I was back in the states for the holidays but have sinced returned to Russia. Here are some pictures. I'll update more hopefully this weekend.
Here you'll see some pictures from the public school I work at. I go in every tuesday and wednesday for a total of about 10 hours a week. All of the ~250 students (ranging in ages from 8 - 17) here study german as a second language, but a majority of the older students also learn english. I teach about 8 hours of classes a week entirely on my own. Ocassionally the teacher will sit in the back and work on something else but often times they will just leave the room. The classes I teach are usually small (5 - 12) and are entirely manageable. The general level of english ability is higher than in Japan and the students are less self conscious about speaking. Most of the activities I do with them center around culture, history, and geography and are presented in some kind of problem solving context. I spend about two hours a week in the teachers lounge talking with the teachers in a mix of russian, english, and german (a nice perk is the opportunity to practice german) -- one of our younger german teachers just got engaged...and she asked him!
The rest of the pictures are random. Let's see....what else... Oh! We had temperatures of about -30 - -25 centigrade for almost the entire week last week. Even my siberian friend was complaining. And my other russian friends said it was the coldest winter in about 25 years. Good timing on my part no?
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