Orientation

Well, I've finished my two orientation days, and things are going pretty well here. I've made some friends (there were 6 other teachers going through orientation with me), and although I'm nervous about teaching, I feel pretty positive about everything. (I'm sure that will change come Sunday night.) My roommates are great-- they're both American and were Russian and linguistics majors. They both speak some Russian and like to practice around the house. I am worried a bit that my Russian won't improve much, so that's good. Our TV doesn't work, and that's how I picked up a lot of Russian last time-- I think I might buy some Russian DVDs. Also I can't start Russian classes yet because I don't have all my hours and I might end up with a conflicting class-- which I really hope doesn't happen because I really want to take a class. If I can't take an advanced class, I might take a slightly lower level than I'm at just for practice. Or, see if I can get a tutor.

Anyway, I'm not sure how much I learned at orientation because we had a lot of people talking at us and it was a bit much to take in. But all of us have mentors who have taught awhile, and I'm going to meet with mine in a couple hours. I did make some friends at orientation, as I mentioned. I kind of think of them as "the Brits" even though one is an Afrikaner and no more British than I am. I had a couple beers with them after orientation last night and we talked a lot about all of our different accents (one of the actual Brits is English and the other Welsh so we were all pretty different in that respect). And we talked about British and American TV and they all agreed that the ending to American Life on Mars was ridiculous and lame. We also decided that our Moscow flats, with their ridiculous peeling wallpaper everywhere, were right out of the original Life on Mars.

Saturday we have our monthly seminar and then a party for the new teachers! I am excited to meet more people. I have to go to an extra seminar to prepare for a week long camp session outside of Moscow that I'm going to teach at. I volunteered for it and I'm really excited about it. It will be my rustic Russian adventure! It will be really great to see more nature, though there are a surprising number of parks around here. I'm not really a fall person, but the changing leaves on the birch trees just about takes my breath away.

I start teaching Monday. I have one group of kids, one of teens, and one of adults. I'm only teaching 11 real hours (I have no idea how many academic hours that is), thank God. They'll give me more classes as other teachers go home or they get more students. I'm pretty nervous, especially as they don't have a copy of all of the books for me to look at. But I'll talk to my mentor about it and I'm sure there will be at least a shared copy that I can Xerox some stuff out of or something.