We’ve already covered the fact that messaging/texting/blogging on the intarweb improves our writing and strengthens our grasp on grammar, but my current occupation seems to take that learning curve and make it look like someone flat-lined.

Teaching English having only a degree in Russian and Philosophy is a lot more involved than simply being a native speaker. Sure, I can tell you with incredible accuracy if a sentence or utterance is logical and ‘can’ or ‘cannot’ be understood by English speakers. But before August 10th, I probably couldn’t have told you why. I never mix my articles, or misconjugate a verb, but I had no idea the rules or exceptions. English doesn’t have 6 noun declensions, but instead has 12 verb tenses and that doesn’t include adding rules for aspects, voices and moods. English is moody.

Since I hardly update even biweekly, adding categories seems facetious. I end up talking about work, and not work in every post. Earlier this week several of the AH teachers went to Mister Gamburger (Russian doesn’t have a soft h and they think g is closer than their hard h). Mister Gamburger is Vladimir’s attempt at a western style restaurant. The building, on the inside, looks like any Burger King or McDonalds if they didn’t have a logo to paste everywhere, and only used pastel colors. The staff all have a real full uniform, which is uncommon for cheaply priced restaurants in Russia. Speaking of cheaply priced, Mister Gamburger isn’t. Its about 10% cheaper than American prices for food that looks just like American food. That’s about where the resemblance ends. I ordered a Gamburger de lux meal and the meat wasn’t quite meat. The sauce was probably the worst tasting part of the burger, until you open it up and realize ‘de lux‘ means they added some shredded cabbage instead of lettuce. Needless to say, most of us had upset stomachs for the rest of the afternoon.

In other news… Last night my host dad kicked my ass 2 out of 3 games in chess. I used to play quite well, years ago. Now, I realize I’ve forgotten how to orchestrate the pieces, having them work as one unit. My host dad, on the other hand, trumped my every move and at the same time was subtly setting up his own attack that ended the game a lot sooner than I had expected. Now that I’m in Russia, a land known for its great chess players, I will be finding a park where old men play chess and get back into the game in time for the American Home Chess Tournament in the spring.

If you don’t click any links I provide for you when you read my posts, you should be ashamed. I give you those wonderful google ads at the top to give you an opportunity to support my adventures abroad for free! The rest of the links are mutual to the other teachers or other learned sources that I think worth your time.

If you still haven’t clicked any links I have given you this paragraph is for you. On Wednesday the last AH teacher arrived and she will be giving her mock lesson on Monday. She gets 5 days to our 3 weeks. I’m sure she’ll do fine, 3 weeks of training can’t really prepare you for the real thing, but it sure as hell can make you a lot more nervous. The restaurant next door to us, Traktir, partially burned down a while ago, the pictures are on other blogs. This weekend most of the AH teachers are going to Nizhnii Novgorod. In August, we went way over our 2.5 GB bandwidth the AH. We got reprimanded. We, hopefully, won’t do it again. Thats the news where I am.

For the next week, I will be writing or copying syllabi for my classes and writing or copying lesson plans for the first week of class.

Quick note to all my old teachers: I’ve spent the last 3 weeks in teacher training and learning lots about what it means to be a teacher. Somewhere along the way I realized that this is exactly what your job was when I was your student. Often, I find myself thinking “Damn, this is hard and complicated and there is so much that you have to prepare for, and when you’re on stage (in class) you have to keep so many things going on in your head at once. This is impossible.” and I realize you did it. Thanks.