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!