestee has to sign a paper indicating that these rights have been read to him. It sometimes happens that an arrestee refused to sign, in which case the arresting officer may make an affidavit or get another officer to back him up as a witness.
All of this was quite interesting to discover. Like many Americans, I had assumed Russians lacked many of the rights and freedoms Americans take for granted. I had read international reports of the human rights situation in Russia with disdain (one report ranked Russia something like 102nd out of 198 countries on its index of freedom). But the simple fact that Russian criminal suspects have the right to know the charges against them, to consult with an attorney, and not to forced into self-incrimination is a hopeful sign. Russia may have a ways to go before its level of liberty matches that of the west. But progress is clearly being made.
When I began working with Volodya, I understood his needs as follows: he was seeking to improve his English for corporate correspondence and occasional travel (he told me he was going on holiday to South Africa in August and had used English during various European vacations). He told me he wanted a program of general English for about two months, followed by ten months of business English, and that he hoped to move up a full level in the course of our studies. I told him I thought this was a reasonable goal and that I would be more than happy to help him reach it.
Since I began working with Volodya, I have had the opportunity to learn only a little about his work. He is in-house counsel at a Russian steel company. The work he does concerns compliance with Russian tax law. Although he takes business trips on occasion, they are almost exclusively within Russia.
Naturally, finding English teaching material directly related to Russian tax situations is not a realistic possibility. Instead, I have taken the tack of having him do a lot of Wikipedia research about various topics. The other day, after a long discussion of how the Russian court system works, I had him research Miranda v. Arizona and tell me how it compared to the Russian situation. I had expected things would work differently on this side of the Baltic; many things come to mind when contemplating the Russian police, but the words "you have the right to an attorney" are not among them.
I was surprised to learn just how misinformed I was about the Russian criminal justice system. Although there seems to be no exact formula Russian police are required to use when arresting someone, all of the rights enshrined in the Miranda warning now exist in Russia (they existed on paper in Soviet times, too, but needless to say were never enforced). Russian defendants have the right to remain silent, the right to know that what they say can and will be used against them, and the right to an attorney even if indigent.
Volodya said that these rights are now mostly followed by Russian police. When they are not followed, blame can be attributed to the poor education of many Russian police officers. But when these rights are violated, attorneys are able to get arrests thrown out.
The most interesting fact Volodya brought up is that, in Russia, an arrestee has to sign a paper indicating that these rights have been read to him. It sometimes happens that an arrestee refused to sign, in which case the arresting officer may make an affidavit or get another officer to back him up as a witness.
All of this was quite interesting to discover. Like many Americans, I had assumed Russians lacked many of the rights and freedoms Americans take for granted. I had read international reports of the human rights situation in Russia with disdain (one report ranked Russia something like 102nd out of 198 countries on its index of freedom). But the simple fact that Russian criminal suspects have the right to know the charges against them, to consult with an attorney, and not to forced into self-incrimination is a hopeful sign. Russia may have a ways to go before its level of liberty matches that of the west. But progress is clearly being made.
23 July 2008
Reciting the Four Questions
Every year at Passover, Jews read what are known as the Four Questions, a part of the Hagaddah (a special scripture used in conducting the Passover meal) meant both to explain the reasons for observing Passover and to provide the stimulus for further questions about the holiday's meaning. It is traditional for the Four Questions to be read by the youngest child in the family who is old enough to speak. Often, this is a child of three or four who can recite the questions only haltingly, with numerous prompts from a parent or an older sibling. But however poor the performance may be, the adults present always praise the child profusely for his efforts.
I think about this tradition regarding the Four Questions on the rare occasions when I actually get to speak in Russian. Aside from asking for a Coca-Cola at a kiosk (small booths that serve much the purpose that gas station convenience stores do in America), my only real chances are in my twice-weekly Russian classes, when I am out with Konstantin on one of our Sunday forays in Moscow, or, even more rarely, in one of my English classes.
I do not speak Russian at length in my classes, of course. For one thing, doing so would defeat the object of the classes. For another, my school's policy forbids it, and my students pay for--and expect--English-only lessons. There are only two situations where I speak any Russian with my students.
The first is when my students, finding some task difficult to perform in English, drift into Russian. I have heard various methods suggested for dealing with this, but the one I use the most with adults is simply to say, in a tone of mocking irony, в'англййскйй, пажалуста (b'angleeskee pozhalyoosta, "in English, please"). I find this works better than any of the game-oriented ways of getting students to stop speaking Russian. Learning a foreign langauge often involves feeling like a three-year-old all over again, and not in a good way. My adult business students respond perfectly well to a simple request to speak in the language they are paying good money to learn.
The other time I speak Russian in class is when the subject of my learning Russian comes up. This has happened only a couple of times, in one-on-one situations, and usually after a student has apologized for his poor level of English. My reponse to such an apology is to tell my student his level of English is good (it almost always is), and that British and American people do not expect foreigners to use English in all of the ways we do. I tell my students I am trying to learn Russian and therefore understand how hard learning a foreign language can be.
This invariably leads to questions about what words I know and how far I have progressed. My canned response is to say, in Russian, that I am trying to learn to speak Russian but do not know very much.
It's amazing what kind of response this simple utterance can get. I am always told my Russian is very good. It isn't; the few times I have had to do such simple things as ask for directions in Russian, I understand very little of what is said and sometimes have to ask people to repeat things two or three times. But my students have invariably complimented me.
It's at this moment that the Four Questions come into play. A child reciting the Four Questions for the first time is likely nervous, as he does not want to be the center of so much attention from grown-ups; an older child who has had to do it for years is generally resentful. And if he has the chance to pass it off to an even younger child, he will jump at it.
Speaking about my Russian studies in Russian, I always feel like a three-year-old reciting the Four Questions. I manage to get the sentence out--I've repeated it to enough people now that it feels like a line from a script or, dare I say it, a Hagaddah--but it certainly doesn't feel like natural conversation. And yet, for this smidgin of Russian, I get lavish praise.
There could not be a starker contrast with how Americans often react to a foreigner who doesn't speak English well. Unless he happens to work with immigrants, or as an ESL teacher, an American is likely to treat a non-native speaker with at least condescension and at worst outright contempt. Many Americans seem to labor under a delusion that, if someone does not speak English, simply speaking more loudly to him will magically make him able to understand. I am horrified that this approach to non-English speakers persists even when Americans go abroad.
I think this dichotomy in attitudes explains a lot about my students. Volodya, the attorney I have mentioned in a previous post, has discussed with me, in English, such complicated matters as the nature of Russia's highest courts, the appointment of justices to them, and the rights criminal defendants have in the Russian judicial system (more on all of these points later). During the course of this conversation, he had only to be taught a couple of key words (plaintiff, defendant, and litigator) and to get some information from me about some differences in terminology. Yet even he apologized more than once about how "poor" his English is.
I think about this tradition regarding the Four Questions on the rare occasions when I actually get to speak in Russian. Aside from asking for a Coca-Cola at a kiosk (small booths that serve much the purpose that gas station convenience stores do in America), my only real chances are in my twice-weekly Russian classes, when I am out with Konstantin on one of our Sunday forays in Moscow, or, even more rarely, in one of my English classes.
I do not speak Russian at length in my classes, of course. For one thing, doing so would defeat the object of the classes. For another, my school's policy forbids it, and my students pay for--and expect--English-only lessons. There are only two situations where I speak any Russian with my students.
The first is when my students, finding some task difficult to perform in English, drift into Russian. I have heard various methods suggested for dealing with this, but the one I use the most with adults is simply to say, in a tone of mocking irony, в'англййскйй, пажалуста (b'angleeskee pozhalyoosta, "in English, please"). I find this works better than any of the game-oriented ways of getting students to stop speaking Russian. Learning a foreign langauge often involves feeling like a three-year-old all over again, and not in a good way. My adult business students respond perfectly well to a simple request to speak in the language they are paying good money to learn.
