Observations after a couple of teaching weeks.

So we have the new school sorted out. It is funny how little challenges can turn into all day expeditions and trials. Finding class material is difficult as our geographical proximity to Europe and the United Kingdom results in most of our teaching aids being British English. This can have humorous outcomes!

In Briton, a hare is a rabbit the sound of the word hare and hair is the same. So, "I have a hare/hair on my plate has entirely different meanings.

Other words provide additional challenges to Russians trying to make sense of Crazy English.  Lap is a simple word to say and spell but is challenging because do you mean a lap at the track or in the pool or your lap?

English, at least spoken English is such a subject-oriented language, and this can be very confusing for both new learners and people who have a good grasp of English. Let me also remind you that Russians don't like to be embarrassed, so they usually don't find the humour in these confusions.

The class structure is a bit of a learning curve, or perhaps CULTURAL SHOCK is a better descriptor. Russian students are more accustomed to a structured style of questions on paper or translating paragraphs of either language. This is why most Russian students could give lessons on grammar to North American students their same age or older for the most part. They KNOW the RULES! But how do we construct a sentence? Why; "Put the cat outside." and not "Take the cat outside." Both are grammatically correct. Why make a big deal about it? Well if I don't get them hearing how we construct the sentence, the problem becomes larger when we start talking about "in a car" "on a boat".

Sound is so important to how we learn English yet when we teach it we usually focus on grammar rules and not the music of the language. Music is the reason English has such a penetrating reach around the world. Moscow had never seen crowds like they did when Metallica and The Scorpions rocked the Soviet Union like they did in 1989 and 1991. Long hair and heavy metal rock music spoke of peace and brotherhood. Topics considered VERY ALTERNATIVE at this time. But it got an entire culture interested and TALKING.

We native speakers learned English by talking. Native speaking Russians learned Russian the same way. So why do we try to teach ESL classes with rules, charts for timelines, and translation? I don't know the answer to that question. I just don't do it! I teach by using the language, and in the classroom, we only speak English. We RAP along to music that shows why certain words are used over other similar and correct words. We talk about current movies and learn metaphors and additional language tools. So we understand if Dad really put his foot down or if we really crossed our fingers watching the game. When you are teaching another language, you have to be sensitive to much more than just the difference in the expression! Do North American fathers do a great deal of foot stomping? How would a person from Russia know?

While my spaces are filling up quickly with eager students. Especially since I don't drone on and on about rules and the sort. They tell their friends; "Mr Scott uses RAP, and I thought it was too fast for me, but then it was easy." So while I am busy, Inga is less so. It would seem that Russian parents don't think early education is a good value. I was a little shocked at this. I told one person four hundred rubles spent at four is four thousand rubles of education at eight and forty thousand at eighteen. A great example of this is my Russian brother's daughter.  Nashtia and I both learned our numbers to ten and primary colours at the same time. I think she was just two years old. Mom pointed to coloured numbers and said: "One Yellow, Three Red" in Russian and I repeated it with Nashtia in Russian and then repeated it in English. She started repeating it in English with me. Now she is almost four, and she understands her uncle can't understand Russian so when she wants something like a candy she will point and say the colour of the candy IN ENGLISH! "Ya Hachoo BLUE"

Children are like sponges. They absorb knowledge at an incredible rate, and they learn to incorporate what they hear, see and experience more quickly than any other time in their life. They also don't have a negative association with the school. It is all play and fun. They play and interact and learn. My sister played a significant role in a school in southern California that developed and made famous this method of play learning in a Pre School program populated by the children of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Will Smith.