Looking for Course Materials...

So, I thought it would be a good idea to use a song to demonstrate types of characterization to my Literary Analysis class. I thought it would be fairly easy to find such a song, but in fact it is quite difficult! It seems that very few songwriters these days actually write songs about people! Here are some potential choices and why they got shot down...

"Kate" by Ben Folds Five: While this song is awesome, there are just too many confusing references (Bhagavad Gita?). Also, I'm not sure if the class will understand why the narrator loves a girl who smokes pot and wears the same clothes every day...

"Cath..." by Death Cab for Cutie: Just too depressing. I don't really want to have an in-depth discussion about Cath settling for an unsatisfying marriage at 8:00 AM.

"Lua" by Bright Eyes: See above. While this song is brilliant, I feel like the bulimia and drug issues might be a bit much to explain.

"Heroin Girl," "Amphetamine" by Everclear: I'm seeing that drug themes are a definite problem for basically every song I can find. I don't know how much I want to rock Comrat's world here. Plus, am I allowed to drop the f-bomb in a college classroom? Even if no one knows what it means?

"Jeremy," "Off He Goes," "Better Man," "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter In a Small Town" by Pearl Jam: Once again, too depressing! Teenage murder is another topic I don't want to discuss in-depth. "Off He Goes" seems too subtle, although I actually think it would be awesome in a native English speaker class. "Better Man" is basically a proto-version of "Cath..." so I'm going to nix that one. Plus, Eddie Vedder just doesn't enunciate enough. "Elderly Woman" actually is a really cool song and I think people would relate to it, but I think it doesn't actually give enough examples of characterization to use in the class.

And the winner is..."Candle in the Wind" by Elton John!

While this song is actually very depressing and also has drug themes, I think the fact that it is (1) famous and (2) about Marilyn Monroe will be interesting for the class.

If anyone has any suggestions for songs that display characterization in its many forms (direct, indirect, etc.) I would gladly consider them! Remember that songs have to be fairly comprehensible for people who don't speak colloquial English.

PS: This is rather unrelated, but did anyone know that Simon and Garfunkle did a take on "Richard Cory"? Would definitely be interesting to use in an American literature class.

Adventures in Feminism

September 27th, 2009

Things have cooled down a bit here, which is pleasant. I have turned in the final versions of two scholarship applications, so I have been relaxing and enjoying Tolstoy and lesson-planning. My chili turned out pretty well, by the way. I didn't have any cumin and the grass-fed meat had a different taste, but it tasted fairly authentic. I found spicy chilis at the market (although not Homer's special chilis, unfortunately), so all was well.

When not working or cooking or reading, I have had some run-ins with women’s issues so far and I thought I would share.

Part I: The World of Women

The main problem in rural Moldova is that you just can’t make a living. A very good salary here is $500 a month, and a teacher’s salary is much less than that. Food is very cheap, but utilities, rent, and clothes are not. Even if you have two incomes coming in, it’s hard to buy more than the basics with your paycheck, especially if you have kids. So, in a phenomenon you can observe throughout the rural periphery of the former USSR, many of the men who should be living here are working somewhere in Russia. The result is a sort of feminized countryside. (I should note that some women do work abroad, particularly in care-taking professions, but they are not the norm.) At the university, all of my colleagues are women. There are a few men who work at the university, but they are few and far between. We have a couple of guys in our classes, but what’s the point of learning English if you’re going to be working on a construction site in Russia in five years? So, most of the people I come into contact with on a daily basis are women.

I’ve yet to make any solid determinations on the impact of this migration on the role of women, but logically it would seem that women here are forced to be more self-sufficient and independent than many women elsewhere.

Part II: Patriarchy?

Russian morning television is pretty entertaining, as a rule. When I have the time, I like to watch this pseudo-Today Show that has both serious and light news programs. Last week there was a program on--gasp!--women paying for dates! This is still a pretty up-in-the-air issue in the United States for a lot of people, but I thought it was funny that there was actually a news story on this. I guess it must be breaking news? There was supposed to be some kind of discussion after the news story, but it seemed fairly one-sided. This lady kept saying that feminism had killed humor. I was like, um, what does that have to do with the topic of paying for dinner? Like, maybe this would be relevant if women were refusing to go on dates to comedy clubs because of feminism.

