Home Again

I did not post yesterday for when I came home my fever had returned - bummer. We decided to take it easy today and I seem to have gotten rid of the fever again. It is rather comical as Nina, Vladmir and I communicate with very little common language, but we seem to do rather well anyway.





Yesterday was a very full day with visits to another gymnasium (#67) and an invitation to dinner (lunch) at the home of an Armenian couple. They have two children - the youngest studying in a Rapid City SD high school for the year. Not only did we have more than could you could eat in two weeks but we were also treated to songs by the daughter and her father. When we returned we successfully connected to Twining Middle School using Skype and also managed to talk to Mark right before he taught my class. There were two very talented 15 year old students (Stash and Micha) who set up the equipment, took a short video and when they found they couldn't post it to my blog they uploaded it to YouTube and I thought they were going to post the address in the comment field but I haven't seen it yet.

Getting back to my classroom visits - History Museum, Math, Science, English,
and kind of a Consumer Science class. It seems that most school maintain an historical museum and the gymnasiums that I have visited also maintain a museum of Russian history. This museum highlighted the military during World War II. The students explained very plainly in the English the documents and drawings on the walls.

The rest of the classes were all held in the Media Center that has just recently been outfitted with computers and an Interactive WhiteBoard. The first class was Algebra. The structure of the class starts out with the purpose of the lesson, teacher demonstration with the whiteboard, group work on problems, student explanation of the problem using a chart, and a group test with results entered into the computer. The most amazing thing to me was the students read and accomplished tasks using a book where the information was sometimes written in Russian and other parts in English.


The science class was studying viruses. They read from both a Russian textbook and an English textbook. They watched an English video and took notes on the most important concepts. Then a number of students read their reports they had written in English about a number of different viruses. They easily went back and forth between the two languages addressing a subject with very specific terminology. I suppose it is hard to know how much they practiced but they seemd to be able to do it with such ease.



The English teacher had been to the US as part of the Teacher To Teacher program in April so she took an interesting approach to her lesson on the United States. She first showed images of Columbus discovering America, then showed her trip and how she discovered America for herself and students gave presentations on how they had discovered America. They chose the states of Indiana, Montana and California and created PowerPoints in English.


The final class in the morning consisted of all girls and I was a student in this class. We followed the teacher's directions and created a Russian doll using cloth pieces and string. All of the students gave me their dolls so I could bring them back to the United States and give them to my friends.



After we returned from lunch the extra curricular club gave a presentation about their activites. Two girls sang songs (beautiful voices) and the students told about their International Friendship Club called Globe. Students often travel to England, Italy, United States and other countrues.

I have noticed that many children have cell phones so I asked about the policies. There are no formal policies written down but they ask them to put them on vibrate and wait until the break to return the call. The attitude is they can't take them away because parents have purchased them and that makes them their property.

The classes are forty minutes long and students leave with homework. Gymnasium 67 has about 700 students and they run two shifts in order to accomodate that number.

It was great that we could make the Skype connection to Twining. I am going to give Rachel, Melissa and Katie, Misha's email address so they can write to him and answer his questions.

I am going to try and post some pictures.