The other time I speak Russian in class is when the subject of my learning Russian comes up. This has happened only a couple of times, in one-on-one situations, and usually after a student has apologized for his poor level of English. My reponse to such an apology is to tell my student his level of English is good (it almost always is), and that British and American people do not expect foreigners to use English in all of the ways we do. I tell my students I am trying to learn Russian and therefore understand how hard learning a foreign language can be.
This invariably leads to questions about what words I know and how far I have progressed. My canned response is to say, in Russian, that I am trying to learn to speak Russian but do not know very much.
It's amazing what kind of response this simple utterance can get. I am always told my Russian is very good. It isn't; the few times I have had to do such simple things as ask for directions in Russian, I understand very little of what is said and sometimes have to ask people to repeat things two or three times. But my students have invariably complimented me.
It's at this moment that the Four Questions come into play. A child reciting the Four Questions for the first time is likely nervous, as he does not want to be the center of so much attention from grown-ups; an older child who has had to do it for years is generally resentful. And if he has the chance to pass it off to an even younger child, he will jump at it.
Speaking about my Russian studies in Russian, I always feel like a three-year-old reciting the Four Questions. I manage to get the sentence out--I've repeated it to enough people now that it feels like a line from a script or, dare I say it, a Hagaddah--but it certainly doesn't feel like natural conversation. And yet, for this smidgin of Russian, I get lavish praise.
There could not be a starker contrast with how Americans often react to a foreigner who doesn't speak English well. Unless he happens to work with immigrants, or as an ESL teacher, an American is likely to treat a non-native speaker with at least condescension and at worst outright contempt. Many Americans seem to labor under a delusion that, if someone does not speak English, simply speaking more loudly to him will magically make him able to understand. I am horrified that this approach to non-English speakers persists even when Americans go abroad.
I think this dichotomy in attitudes explains a lot about my students. Volodya, the attorney I have mentioned in a previous post, has discussed with me, in English, such complicated matters as the nature of Russia's highest courts, the appointment of justices to them, and the rights criminal defendants have in the Russian judicial system (more on all of these points later). During the course of this conversation, he had only to be taught a couple of key words (plaintiff, defendant, and litigator) and to get some information from me about some differences in terminology. Yet even he apologized more than once about how "poor" his English is.
20 July 2008
Russian Women, Fish, and Bicycles
Because I teach such high-level classes at the moment, one of my big challenges is finding good topics for discussion. Students who reach these levels tend to say they really want grammar, but in practice what I find is that they really want to talk. And talk. And talk some more. All of which is great, since a main aim of an EFL teacher is to get students to "produce" langauge (in TEFL jargon, this means using language authentically to express their own thoughts and opinions).
This week, a couple of my classes got to teach me about the status of women and the outline of gender roles in Russia. What they had to say about this topic was surprising.
The first student who got to teach me about such things is a businessman I see on an individual basis twice a week, a man I will call Volodya. I often think of Volodya as the Russian counterpart of a good friend of mine in New York, who will no doubt recognize himself in the following description. He is a mild-mannered but affable tax attorney, married with one child and plans to have or adopt another. Right now, Volodya's aim in improving his English is to be ready in a year when the steel company for which he works adopts an English-only e-mail policy (something which is becoming more and more common in multinational corporations, I hear). He has traveled quite a bit around Europe and will be venturing off to South Africa later this summer to visit relations.
A couple of weeks ago, I gave Volodya a lesson involving the first episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. So impressed was he with this program that he asked me to lend him my DVD. I did so but also gave him an assignment to read the Wikipedia article on MTM and tell me when the program was on, why it was successful, and why it was important in America. Volodya did admirably at finding all of this information. His reporting of his findings segued nicely into a discussion of women in Russia.
First, I taught Volodya the term "pink collar" and asked him if there are any jobs that are considered pink-collar in Russia. Some of his answers surprised me. In Russia, bus and trolleybus drivers are almost always female. So are cashiers on the Metro, a fact I had noticed independently. Provodnitsas on trains (somewhat akin to airline stewardesses--on nicer trains, they actually do fetch you a cup of tea) are also generally women.
When I asked him whether he thought women in Russia are equal to men, he seemed to indicate that the biggest challenge to Russian women is not discrimination in the workplace or at the voting booth but the simple fact that Russian men are extremely traditional in their attitudes toward childcare. In America, wives complain that their husbands don't change diapers often enough; in Russia, men won't touch them with a ten-foot pole. Almost anything having to do with children is still seen as "women's work," and when men do get involved in it, it's not because they have an ideological commitment to gender equality but because they happen to be unusually affectionate toward their child. Though he did not say so explicitly, I gathered that Volodya fell into this category, as he has always discussed his daughter with palpable affection.
Intrigued by what Volodya had told me, I brought up the subject of women again in what I had supposed would be a "conversation group" (only one student actually turned up). I had a reading prepared about an annual festival in part of Greece that involves men and women swapping roles for the day. To lead into the topic, I wrote on a flip chart the following expressions:
A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
Woman needs man, and man must have his mate.
(For fifty points, explain to me why the first sentence requires articles and the second does not).
My student, whom I will call Svetlana, had an unexpected interpretation of the second sentence. Not knowing its origin or context, she took it to mean that, whereas a woman needs an emotional attachment to a man, a man just wants sex. Certainly not what I had even interpreted "As Time Goes By" to be saying, but in the interests of our discussion, I did not try to persuade her to adopt my interpretation.
Like Volodya, Svetlana listed provodnitsas, trolleybus and bus drivers, and Metro cashiers as pink-collar jobs. But she added in a couple that surprised me. Doctors, it seems, are usually women in Russia (I gather that the medical profession in Russia does not offer the same pay and prestige as in America). Her own profession, that of bookkeepers, is also highly female.
When I asked her for an explanation of this, she said that women are just naturally better at having attention to detail than men, and so this was "naturally" a woman's profession (I thought of telling her that, in America, feminists have had to fight a perception that women are not good at math, but didn't quite know how to get that idea across to her). She also indicated that, because of their heavy home responsibilities, Russian women are more likely to take a job that has regular hours and that is unlikely to make taking a day off to care for a sick child (in Russia, this is invariably seen as the mother's responsibility) possible.
I asked her about women in politics. Her responses were interesting. She told me that about a third of the members of the Duma (the Russian parliament) are women. But she felt it was unlikely a woman would ever occupy Dmitri Medvyedev's job. As evidence, she pointed out that Russia had had generations of czars but only two queens, and that not a single party chairman in Soviet times had been female.
Overall, I get the distinct impression that Russians of both sexes are less reticent than Americans about professing belief in "natural" gender differences. In America, suggesting that women are "naturally" better suited to any job would probably result in lynching. But in Russia, the thought seems common. This is not to say that feminism doesn't exist in Russia, but it takes a very different form than in the West.
Women's issues are just not the same here. Many commentators have noted that, since the fall of Communism, Russian women have become much more interested in fashion and "femininity" than they were previously. Russian women do not seem as concerned about being unabashedly girlie as educated American women now are. Much of this has to do with increased access to Western fashion and cosmetics. But a lot more has to do with how women existed under Communism.
From what I gather, the Communist regime, though proclaiming women the equals of men, mostly just liberated women to be drudges. Russian women worked a double shift, one at the office and one at home, where men steadfastly refused to take up the slack. American women also complain of a double shift, but for Russians under Communism, that shift was even more grueling. The lack of refrigerators in my apartments and preservatives in most foodstuffs (the latter is still true today) meant endless waits in line to buy groceries that were often in short supply. Additionally, Russian women had access to few labor-saving devices to assist them with housework (and still have them less often than their American counterparts). Many urban apartments still lack a washing machine, and I gather that clothes dryers are an almost unheard-of luxury (though one of my fellow teachers has a washing machine that also dries clothes).