In a related note, Sofia, my host mom, told me her story of trying to buck the system and keep her own name when she got married. Her husband’s side of the family got too upset, so she caved. I explained to her that in U.S. people tend to freak out about this as well, as I’m sure Nicole and Chris Person-Rennell can attest to!

Part III: Women’s Organizations

I had the happy opportunity to meet up with Christine, a Peace Corps Volunteer here in Comrat. She is currently working with two organizations, a youth volunteer league and a women’s rights organization, to help them build capacity and apply for grants. They are currently working on getting a grant from UNIFEM to strengthen the inadequate enforcement of women’s rights laws currently on the books in Moldova. They would like to start up a business center and microloan program to empower women entrepreneurs in the south of Moldova with the UNIFEM money. I hope they get the grant, because it sounds like a very worthy program.

They do a lot of active, hands-on trainings to teach people about domestic violence issues and human trafficking. Human trafficking is especially a big problem in Transnistria, so they train people to recognize behaviors that could make a woman an easy target for traffickers. They did a small summer camp for kids to teach them about equality in the home and techniques for conflict resolution in relationships. It even got a positive write-up in the local paper!

Part IV: Avon, the Company for Women

Every time I travel to the former USSR, I always find another surprising example of globalization. This time around, it was Avon ladies. We always have an Avon catalogue floating around our office, which I use as a resource to learn the Russian names for things like nail clippers and conditioner. I randomly got pushed into going to a big Avon meeting yesterday, which ended up being a rather interesting cultural experience.

I have mixed feelings about Avon in general. On the one hand, it empowers women to make money through social networking, which seems like a very positive thing. On the other hand, the company does this through convincing women they need cosmetics that they probably don’t have the money to buy (at least not in Moldova).

The meeting was held in the “House of Culture.” I went with Tatiana, a German professor, and Lyudmila, our secretary. Lyudmila’s five-year-old daughter provided comic relief. We waited a good hour before things actually got underway. Annoyingly (and somewhat illogically), the majority of the presentation was in Moldovan, so I didn’t understand much. But it seemed pretty standard. There were dancers. We all got free “Curlacious” mascara. We watched videos on new products like Patrick Dempsey’s cologne “Unscripted.” (Ugh. What hath Grey’s Anatomy wrought?) Avon representatives who sold over a certain amount of Avon products got flowers. After that, there was a pretty cool concert with a Moldovan folk singer. Overall, I would have to say that it was pretty entertaining, and I won’t look a free mascara gift horse in the mouth. I’m still not sure whether Avon is good or evil, but I think that their marketing department is very smart.

I have killed the most magnificent centipede

There was a gross centipede haunting my room and I have conquered him.

Or rather, Sofia has killed him with a towel.

Thrice, I have fought the dread centipede.

Twice, it evaded me. But not this time.

I have to say it was the most attractive centipede I have ever seen. It was golden-colored, with thin, long, multicolored legs. But still, gross.

Like, Beowulf, we have slayed a monster. Huzzah!

Chili

My goal for tomorrow is to make chili. I am without my beloved crock pot, so I'm going to have to improvise. I have found a fairly simple recipe from the Food Network website, which I am going to snazz up by adding more vegetables to.

I have translated tricky words of ingredients into Russian. Today, I'm going to see if I can buy the dry ingredients at Fourchette, our grocery store.

Tomorrow: the markets. Wish me luck!

Admiring the stack of Russian books on my coffee table

This blog entry may only be interesting to my language-learning friends, but considering how many of them I know, I don’t think it will be a bad thing!

Last night, I told Sofia that I like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and she was like, “I have a whole library in the back! I have 20 volumes of Tolstoy!” And then she proceded to bring me every single volume of Tolstoy, as well as two volumes of Dostoevsky, and some Bulgakov to boot. To make a long story short, I now have about seven volumes of Russian classics in my room, and Sofia is expecting me to read them!

I took a crack at War and Peace last night and it turned out better than I expected. The first paragraph is still hilarious. (I remember getting a Quiz Bowl question about famous first lines—I nailed the War and Peace one: “Eh bien, mon prince, Gênes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, de поместья de la famille Buonaparte...”) Having read it twice, I can follow what’s going on without too much difficulty. (The fact that about 20% of the first few chapters is in French helps, too!) I made it through two chapters, right up to the point where Pierre shows up at the party and starts making everyone uncomfortable. Excellent.

