2.10.12 I should write about my time away from my Russian home in Dolgoprudny while it’s still a little fresh in my mind. It was hard to leave here in the last week of August. I had really enjoyed my three weeks of vacation here, not travelling anywhere but where classical literature would take me in my head. It had been more than enough of a release from my everyday work life, and I wasn’t especially keen on travelling for real. But I had practiced my German, and studied some Polish with the hopes of building some sort of foundation for further study of language during my course which was to take place in Krakow the following month. It was the day before my mom’s birthday when I left for Domodedovo airport, anxious that I had forgotten something, and address to a hostel, or important information for the first day of the CELTA course. I found myself feeling the outer pocket of my computer bag to ensure that my passport was still there. If I lose my passport, I’m screwed – I kept thinking – please, just don’t let me lose my passport. I had never lost it before, but I wasn’t sure that that was reason to worry less, so I worried more. Sasha called me when I was in the express train to the airport. This was the last time we would be able to talk to each other for a few weeks, because while I might have been able to figure out how skype works, it wouldn’t have worked out anyway, since she would spend much of the month in the boonies with some distant relatives of the older generation. On the train, she asked me if everything was all right, if I had everything I needed. I said yes, we wished each other well, and said goodbye. My nervousness went away when I finally arrived at the hostel in Berlin. I had established a place to stay and a place to get food at a nearby supermarket. Life was good again. So in the last week of August, I spent a few days walking around Berlin, with my brother for two days, seeing the sights, but also walking the city proper, probably in places where few tourists go, coming in and out of the more familiar areas here and there, making ‘connections’ to known places, like I often do on walks in Moscow. On my last day there, I went on a very long walk, which featured three branches of a local bookstore, called ‘Hugendubels,’ where I couldn’t help but buy a few more books for practical reading before my next trip to the country; featured also Charlotte’s castle, where my parents, Aunt and Uncle had visited a few years before. I walked around in the garden behind the castle before heading home. I walked on a dirt path along a canal until I reached the street of June 17th (I think that’s the right date), which brought me past the Column of Victory, and the Soviet monument, just as it did on my first day in Berlin about seven years ago. The central train station is near that monument. There I got on a train back to my hostel for the night before my trip to Krakow. The train ride east was discouraging. The tracks within a few miles of Berlin are in perfect order. You can just imagine them being a certain distance from one another with an error of no more than a fraction of a millimeter, but then you go further and further east and soon the planks on which the tracks are laid change from cement to wooden. Some of them seem to be rotting away. The platforms too become all the more overgrown with grass and weeds, the further east you go. And then you arrive in Krakow. The main train station, where I arrived that evening, left a good first impression. Sure, the planks were still wooden, but they looked good. The lighting was uniform. No lights had gone out, and none were flickering. The platform was precisely paved and free of cigarette butts and beer bottles. There wasn’t even any trash among the tracks. I took my time leaving the station. I wanted to enjoy the fact that I had arrived in Krakow and not some other city in Poland or some other country. Sure, the train had been direct from Berlin, but direct trains haven’t stopped this American from making really stupid travel mistakes. So I eventually made my way down an escalator and into an adjacent mall. There was a currency exchange counter there. I took note. I exited the mall, found the street name and was happy to have that very street on the map I had drawn to help me reach my accommodation. It turned out to be really close. I found the street without any problem, but passed by the hostel at first, and was forced to turn back to find myself in front of the entrance to what looked like a strip club. There was a sign in black and white with the profile of a woman wearing little more than very high-heels beckoning to the passers-by to pay her a visit. This was where my hostel was supposed to be. For a moment I thought that I had been had, and would have to make an immediate change in accommodation plans. It was already past nine in the evening, plenty dark, and not the best time to be running around an unknown city while carrying a few bags and dragging a huge suitcase. I entered the building with the strip club’s sign, climbed some stairs, and found, attached to a door on my left, a small business card which I recognized as my intended hostel. I rang, and was accepted and given a room. The strip club, it turns out, was further along the first floor, down some stairs. It wasn’t very popular, I would find out. In fact, I spent a good deal of time in the area (stretching in the courtyard after running), and saw so few people go inside, that I began to doubt that it was a club of any sort. Lots of possibilities come to mind, if you have a little imagination: a hackers’ base, for example, maybe associated to some spy organization. My place at the hostel was rather nice. I was in a room furnished for five or six, but over the course of the whole month, I was alone in the room most of the time. I had gambled on the popularity of Krakow in September, and my gamble ended up paying off, since I usually had peace and quiet while doing my homework, but also paid about half the price that the CELTA administrators’ recommended accommodation providers had offered. Aside from the room, there was a kitchen with a small cooker and a fridge. I cooked a few times a week and had leftovers for when there was no time to cook. The month flew by, and soon I found myself packing my bags again, getting ready for the trip back. I’ve said before that leaving a place that has been your home somehow reminds me of dying, and I was reminded again when leaving Krakow, even if I had been there only a few weeks. This feeling was accentuated by the fact that my