So for Russian women, girlie clothes and make-up end up being not symbols of oppression but signs of liberation. If you have time to worry about your appearance, the thinking seems to go, this indicates that you have been at least half-liberated from domestic drudgery.
This week, a couple of my classes got to teach me about the status of women and the outline of gender roles in Russia. What they had to say about this topic was surprising.
The first student who got to teach me about such things is a businessman I see on an individual basis twice a week, a man I will call Volodya. I often think of Volodya as the Russian counterpart of a good friend of mine in New York, who will no doubt recognize himself in the following description. He is a mild-mannered but affable tax attorney, married with one child and plans to have or adopt another. Right now, Volodya's aim in improving his English is to be ready in a year when the steel company for which he works adopts an English-only e-mail policy (something which is becoming more and more common in multinational corporations, I hear). He has traveled quite a bit around Europe and will be venturing off to South Africa later this summer to visit relations.
A couple of weeks ago, I gave Volodya a lesson involving the first episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. So impressed was he with this program that he asked me to lend him my DVD. I did so but also gave him an assignment to read the Wikipedia article on MTM and tell me when the program was on, why it was successful, and why it was important in America. Volodya did admirably at finding all of this information. His reporting of his findings segued nicely into a discussion of women in Russia.
First, I taught Volodya the term "pink collar" and asked him if there are any jobs that are considered pink-collar in Russia. Some of his answers surprised me. In Russia, bus and trolleybus drivers are almost always female. So are cashiers on the Metro, a fact I had noticed independently. Provodnitsas on trains (somewhat akin to airline stewardesses--on nicer trains, they actually do fetch you a cup of tea) are also generally women.
When I asked him whether he thought women in Russia are equal to men, he seemed to indicate that the biggest challenge to Russian women is not discrimination in the workplace or at the voting booth but the simple fact that Russian men are extremely traditional in their attitudes toward childcare. In America, wives complain that their husbands don't change diapers often enough; in Russia, men won't touch them with a ten-foot pole. Almost anything having to do with children is still seen as "women's work," and when men do get involved in it, it's not because they have an ideological commitment to gender equality but because they happen to be unusually affectionate toward their child. Though he did not say so explicitly, I gathered that Volodya fell into this category, as he has always discussed his daughter with palpable affection.
Intrigued by what Volodya had told me, I brought up the subject of women again in what I had supposed would be a "conversation group" (only one student actually turned up). I had a reading prepared about an annual festival in part of Greece that involves men and women swapping roles for the day. To lead into the topic, I wrote on a flip chart the following expressions:
A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
Woman needs man, and man must have his mate.
(For fifty points, explain to me why the first sentence requires articles and the second does not).
My student, whom I will call Svetlana, had an unexpected interpretation of the second sentence. Not knowing its origin or context, she took it to mean that, whereas a woman needs an emotional attachment to a man, a man just wants sex. Certainly not what I had even interpreted "As Time Goes By" to be saying, but in the interests of our discussion, I did not try to persuade her to adopt my interpretation.
Like Volodya, Svetlana listed provodnitsas, trolleybus and bus drivers, and Metro cashiers as pink-collar jobs. But she added in a couple that surprised me. Doctors, it seems, are usually women in Russia (I gather that the medical profession in Russia does not offer the same pay and prestige as in America). Her own profession, that of bookkeepers, is also highly female.
When I asked her for an explanation of this, she said that women are just naturally better at having attention to detail than men, and so this was "naturally" a woman's profession (I thought of telling her that, in America, feminists have had to fight a perception that women are not good at math, but didn't quite know how to get that idea across to her). She also indicated that, because of their heavy home responsibilities, Russian women are more likely to take a job that has regular hours and that is unlikely to make taking a day off to care for a sick child (in Russia, this is invariably seen as the mother's responsibility) possible.
I asked her about women in politics. Her responses were interesting. She told me that about a third of the members of the Duma (the Russian parliament) are women. But she felt it was unlikely a woman would ever occupy Dmitri Medvyedev's job. As evidence, she pointed out that Russia had had generations of czars but only two queens, and that not a single party chairman in Soviet times had been female.
Overall, I get the distinct impression that Russians of both sexes are less reticent than Americans about professing belief in "natural" gender differences. In America, suggesting that women are "naturally" better suited to any job would probably result in lynching. But in Russia, the thought seems common. This is not to say that feminism doesn't exist in Russia, but it takes a very different form than in the West.
Women's issues are just not the same here. Many commentators have noted that, since the fall of Communism, Russian women have become much more interested in fashion and "femininity" than they were previously. Russian women do not seem as concerned about being unabashedly girlie as educated American women now are. Much of this has to do with increased access to Western fashion and cosmetics. But a lot more has to do with how women existed under Communism.
From what I gather, the Communist regime, though proclaiming women the equals of men, mostly just liberated women to be drudges. Russian women worked a double shift, one at the office and one at home, where men steadfastly refused to take up the slack. American women also complain of a double shift, but for Russians under Communism, that shift was even more grueling. The lack of refrigerators in my apartments and preservatives in most foodstuffs (the latter is still true today) meant endless waits in line to buy groceries that were often in short supply. Additionally, Russian women had access to few labor-saving devices to assist them with housework (and still have them less often than their American counterparts). Many urban apartments still lack a washing machine, and I gather that clothes dryers are an almost unheard-of luxury (though one of my fellow teachers has a washing machine that also dries clothes).
So for Russian women, girlie clothes and make-up end up being not symbols of oppression but signs of liberation. If you have time to worry about your appearance, the thinking seems to go, this indicates that you have been at least half-liberated from domestic drudgery.
Forty Acres and a Shul
It's not hard to wonder, sometimes, whether my students teach me more than I teach them. Because the students I teach are at such a high level--by the time students reach what we call the Upper-Intermediate Level, they know virtually all of English grammar and mostly need speaking practice, reading, and vocabulary building--I find my classes are the ideal place to learn all that I can about Russian values and Russian society.
This week, I got this opportunity in a couple of different ways. In my upper-intermediate business class, I found myself having to explain the concept of "positive discrimination" to my students (this is the British term for what Americans know as affirmative action). My students by and large were appalled that such a thing went on in Britain and America and rankled at what they saw as its clear injustice.
These days, I don't really know how I feel about affirmative action myself. I find myself becoming more liberal--the behavior of the Orthodox rabbinate in Israel seems to be forcing me into it--but am not sure whether vague, long-ago promises of "40 acres and a mule" merit policies that only seem to stir up more racial hatred, to keep American government and business institutions eternally involved in deciding who is "really" African-American (something it does not do with any other group, save Native Americans), and delay the day when all citizens will be truly equal under the law.
Nonetheless, I feel some compensation is owed to people who were denied their basic human rights under decades of Jim Crow segregation in the South, and who are still alive and able to collect compensation. If compensation is owed to the survivors of Japanese internment camps, it is owed to millions of African-Americans who survived the Jim Crow South. That giving this compensation to African-Americans would be more expensive does not change this, in my opinion.
All of this was hard to get across to my students. I find in general that Russians have an excellent grasp of history, not only their own but of other people's as well. For all the talk there was during the Cold War about Russia's being a "closed society," Russians do not seem to live in the kind of bubble Americans do, blithely ignorant that there is a world beyond their shores.
I asked my students to what extent ethnic discrimination still exists in Russian society. I have heard quite a bit about discrimination against people from the Caucuses (if you really want to get a discussion going in a Russian classroom, tell a bunch of ethnic Russians that in America, they would be seen as "Caucasian"). My students largely felt that the Russian business world, while full of corruption and lawlessness, at least tries to adhere to notions of equal opportunity.
