9/3/09 - First Day of Class

I survived my first day of class! Yesterday, I met with Svetlana at 2pm at the university and she gave me my schedule for the first week. First, I will be teaching groups of second year students, next I will teach the translators (students who will use English in their respective professions), and then the first year students. I will teach 9, 90 minute lessons per week. I won't be responsible for teaching grammar (whew!), but my purpose will be to teach about "Life in America", and to help improve the students' communication abilities. I will also lead “teacher roundtables”, basically an English lesson once a month for the teachers. At Russian universities students are placed in one group for all 5 years of university depending on their specialty. There are several groups and each group has about 15 students. Instead of teaching a whole course to a few groups of students, I will only teach four lessons to most groups, because the university would like me to teach as many groups as possible. In addition to teaching I will be responsible for getting involved with the community, or more involved with the university, and I have to complete an independent research project. My project will focus on Russian and US relations, with an emphasis on energy and environmental issues.

Today I had one class with one group, tomorrow I have three classes – two with one group and one with the other. So once I got home at 4pm yesterday, I had to prepare one lesson for 10am today, and I have to do a second for tomorrow. Accomplishing this task with serious jetlag and without access to the internet was a little daunting and somewhat frustrating. I don’t think I realize just how dependent I am on the internet. I don’t know how I would have done it if Katherine hadn’t left all of her materials behind for my reference. Luckily, I was able to come up with a pretty successful lesson. My students spoke better English than I had expected, and knew most of what I had planned to cover, but I made the best of it and it ended up going pretty well. Tomorrow I will teach two more geography lessons and one on US history.
After class, Anya and Andre, two 5^th year students who will be translators for their careers, volunteered to show me around Tyumen, which was really nice of them to do. Even though I was exhausted I was thrilled to see the city and have my own personal tour guides, especially because I could barely find any information about the city (including a map) while I was home. During our 3 hour walk Anya and Andre showed me the central market or rynok, a big mall, many of the famous landmarks and monuments, and they taught me how to use the bus system and more. I am looking forward to the weekend to have more time to explore the city.