The Estates of the Union

Business English, I am finding, presents a few special challenges to the EFL teacher. One is the apathetic nature of many of the students. Particularly when they reach what we call the Intermediate Slump--the point at which they have had most of the grammatical structures of the language and turn to work that can often feel like fine-tuning--motivation tends to decrease. But the heavier weights pulling down on business students' motivation, I find, are lack of time and lack of what a psychology professor at my university called the "sunk-cost effect" (basically, what happens when you decide you need to go to the gym more to justify money spent on the membership that you can't get back). Business students are seldom paying for the course themselves and can sometimes take a very lackadaisical attitude toward class attendance, homework, or anything else the course requiring commitments of time.

It is because of these factors that I find Volodya such a joy to teach. From the first time I met him, I knew things would be different with him. He told me he had asked for me as his teacher after seeing my resume and realizing I had a legal background and therefore some knowledge of legal English (and if he needs someone to explain promissory estoppel to him, I am probably one of the few EFL teachers in Russia able to do it). He is conscientious about doing his homework; in two months of working together, he has failed to do his homework only once, just before he went on holiday to South Africa. Only rarely does he interrupt our sessions together to take a phone call or do anything else directly related to his work.

While I like teaching Volodya very much, he does present a few challenges--the biggest one being that his reasons for wanting to improve his English are different from those of most other Business English students. Sometime next year, the company for which Volodya works will be shifted to an English-only e-mail policy, and this is Volodya's biggest reason for needing to upgrade his English skills. For other business students, the focus is on speaking for travel and communication with clients abroad. But Volodya is unlikely to have to communicate with clients abroad, since his work focuses largely on the domestic end of his company's business.

For me, all of this creates a major challenge. Finding materials that have any direct bearing on his work is difficult. I have given him some Supreme Court cases to read up on, but as my knowledge of taxation and tax law is virtually non-existent, it's hard to give him the kind of materials he probably needs most. Today, however, I managed to overcome that challenge, for a short time.

At our class on Tuesday, I decided to give him, for homework, the Wikipedia article on the estate tax in the United States. For my non-American readers (who seem to be rapidly multiplying), the estate tax meant to prevent extremely wealthy individuals from passing money on to their children in ways that would create a permanent aristocracy. This at least is what political liberals say it is; conservatives say it is abomination and indignantly insist on calling it the "death tax". My personal view is that there is nothing immoral about such a tax, but that, as matters currently stand in America, it tends to serve more as a subsidy for the life insurance industry than as a viable means of limiting wealth accumulation.

My point in giving this reading was to get Volodya to understand and talk about the difference between the words "estate tax" and "death tax" and thereby get him into the whole concept of loaded language. It took a while to get him to understand how the terms are really used in America, but eventually he got it. In the process, he gave me some interesting ideas on why we have such a tax. The first is that the estate tax exists because it is somehow easier for the government to know the exact value of estates than to know your income. The second is that America does not want wealthy families accumulating too much political power and becoming essentially states within the state (this is partly true, but not the main rationale behind the estate tax). But he was just as puzzled as I am, and as most Americans are, as to why the estate tax will likely disappear in 2010, only to reappear a year later (the result of squabbles over it in Congress).

Nonetheless, the exercise seems to have worked, and in the process, I got to learn a bit about the Russian tax system. In many ways, the system would look very familiar to Americans rushing to fill out their 1040s in April. Like Americans, Russians deal with withholdings and deductions (Volodya knew these terms without my having to teach them). Also like Americans, they get a credit for each child they have and regarding the taxman with a mix of hostility, hatred, and loathing.

Unlike Americans, however, Russians have a relatively regressive tax system; everyone pays 13 percent, far lower than in other industrialized countries. From what I gather, little effort is made to make the rich pay more (I suspect the Soviet Union has given Russians a distate for efforts at income redistribution). And even stranger, you can pay many of your taxes in cash.