One of my students, a woman of about seventy, did volunteer that there had been significant discrimination against Jewish people in Soviet times. This I had known about, but it was the first time I had heard anything about it from a Russian person. The younger students in my class (all in their mid-thirties, from what I gather) don't seem to think anti-Semitism is a serious problem in Russian business circles today. But my older student sighed and said she thought they were being naive.
All in all, I cannot say that I have encountered any direct anti-Semitism in Russia. Other forms of discrimination are more visible, however. Unlike America, Russia allows businesses to specify age and sex in job advertisements. I have seen ads in store windows stating the store is looking for "a girl, not older than 30" to work there.
This week, I got this opportunity in a couple of different ways. In my upper-intermediate business class, I found myself having to explain the concept of "positive discrimination" to my students (this is the British term for what Americans know as affirmative action). My students by and large were appalled that such a thing went on in Britain and America and rankled at what they saw as its clear injustice.
These days, I don't really know how I feel about affirmative action myself. I find myself becoming more liberal--the behavior of the Orthodox rabbinate in Israel seems to be forcing me into it--but am not sure whether vague, long-ago promises of "40 acres and a mule" merit policies that only seem to stir up more racial hatred, to keep American government and business institutions eternally involved in deciding who is "really" African-American (something it does not do with any other group, save Native Americans), and delay the day when all citizens will be truly equal under the law.
Nonetheless, I feel some compensation is owed to people who were denied their basic human rights under decades of Jim Crow segregation in the South, and who are still alive and able to collect compensation. If compensation is owed to the survivors of Japanese internment camps, it is owed to millions of African-Americans who survived the Jim Crow South. That giving this compensation to African-Americans would be more expensive does not change this, in my opinion.
All of this was hard to get across to my students. I find in general that Russians have an excellent grasp of history, not only their own but of other people's as well. For all the talk there was during the Cold War about Russia's being a "closed society," Russians do not seem to live in the kind of bubble Americans do, blithely ignorant that there is a world beyond their shores.
I asked my students to what extent ethnic discrimination still exists in Russian society. I have heard quite a bit about discrimination against people from the Caucuses (if you really want to get a discussion going in a Russian classroom, tell a bunch of ethnic Russians that in America, they would be seen as "Caucasian"). My students largely felt that the Russian business world, while full of corruption and lawlessness, at least tries to adhere to notions of equal opportunity.
One of my students, a woman of about seventy, did volunteer that there had been significant discrimination against Jewish people in Soviet times. This I had known about, but it was the first time I had heard anything about it from a Russian person. The younger students in my class (all in their mid-thirties, from what I gather) don't seem to think anti-Semitism is a serious problem in Russian business circles today. But my older student sighed and said she thought they were being naive.
All in all, I cannot say that I have encountered any direct anti-Semitism in Russia. Other forms of discrimination are more visible, however. Unlike America, Russia allows businesses to specify age and sex in job advertisements. I have seen ads in store windows stating the store is looking for "a girl, not older than 30" to work there.
13 July 2008
The Man Behind the Curtain
Last night around midnight, I left my apartment to come check my e-mail at the local internet cafe. As it's been a month since I last bought an internet card for my computer (and as I'm looking into getting something better in terms of home internet service, anyway), I couldn't do anything internet-related from home, and I needed a walk anyway.
I never made it to an internet terminal. On the way there, I ran into a couple of fellow teachers from my school who were having a beer across the street from the internet cafe. I stopped and joined them. In short order, a few other teachers, back from galavants around Moscow, joined us as well. And so we had a merry time for about an hour and a half, having brews and talking about this and that.
Somewhere in the course of the conversation, the subject of movies came up. Someone asked which movies had profoundly changed people's lives. The responses ranged from the ponderous (The Godfather, 2001: a Space Odyssey, The Women) to the downright silly (Kindergarten Cop). While I didn't have an answer right then, I started to think, as I walked home, how much The Wizard of Oz has changed my life. And, to a great extent, how much that film has to say about the Jewish community today.
It's amazing how much Dorothy, the Lion, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Man have in common with the Jewish masses of today. Like Dorothy et al, today's Jews are wandering along a yellow brick road in search of "home", a place of Jewish peace and unity. And like Dorothy et. al, the Jews who constitute the vast majority of Jews today either can't or won't see the man behind the curtain.
Who is the man behind the curtain? That man is the Orthodox rabbinic establishment, in Israel and the Diaspora. I am sure that some people who read this will accuse me of "Orthodox-bashing", of hating my fellow Jew. Before that goes much further, I feel quite a bit of explanation is in order.
I do not wish the destruction of Orthodox Jews or of Orthodox Jewry. I merely wish the end of the political control that community exerts on the Jewish community, far out of proportion to its actual numbers, importance, or relevance. I object to the way Orthodox commentators have obfuscated the real nature and causes of "division" within the Jewish community, and have caused countless Jews to avoid taking a progressive stance on community issues for fear of non-existent "problems" they or their children may supposedly encounter.
Like the man behind the curtain, the Orthodox community pretends to be something it is clearly not. It claims to be the Judaism of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers. It claims to be the sole, original, authentic Judaism given at Sinai and delivered, unchanged, through the ages. This claim relies on the wider community's ignorance of its own history, a history that has been characterized more by change and development over the centuries than by the blind imitation of the past. But the man behind the curtain doesn't want us to see this.
Like the man behind the curtain, the Orthodox community uses smoke and mirrors to avoid letting us see how much it is the cause of our communal "division". Unlike most commentators in the Jewish world today, I do not see a community that is "hopelessly divided" amongst itself. I see only one division within the Jewish community today that has any meaning: the division between an increasingly Haredi Orthodox world and the better than 80 percent of Jews in Israel and the diaspora who characterize themselves as Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, Humanist, Hiloni (Secular), Just Plain Jewish, or any of a dozen other categories.
Let's face it: there is no real division among the rest of the community. Non-Orthodox Jewry may have its disagreements, but we have never politicized them. The Conservative rabbinate takes a backward and immoral position on patrilineal descent, but it has not and never will politicize its opinion by attempting to impose it on all other Jewish communities here and in Israel. And the clear fact that better than 70 percent of the Conservative laity have the sense to reject this outdated and divisive position indicates that liberal Jewry is far more united than Orthodox commentators would have us believe.
No, the cause of "division" within Jewry today is Orthodoxy's insistence, subtle and not-so-subtle, that it alone constitutes the Jewish community. Orthodox Jews, like fundamentalists of all religious persuasions, are entitled to build such a wall around themselves, either to pretend that the rest of their co-religionists do not exist or to call them heretics.
But we do not have to let that kind of fundamentalist delusion effect our wider community. We do not need to let a hidebound, anti-Zionist Israeli rabbinate force shmitta prohibitions on Israeli Jewish farmers, giving their business over to Arabs who are often hostile to the Jewish state.
We do not need to give the same rabbinate control over marriage, divorce, conversion, burial, and immigration into Israel. When Israel's chief rabbinate starts rejecting even mainstream "Modern" Orthodox conversions, and retroactively declaring even the born-Jewish spouses of people converted by the official Israeli rabbinate non-Jewish (as has happened recently), it is time for all of world Jewry to take away powers they are using irresponsibly, to the detriment not only of the Jewish state but of the Jewish people throughout the world.
We do not have to send out our sons and daughters to die on the West Bank, so that people who get draft deferments to sit around in yeshiva can hold onto an illusion that G_d will not tolerate any cessation of "Judea and Samaria" to the Palestinians. Let the fence be completed; Israel can and will withdraw to defensible boundaries slightly beyond the Green Line, a right given it by the United Nations in 1967. But our sons and daughters do not have to die to protect the homes of fundamentalists who put literal interpretation of Torah and Talmud above the Jewish people's need for peace.