trip back was the same as the one had been forward, only much faster. It was as though my short life there were flashing before my eyes before my return to Purgatory. I travelled back to Berlin on a night train (because I, foolishly, had bought a round trip flight between Berlin and Moscow). I had to catch two connecting trains, one in Warsaw at midnight, the other in S’czens’c’a (I think) around six in the morning. I could have left my luggage in a locker at Alexander Platz in Berlin and walked around the famous museum island for a few hours, but I decided not to dilly dally and take a bus straight to Tegel airport, where I would read Hermann Hesse instead of walk. The bus ride there was nostalgic. I passed through central Berlin, saw the buildings I had seen only a few weeks before, passed a café where my brother and I had had lunch, drove up to the Brandenburger gates before turning and leaving the town center for more distant locations. I have to make a long story short here, because it’s bedtime, so I’ll say simply that I’m back. Today was my first day on the job. They’ve given me the first week off from the company, which I really appreciate. I expect there might be a very tight schedule next week when I try to commute (on foot?) from one end of Dolgoprudny to the other. Today was all right. My first lesson was with a 7-year-old Russian monster to whom I first tried to impart my knowledge of English of few months ago. She was nicer than I remember. Today’s second lesson was with a group of young Russian monsters. That could’ve gone better, but at least I’m not so shell shocked that I’m not willing to try them again. A lot of these monsters know me already. We worked together last year, even if just from lessons that I covered for another teacher. I don’t know if I can call my work ‘teaching’ as much as ‘spending time in the same room while attempting to incorporate elements of language instruction.’ It’s always been a bit of a struggle for me, working with kids. Fortunately, I’ll be able to teach adults too. In the end, it will be a good balance of work, and a good experience overall. So here’s to the start of another marathon! 3.10.12 The CELTA course was demanding, as they said it would be. The second and third weeks were most difficult. I had four papers to turn in overall, and the first two they asked me to resubmit. I was expecting not to pass the third on the first try either, but somehow I did pass, and the fourth one was a breeze in comparison to the others. Nobody was asked to resubmit that one. Aside from these papers – analyzing grammar and lexis; producing a lesson based on a given text; producing a lesson for a particular student (to be interviewed) with certain problems (to be discovered from the interview recording); and lessons we’ve learned during the course – we had to give eight short lessons for observation by our peers and tutors, all of whom are experienced language teachers and teacher trainers. You would think that giving the lessons was the easy part, since I had been teaching a work load fifteen times as great for the past two years of my teaching profession, but in the course quantity wasn’t as important as quality. The lessons were scrutinized down to every word said and gesture made. If you were but one second over the forty-five minute time limit, you were commanded to cease instruction and give the next teacher five minutes to set up the class for his or her attempt at avoiding dismal failure in the instruction gauntlet. Needless to say, the tutors wanted to see your plans for each lesson, with every word and gesture highlighted, every breath taken measured by the clock, and every activity planned from instructions through to the feedback stage. The planning was in insane detail, but as used as I was to much simpler and more concise planning, I didn’t resent the attention to the microscopic units of each part of the lesson. As a matter of fact, in some strange way, I almost enjoyed planning very much. I wrote a rough draft, a first draft, then rewrote it for myself for class, and then finally rewrote it a final time for the tutor. This final draft was to be written on a special form which tabulated stage, aims, time, and procedure, along with separate pages for grammar and lexis analysis, prediction of problems in the functional language, grammar or lexis presentations. If I had learned to appreciate planning like this back in high school, I may have enjoyed English class much more. It strikes me a good skill to have, when writing an essay for instance. Back then, I drudged though every single written assignment given to me. Today, having somehow come to appreciate planning things, I might enjoy writing essays much more. If only there were a way to go back to school again … Incidentally, my enjoyment of this part of my job isn’t without a connection to mathematics. Teaching English seems to me to be more and more an intricate science the longer I try to do it. There are so many variables that go into one lesson. The students are a huge variable that I can’t completely control. Although I can control them to a certain extent, depending on how I carry out my job with them: I can make them fall asleep, or scream in rage, or frustration. If I’m successful and a little lucky, I can make them interesting in learning, but that doesn’t happen every day. Aside from them, there are still plenty of variables in a lesson which I do control: what material to cover; how to cover it; how to review; what tasks – should I put this task first or second?; Will the students be tired of speaking at this point and be ready to write a little, or should they listen or read instead of write? In short, the whats, hows, and whens of each lesson are only a sampling of what I’ve had to think about when planning. In the end, lessons are really kind of mathematic. Each lesson is an optimization problem. What combination of possible solutions to what, how and when will get the students as far as possible within the given amount of time? Some lessons get them far (when the right combination is chosen), others not so far. I wanted to write about Krakow, where I took my CELTA course last month, but it’s time for bed. Tomorrow is day three of the current marathon. This week they’ve got me running at a slow jog. They’ll set me free (put me on full time) starting next week. Maybe the analogy isn’t expressed so well that way. Maybe this week I’m still free of too much weight on my back while I run, whereas next week I’ll have to carry a two thousand pound elephant along with me – prime print.