We do not have to tolerate a situation in which 300,000 patrilineal Jews in Israel--people who endured decades of Soviet repression only to end up second-class citizens on Israeli soil--are considered Jewish enough to be used as cannon fodder but not Jewish enough to enjoy the rights and rites accorded to all other Jews in the Jewish state.
We have failed to act on these convictions because the Orthodox have told us two giant lies over and over again: first, that they are the faithful, the ones carrying on the faith of your ancestors, which you have abrogated or abandoned; and second, that horrible consequences will behall your children if they are not able to marry ours.
The latter claim is the one that cries out for refutation. No great calamity will befall the Jewish people if the Orthodox retreat into their examinations of yichus--examinations that have more in common with the Third Reich than with the teachings of rabbinic sages who delcared it lashon hora (malicious gossip) to question someone's Jewishness--or even declare the rest of Jewry "unmarriageable". All that will happen is that, like every other religious tradition on this earth, Judaism wil have a fundamentalist contingent that doesn't like the Bible critics, doesn't like women's liberation, and doesn't like homosexuals, and that refuses to have congress with a wider religious tradition that, acting on its historical value of emet (intellectual truthfulness), chooses not to sacrifice the emotional and spiritual needs of real people to a distorted image of a past that never was.
We will all stop giving power to the man behind the curtain. And when we do, we will at last click our ruby slippers and go home.
I never made it to an internet terminal. On the way there, I ran into a couple of fellow teachers from my school who were having a beer across the street from the internet cafe. I stopped and joined them. In short order, a few other teachers, back from galavants around Moscow, joined us as well. And so we had a merry time for about an hour and a half, having brews and talking about this and that.
Somewhere in the course of the conversation, the subject of movies came up. Someone asked which movies had profoundly changed people's lives. The responses ranged from the ponderous (The Godfather, 2001: a Space Odyssey, The Women) to the downright silly (Kindergarten Cop). While I didn't have an answer right then, I started to think, as I walked home, how much The Wizard of Oz has changed my life. And, to a great extent, how much that film has to say about the Jewish community today.
It's amazing how much Dorothy, the Lion, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Man have in common with the Jewish masses of today. Like Dorothy et al, today's Jews are wandering along a yellow brick road in search of "home", a place of Jewish peace and unity. And like Dorothy et. al, the Jews who constitute the vast majority of Jews today either can't or won't see the man behind the curtain.
Who is the man behind the curtain? That man is the Orthodox rabbinic establishment, in Israel and the Diaspora. I am sure that some people who read this will accuse me of "Orthodox-bashing", of hating my fellow Jew. Before that goes much further, I feel quite a bit of explanation is in order.
I do not wish the destruction of Orthodox Jews or of Orthodox Jewry. I merely wish the end of the political control that community exerts on the Jewish community, far out of proportion to its actual numbers, importance, or relevance. I object to the way Orthodox commentators have obfuscated the real nature and causes of "division" within the Jewish community, and have caused countless Jews to avoid taking a progressive stance on community issues for fear of non-existent "problems" they or their children may supposedly encounter.
Like the man behind the curtain, the Orthodox community pretends to be something it is clearly not. It claims to be the Judaism of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers. It claims to be the sole, original, authentic Judaism given at Sinai and delivered, unchanged, through the ages. This claim relies on the wider community's ignorance of its own history, a history that has been characterized more by change and development over the centuries than by the blind imitation of the past. But the man behind the curtain doesn't want us to see this.
Like the man behind the curtain, the Orthodox community uses smoke and mirrors to avoid letting us see how much it is the cause of our communal "division". Unlike most commentators in the Jewish world today, I do not see a community that is "hopelessly divided" amongst itself. I see only one division within the Jewish community today that has any meaning: the division between an increasingly Haredi Orthodox world and the better than 80 percent of Jews in Israel and the diaspora who characterize themselves as Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, Humanist, Hiloni (Secular), Just Plain Jewish, or any of a dozen other categories.
Let's face it: there is no real division among the rest of the community. Non-Orthodox Jewry may have its disagreements, but we have never politicized them. The Conservative rabbinate takes a backward and immoral position on patrilineal descent, but it has not and never will politicize its opinion by attempting to impose it on all other Jewish communities here and in Israel. And the clear fact that better than 70 percent of the Conservative laity have the sense to reject this outdated and divisive position indicates that liberal Jewry is far more united than Orthodox commentators would have us believe.
No, the cause of "division" within Jewry today is Orthodoxy's insistence, subtle and not-so-subtle, that it alone constitutes the Jewish community. Orthodox Jews, like fundamentalists of all religious persuasions, are entitled to build such a wall around themselves, either to pretend that the rest of their co-religionists do not exist or to call them heretics.
But we do not have to let that kind of fundamentalist delusion effect our wider community. We do not need to let a hidebound, anti-Zionist Israeli rabbinate force shmitta prohibitions on Israeli Jewish farmers, giving their business over to Arabs who are often hostile to the Jewish state.
We do not need to give the same rabbinate control over marriage, divorce, conversion, burial, and immigration into Israel. When Israel's chief rabbinate starts rejecting even mainstream "Modern" Orthodox conversions, and retroactively declaring even the born-Jewish spouses of people converted by the official Israeli rabbinate non-Jewish (as has happened recently), it is time for all of world Jewry to take away powers they are using irresponsibly, to the detriment not only of the Jewish state but of the Jewish people throughout the world.
We do not have to send out our sons and daughters to die on the West Bank, so that people who get draft deferments to sit around in yeshiva can hold onto an illusion that G_d will not tolerate any cessation of "Judea and Samaria" to the Palestinians. Let the fence be completed; Israel can and will withdraw to defensible boundaries slightly beyond the Green Line, a right given it by the United Nations in 1967. But our sons and daughters do not have to die to protect the homes of fundamentalists who put literal interpretation of Torah and Talmud above the Jewish people's need for peace.
We do not have to tolerate a situation in which 300,000 patrilineal Jews in Israel--people who endured decades of Soviet repression only to end up second-class citizens on Israeli soil--are considered Jewish enough to be used as cannon fodder but not Jewish enough to enjoy the rights and rites accorded to all other Jews in the Jewish state.
We have failed to act on these convictions because the Orthodox have told us two giant lies over and over again: first, that they are the faithful, the ones carrying on the faith of your ancestors, which you have abrogated or abandoned; and second, that horrible consequences will behall your children if they are not able to marry ours.
The latter claim is the one that cries out for refutation. No great calamity will befall the Jewish people if the Orthodox retreat into their examinations of yichus--examinations that have more in common with the Third Reich than with the teachings of rabbinic sages who delcared it lashon hora (malicious gossip) to question someone's Jewishness--or even declare the rest of Jewry "unmarriageable". All that will happen is that, like every other religious tradition on this earth, Judaism wil have a fundamentalist contingent that doesn't like the Bible critics, doesn't like women's liberation, and doesn't like homosexuals, and that refuses to have congress with a wider religious tradition that, acting on its historical value of emet (intellectual truthfulness), chooses not to sacrifice the emotional and spiritual needs of real people to a distorted image of a past that never was.
We will all stop giving power to the man behind the curtain. And when we do, we will at last click our ruby slippers and go home.
12 July 2008
May Your Strength Increase
Periodically (okay, not so periodically...I have a knack for bringing it up out of the blue), I find myself explaining Jewish law, lore, and customs to the non-Jewish teachers with whom I work. In the course of a month and a half, I have explained the mechitzah (the divider keeping men and women apart in an Orthodox synagogue), the difference between a rabbi and other types of Jewish educators, the plight of patrilineal Jews in Russia and Israel, and why the rabbis care whether shooting a baby as it is plummeting from a rooftop to its inevitable death is an act of murder.
One aspect of Jewish life that comes up not infrequently is the diction of being a Jew--or, at least, of being a certain kind of Upper West Side, lox-eating, Jewish Week-reading Jew. I get to explain what is meant by a "Jappy" girl from Long Island, why "yad" is a real word that should be acceptable in Scrabble (it's a small item used in synagogue readings from the Torah scrolls), and when it is appropriate to use the greeting, "Nu?"
So far, however, I have yet to delve into more complicated aspects of the Jewish leixcon. But to make headway in this--several of my fellow teachers have become regular readers of my blog--I felt I would start with one of the more common Jewish greetings, Yasher Koach (may your strength increase).
This greeting may be said to anyone who is known to have recently done something meritorious, but it is most commonly said to someone who is returning to the congregation from having given a bracha (blessing) over the Torah.
I think about this phrase a lot lately, as I think about the situation of interfaith families in the Jewish community, and of patrilineal Jews in particular. Where, I wonder, are the opportunities for us to give each other a big yasher koach? What have we done lately that merits our saying, "may your strengh increase?"
It's true there is a lot to be thankful for with respect to the interfaith family community these days. A website, interfaithfamily.com, provides articles and allows many of us to know we are not alone in grappling with the "December Dilemma", the hostility of those within the Jewish community who are opposed to outreach, and in making sense out of our relations with Jewish and non-Jewish relatives. Synagogues across the country provide programming for the intermarried. Two years ago, a woman with whom I am much in touch, and who has commented on this blog, launched a website, including a message board, aimed at the half-Jewish community.
We have achieved a lot. But when I look at what we have increased, I see how far we have to go. Patrilineal Jews are hopelessly under-represented and unheard in the very bodies within the Jewish community that decide their fate and their identity. Interfaith families and patrilineal Jews have the majority of the Jewish community, both here and in Israel, on our side, but we seem unable to galvanize that moral majority into any sort of action on our behalf. We fail to exert any backbone when dealing with a hidebound Orthodox rabbinate that still, far too often, sets Jewish communal policy in Israel and the religious agenda of affiliated Jews in America.
We have found each other, but have yet to find our voices. We have learned we are not alone in not wanting to sit on the back of the bus, but we have yet to organize any bus boycotts. We are not heard in JTS, in the Knesset, or in any body that might do anything to address our concerns or give us the equality and dignity we crave and deserve.
I myself have been guilty of this. Emunah Avot (http://emunahavot.net) exists but has yet to attract much attention from anyone. I have done little to publicize its existence or to network with other patrilineal and non-patrilineal Jews who are eager to fight entrenched discrimination within the Jewish community. Even when I had the time, during my Kansas lay-over between Taiwan and Russia, I failed to act on the opportunity to do more about this issue.
Elul, the month before Rosh Hashanah when Jews begin to examine their own consciences and prepare for the hard task of repentence and renewal, is fast approaching. And so with that in mind, I ask the interfaith community to reflect on our past sins and forge a new path ahead.
We need to kvetch less and do more.
We need to do less navel-gazing and exploring of our own unique or "unique" paths and start working toward real equality within the Jewish community. We do not need another support group to give vent to our feelings about segregation; we need to end that segregation.
We need to stop accepting half-hearted measures aimed more at making the wider Jewish community feel it is doing something progressive with regard to our issues and start insisting on measures actually designed to solve our real problems and concerns.
We need to refuse to be divided along lines of denomination and descent. Matrilineal and patrilineal, Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, or secular, we all have a clear interest in forging a Jewish community that sees us as souls to be nurtured, not a problem to be solved.
We need to stop being silent about what is going on with respect to our brothers and sisters in Israel, who face discrimination from the official rabbinate and hostility even from wider secular society.
And most of all, we need to remember that our problems are not emotional but systemic, not personal but political.
May our strength increase.
One aspect of Jewish life that comes up not infrequently is the diction of being a Jew--or, at least, of being a certain kind of Upper West Side, lox-eating, Jewish Week-reading Jew. I get to explain what is meant by a "Jappy" girl from Long Island, why "yad" is a real word that should be acceptable in Scrabble (it's a small item used in synagogue readings from the Torah scrolls), and when it is appropriate to use the greeting, "Nu?"
So far, however, I have yet to delve into more complicated aspects of the Jewish leixcon. But to make headway in this--several of my fellow teachers have become regular readers of my blog--I felt I would start with one of the more common Jewish greetings, Yasher Koach (may your strength increase).
This greeting may be said to anyone who is known to have recently done something meritorious, but it is most commonly said to someone who is returning to the congregation from having given a bracha (blessing) over the Torah.
I think about this phrase a lot lately, as I think about the situation of interfaith families in the Jewish community, and of patrilineal Jews in particular. Where, I wonder, are the opportunities for us to give each other a big yasher koach? What have we done lately that merits our saying, "may your strengh increase?"
It's true there is a lot to be thankful for with respect to the interfaith family community these days. A website, interfaithfamily.com, provides articles and allows many of us to know we are not alone in grappling with the "December Dilemma", the hostility of those within the Jewish community who are opposed to outreach, and in making sense out of our relations with Jewish and non-Jewish relatives. Synagogues across the country provide programming for the intermarried. Two years ago, a woman with whom I am much in touch, and who has commented on this blog, launched a website, including a message board, aimed at the half-Jewish community.
We have achieved a lot. But when I look at what we have increased, I see how far we have to go. Patrilineal Jews are hopelessly under-represented and unheard in the very bodies within the Jewish community that decide their fate and their identity. Interfaith families and patrilineal Jews have the majority of the Jewish community, both here and in Israel, on our side, but we seem unable to galvanize that moral majority into any sort of action on our behalf. We fail to exert any backbone when dealing with a hidebound Orthodox rabbinate that still, far too often, sets Jewish communal policy in Israel and the religious agenda of affiliated Jews in America.
We have found each other, but have yet to find our voices. We have learned we are not alone in not wanting to sit on the back of the bus, but we have yet to organize any bus boycotts. We are not heard in JTS, in the Knesset, or in any body that might do anything to address our concerns or give us the equality and dignity we crave and deserve.
I myself have been guilty of this. Emunah Avot (http://emunahavot.net) exists but has yet to attract much attention from anyone. I have done little to publicize its existence or to network with other patrilineal and non-patrilineal Jews who are eager to fight entrenched discrimination within the Jewish community. Even when I had the time, during my Kansas lay-over between Taiwan and Russia, I failed to act on the opportunity to do more about this issue.
Elul, the month before Rosh Hashanah when Jews begin to examine their own consciences and prepare for the hard task of repentence and renewal, is fast approaching. And so with that in mind, I ask the interfaith community to reflect on our past sins and forge a new path ahead.
We need to kvetch less and do more.
We need to do less navel-gazing and exploring of our own unique or "unique" paths and start working toward real equality within the Jewish community. We do not need another support group to give vent to our feelings about segregation; we need to end that segregation.
We need to stop accepting half-hearted measures aimed more at making the wider Jewish community feel it is doing something progressive with regard to our issues and start insisting on measures actually designed to solve our real problems and concerns.
We need to refuse to be divided along lines of denomination and descent. Matrilineal and patrilineal, Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, or secular, we all have a clear interest in forging a Jewish community that sees us as souls to be nurtured, not a problem to be solved.
We need to stop being silent about what is going on with respect to our brothers and sisters in Israel, who face discrimination from the official rabbinate and hostility even from wider secular society.
And most of all, we need to remember that our problems are not emotional but systemic, not personal but political.
May our strength increase.
The Incredible Shrinking Planet
When I was a child, one of my family's weekly rituals was tuning into CBS News every Sunday to watch a program called Sunday Morning. I recall the show as a kind of hodgepodge that barely exists elsewhere anymore. Everything from world news to television reviews to sentimental pieces from a man who delivered "Postcards from Iowa" were featured.
At this point, it's hard to remember much of the specific content of the program. I tended to focus on the television and cultural reviews, which were time-sensitive and not generally the kind of thing that stays with you for very long. But for some reason, I do remember a lot of the commercials that punctuated the Sunday Morning broadcasts, and what I remember most are the commercials for telephone companies.
This was in the late '80s and early '90s, the days when Ma Bell had thankfully been broken up but before cell phones and the internet had made the phrase "long-distance" seem as archaic as "telephone exchange name" or "rotary dial". Ma Bell's new incarnation, AT&T, was in heady competition with Sprint, MCI, and various smaller companies to get you to switch your long-distance service. And it seemed, at the time, that these companies all made their appeals somewhere between Charles Kuralt's weather forecast and John Leonard's review of the latest movie-of-the-week.
The ads all seemed about the same. Smiling grandmothers were shown talking to grandchildren a continent or, indeed, sometimes a world away. A NASA photograph of the earth from space, or a computer-generated graphic of the same, would come on. And the viewer would be treated to some prattle about how much our planet was shrinking and the world was coming closer together because California could now call New York for a mere twelve cents a minute.
I've thought about that prattle quite a bit lately as I've found myself back in touch with people back home. Last Sunday, I called my parents for the first time from my apartment landline for G_d only knows what outrageous price. It's odd to think how easy it was to make a direct-dial call from Moscow to the Midwest. At one time, telephone service between the Soviet Union and the United States was greatly restricted, but I didn't have to deal with a single operator to make the call.
More to the point, the internet has enabled me to make contact in ways that would have been unimaginable to me when I used to sit in my pajamas and watch Charles Kuralt. A couple weeks ago, I introduced two friends to each other, both teachers. It was a joyful event for me.
The interesting catch was that both of these friends are not in Moscow but in Daegu, Korea--a city I have never visited and expect I never will visit. I made the connection through a three-way e-mail after having bumped into one of these friends on facebook. What a world we live in--introductions can be made from across the globe!
At this point, it's hard to remember much of the specific content of the program. I tended to focus on the television and cultural reviews, which were time-sensitive and not generally the kind of thing that stays with you for very long. But for some reason, I do remember a lot of the commercials that punctuated the Sunday Morning broadcasts, and what I remember most are the commercials for telephone companies.
This was in the late '80s and early '90s, the days when Ma Bell had thankfully been broken up but before cell phones and the internet had made the phrase "long-distance" seem as archaic as "telephone exchange name" or "rotary dial". Ma Bell's new incarnation, AT&T, was in heady competition with Sprint, MCI, and various smaller companies to get you to switch your long-distance service. And it seemed, at the time, that these companies all made their appeals somewhere between Charles Kuralt's weather forecast and John Leonard's review of the latest movie-of-the-week.
The ads all seemed about the same. Smiling grandmothers were shown talking to grandchildren a continent or, indeed, sometimes a world away. A NASA photograph of the earth from space, or a computer-generated graphic of the same, would come on. And the viewer would be treated to some prattle about how much our planet was shrinking and the world was coming closer together because California could now call New York for a mere twelve cents a minute.
I've thought about that prattle quite a bit lately as I've found myself back in touch with people back home. Last Sunday, I called my parents for the first time from my apartment landline for G_d only knows what outrageous price. It's odd to think how easy it was to make a direct-dial call from Moscow to the Midwest. At one time, telephone service between the Soviet Union and the United States was greatly restricted, but I didn't have to deal with a single operator to make the call.
More to the point, the internet has enabled me to make contact in ways that would have been unimaginable to me when I used to sit in my pajamas and watch Charles Kuralt. A couple weeks ago, I introduced two friends to each other, both teachers. It was a joyful event for me.
The interesting catch was that both of these friends are not in Moscow but in Daegu, Korea--a city I have never visited and expect I never will visit. I made the connection through a three-way e-mail after having bumped into one of these friends on facebook. What a world we live in--introductions can be made from across the globe!
04 July 2008
In Russia, Student Teach You!
When I posted my last blog entry, describing my use of She Who Can Turn the World on with Her Smile in the classroom, I wrote too soon, for I had an opportunity to use Mary Richards' interview with Mr. Grant again the very next day. The student with whom I used it was a businessman, at the same level as the class I had shown it to previously, who sees me on a one-on-one basis. I used the episode to talk about first impressions and introductions, the topic in the first lesson of our general English textbook.
My student responded to the task well. Like the class to whom I had shown Mary Tyler Moore the day before, he was able to find the humor in the scene even if he struggles a bit to make out all of the actual words. And he had quite a bit to say about how such a scene might play out in Russia.
For starters, he said, job interviews on this side of the Baltic are much more formal and structured. I made clear to him that Mary's interview with Mr. Grant was far from typical of American job interviews (it is a situation comedy, after all). I also learned that the general system of hiring in Russia is a first interview to determine a candidate's likability and overall suitability, followed by a skills test of candidates deemed suitable.
This was not the first instance in which my students have taught me important things about life in Russia. While substituting for a British teacher who was stuck back home due to visa troubles, I found out from one class of students why laundromats are impossible to find in Moscow. The reason has nothing to do with money or communism; rather, it has to do with Russian manners. In Russia, it is not considered proper to take dirty clothes outside the home for cleaning (an exception is made for suits and other items that require dry cleaning). For this reason, families that manage to rise into the middle class generally make a washing machine one of the first things they purchase (only a refrigerator seems to be more important).
The same class also gave me the facts on how Russians teach "the facts of life" (pretty much the same as Americans...in school and rather poorly) and some information about the Russian language that will prove valuable when my study of Russian improves. It turns out that Russian, like English, tends to build more and more complicated words with prefixes and suffixes. Antidisestablishmentarianism may be unique to English, but I am willing to hazard a guess that some equally long, opaque, and not horribly useful work exists in Russian.
In fact, asking around of other teachers, I get the impression that, in higher-level classes, the students end up teaching the teacher as much as the teacher teaches the students. Once students get to what we call an "Upper-Intermediate" level of English, they have had most of the grammar of English, and their task becomes one of consolidating vocabulary, building confidence in speaking, and improving their writing skills. Classes become more about talking and less about explicit language teaching. The result is a turnaround of who does the actual teaching.
And as a result, I find myself channeling Yaakov Smirnov. In America, you teach your student; in Russia, student teach you!
My student responded to the task well. Like the class to whom I had shown Mary Tyler Moore the day before, he was able to find the humor in the scene even if he struggles a bit to make out all of the actual words. And he had quite a bit to say about how such a scene might play out in Russia.
For starters, he said, job interviews on this side of the Baltic are much more formal and structured. I made clear to him that Mary's interview with Mr. Grant was far from typical of American job interviews (it is a situation comedy, after all). I also learned that the general system of hiring in Russia is a first interview to determine a candidate's likability and overall suitability, followed by a skills test of candidates deemed suitable.
This was not the first instance in which my students have taught me important things about life in Russia. While substituting for a British teacher who was stuck back home due to visa troubles, I found out from one class of students why laundromats are impossible to find in Moscow. The reason has nothing to do with money or communism; rather, it has to do with Russian manners. In Russia, it is not considered proper to take dirty clothes outside the home for cleaning (an exception is made for suits and other items that require dry cleaning). For this reason, families that manage to rise into the middle class generally make a washing machine one of the first things they purchase (only a refrigerator seems to be more important).
The same class also gave me the facts on how Russians teach "the facts of life" (pretty much the same as Americans...in school and rather poorly) and some information about the Russian language that will prove valuable when my study of Russian improves. It turns out that Russian, like English, tends to build more and more complicated words with prefixes and suffixes. Antidisestablishmentarianism may be unique to English, but I am willing to hazard a guess that some equally long, opaque, and not horribly useful work exists in Russian.
In fact, asking around of other teachers, I get the impression that, in higher-level classes, the students end up teaching the teacher as much as the teacher teaches the students. Once students get to what we call an "Upper-Intermediate" level of English, they have had most of the grammar of English, and their task becomes one of consolidating vocabulary, building confidence in speaking, and improving their writing skills. Classes become more about talking and less about explicit language teaching. The result is a turnaround of who does the actual teaching.
And as a result, I find myself channeling Yaakov Smirnov. In America, you teach your student; in Russia, student teach you!
02 July 2008
A Job Interview at WJM-TV
The chief of my teaching assignments, my school has given me to understand, are likely to be teaching business people. Right at the moment, this is true; of the three teaching assignments I have, two are in corporate settings (the third is a girl of 11 who is a true joy to teach).
Teaching business people, I find, poses some unique challenges. I sometimes feel I have to fake a knowledge of the corporate world I do not have and, frankly, no longer desire. Another challenge is the sheer volume of business-related terminology and idioms I have to teach. In the course of one lesson, I found myself having to teach ASAP, get the ball rolling, hedge your bets, and when the chips are down. None of these are easy to explain.
But there are some definite advantages to teaching business students as well. They are, for the most part, polite and well-behaved. There is the change of scenery I get by traveling to and from different assignments. And then today, there was the opportunity to use my favorite television episode of all time in the classroom: the very first episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
I attempted to use Mary in the classroom once before, when I took CELTA training in New York. That time, the lesson I gave was an absolute disaster, because I tried to accomplish far too much and tried to use the program with a group of students who were not able to handle it. But today, I managed to handle the episode almost perfectly. Instead of trying to do the whole half-hour episode, I focused on the scene for which the episode is justly famous--Mary's interview with Mr. Grant. I set my students the clear task of evaluating Mary's performance as a job candidate and Mr. Grant's performance as a job interviewer. And above all, I had chosen my audience carefully: a classroom of managers who frequently have to make hiring decisions.
If I have seen Mary's interview with Mr. Grant once, I must have seen it a thousand times. But my students had interesting reactions to it. I was delighted that they were able to find the humor in the scene, and that they understood the comprehension questions I gave them afterward about what had happened. Humor is often the hardest thing to translate from one culture to another, and I get the feeling this is doubly true when English speakers and Russian speakers interact. But I was happy that I was able to share a part of my culture I truly love.
My students grasped at once that Mr. Grant is an alcoholic. They were as put off by his questions about Mary's marital status and religion as any American would be. One of my students informed me that, although it is not actually illegal in Russia to ask questions about a job candidate's religion, it is considered very rude. (Marital status may be another matter; I gather that outside of the United States, it is actually quite common for candidates to list their marital status on a resume, and I have no reason to expect that this is less true in Russia).
Overall, my students thought both Mary and Mr. Grant had done poorly in the interview. They saw at once that Mary probably knew nothing about the company or the job she was applying for and had failed to put her best foot forward. And one thing one student said really stuck with me: she called Mary "stupid."
Many words spring to mind when one thinks of Mary Richards: bad hostess, luckless dater, confident career woman, feminist icon. "Stupid" is not generally one of them. But thinking it over, I have come to realize that in a certain sense, my student was right. Mary did an enormous number of truly stupid things during her seven years at WJM. Much of the humor of the show resulted from Mary's seemingly total inability to exert authority when the situation clearly required it. Although she was called an associate producer, the actual work she was shown doing on the program seemed to differ little from the kind of secretarial work she was originally seeking the day she met Mr. Grant. When Mary won our hearts, it was usually for her attempts to keep peace in impossible circumstances, not for the sharpness of her mind.
Don't get me wrong; I've always loved Mary Richards, ever since I first saw her on Nick at Nite back in the day, and I always will. But seeing people watch her with none of out American preconceptions about what Mary is supposed to be or represent has definitely given me a new perspective on her. If, in the '70s, her presence on television seemed like an important breakthrough, that may say more about the '70s than about Mary herself. I may loathe Carrie Bradshaw, but I have to admit that, in six seasons of seeing her brazenly pursue love and labels, the woman I think of as Little Miss Charge Card stuck up for herself in ways Mary Richards never did.
Teaching business people, I find, poses some unique challenges. I sometimes feel I have to fake a knowledge of the corporate world I do not have and, frankly, no longer desire. Another challenge is the sheer volume of business-related terminology and idioms I have to teach. In the course of one lesson, I found myself having to teach ASAP, get the ball rolling, hedge your bets, and when the chips are down. None of these are easy to explain.
But there are some definite advantages to teaching business students as well. They are, for the most part, polite and well-behaved. There is the change of scenery I get by traveling to and from different assignments. And then today, there was the opportunity to use my favorite television episode of all time in the classroom: the very first episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
I attempted to use Mary in the classroom once before, when I took CELTA training in New York. That time, the lesson I gave was an absolute disaster, because I tried to accomplish far too much and tried to use the program with a group of students who were not able to handle it. But today, I managed to handle the episode almost perfectly. Instead of trying to do the whole half-hour episode, I focused on the scene for which the episode is justly famous--Mary's interview with Mr. Grant. I set my students the clear task of evaluating Mary's performance as a job candidate and Mr. Grant's performance as a job interviewer. And above all, I had chosen my audience carefully: a classroom of managers who frequently have to make hiring decisions.
If I have seen Mary's interview with Mr. Grant once, I must have seen it a thousand times. But my students had interesting reactions to it. I was delighted that they were able to find the humor in the scene, and that they understood the comprehension questions I gave them afterward about what had happened. Humor is often the hardest thing to translate from one culture to another, and I get the feeling this is doubly true when English speakers and Russian speakers interact. But I was happy that I was able to share a part of my culture I truly love.
My students grasped at once that Mr. Grant is an alcoholic. They were as put off by his questions about Mary's marital status and religion as any American would be. One of my students informed me that, although it is not actually illegal in Russia to ask questions about a job candidate's religion, it is considered very rude. (Marital status may be another matter; I gather that outside of the United States, it is actually quite common for candidates to list their marital status on a resume, and I have no reason to expect that this is less true in Russia).
Overall, my students thought both Mary and Mr. Grant had done poorly in the interview. They saw at once that Mary probably knew nothing about the company or the job she was applying for and had failed to put her best foot forward. And one thing one student said really stuck with me: she called Mary "stupid."
Many words spring to mind when one thinks of Mary Richards: bad hostess, luckless dater, confident career woman, feminist icon. "Stupid" is not generally one of them. But thinking it over, I have come to realize that in a certain sense, my student was right. Mary did an enormous number of truly stupid things during her seven years at WJM. Much of the humor of the show resulted from Mary's seemingly total inability to exert authority when the situation clearly required it. Although she was called an associate producer, the actual work she was shown doing on the program seemed to differ little from the kind of secretarial work she was originally seeking the day she met Mr. Grant. When Mary won our hearts, it was usually for her attempts to keep peace in impossible circumstances, not for the sharpness of her mind.
Don't get me wrong; I've always loved Mary Richards, ever since I first saw her on Nick at Nite back in the day, and I always will. But seeing people watch her with none of out American preconceptions about what Mary is supposed to be or represent has definitely given me a new perspective on her. If, in the '70s, her presence on television seemed like an important breakthrough, that may say more about the '70s than about Mary herself. I may loathe Carrie Bradshaw, but I have to admit that, in six seasons of seeing her brazenly pursue love and labels, the woman I think of as Little Miss Charge Card stuck up for herself in ways Mary Richards never did.
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