One of the main reasons I was excited to come to Moldova was the chance to polish up my Russian. Those of you who studied at the Critical Languages Institute may remember the discussion of the “Terminal 2’s” among Russian language learners. Namely: People who study Russian at the college level seem to all graduate at an intermediate level. They can get along fine in Russophone environments, but they can’t speak Russian at a professional level. So, my language goal here is to boost from intermediate to professional in nine months. Seems doable.

I should also add here a brief note about the linguistic situation in Moldova. Basically, the national language is Moldovan/Romanian (the name of the language is a very political question...must tread lightly here). However, as many people have noted to me, you are better off using Russian if you don’t know the person you are conversing with. You are much more likely to run into a Moldovan citizen who doesn’t speak Moldovan than a Moldovan citizen who doesn’t speak Russian.

Furthermore, the region of Gagauzia is primarily Russophone. Most of the Gagauz here speak Russian as their language of daily communication, although older generations tend to speak Gagauz more often. (Thanks to my Friday class for explaining this to me!) This tendency is made stronger by the fact that there are many Bulgarians, Russians, and Ukrainians who live here, so they use Russian as a means of communicating with the Gagauz. This is a pretty standard pattern among minority communities in the former USSR. (Case-in-point: Russophone Armenian ethnic communities in Tbilisi, Georgia.)

So, I was overall incredibly lucky to come to a region in the former USSR where I could really develop my Russian skills!

Sofia, the woman I live with, speaks to me almost entirely in Russian. (She is working on her English, but is still in the beginning stages!) She is a German professor at the university, and she also speaks Gagauz. At home, we watch Russian television almost exclusively, which is fun! We have GTV, which is Gagauzian. The broadcast news in Moldovan, Gagauz, and Russian. (They also play Turkish music videos constantly, leading Sofia to jokingly call it “TTV” instead of GTV.) I feel much more connected to what is going on when I can watch news reports of events in Comrat in Russian! We also get “Rossiya,” which is the main Russian state channel. There are also some Moldovan channels that broadcast in Russian. It’s a good mix of shows.

The other professors in the kafedra (I guess this would be translated “department”) speak Russian basically all the time. They like the practice their English with me, but the German teachers generally don’t speak English, so they usually speak in Russian in order to be polite to them. Right now, I can understand what they are saying to me and follow conversations, but I tend to miss a lot of what they are saying to each other. I think quick conversations are one of the hardest things to follow, as a rule. Sometimes it gets depressing, but I am comforted by the fact that Feruz, our Fulbrighter from Uzbekistan at ASU, improved his English immensely while he was living in America. If Feruz can do it, so can I!

I had the chance to interview Olga Kagan, a pretty awesome Russian scholar at UCLA, and she told me the best way to improve my Russian is to get a big fat novel and read every day. I’ve taken her to heart! As far as reading practice goes, I’m still working away at Harry Potter. I finished 1-3 over the last school year, so I’m tackling the challenge of Book 5 right now. Let me tell you, Book 5 is no joke. I think it takes me 4-5 minutes a page. It’s a lot of fun, however, and the entertaining story keeps my attention. I think I’m going to have to split my time between War and Peace and Harry Potter, though. Prince Andrei is about to show up in the book. There’s nothing to keep you plugging through those Russian sentences like Prince Andrei. For those of you who haven’t read War and Peace, I just have to say that you are missing out.

So, my Russian study plan seems to be going fairly well. I’m hoping to start meeting with a Russian tutor. Christine, a Peace Corps volunteer here, told me there was a really good one in Hincesti, which is about 30 minutes away by bus, so it might be worth it.

Any other language acquisition suggestions?

Can We PLEASE Talk About Grendel Now?

September 17, 2009

Today was quite the day. Frankly, by the end of it, I needed a beer.

I had surprising success in my American Folklore and Myth class today. We read a Native American creation myth and discussed it. Well, I guess I can’t really say that we discussed it, but I had a lot of success with getting the students to apply the grammatical structures from the text into everyday, conversational English. Getting most of them to talk is like pulling teeth, but I felt proud that by the end, at least everyone could use the preposition “beside” more or less correctly.

Mariana, one of the girls who attended the conversational club meeting I had yesterday, showed up for the class and sat in on the whole lesson! I took it as a big compliment that she actually wanted to take a class she wasn’t signed up for.

The second class, British Literature, was much more draining. This is one of the classes I have with the Turkish students. We were talking about Beowulf and reading parts of the text (in translation from Old English, of course). The texts were rather hard for the class, and even the best student exclaimed that Beowulf was making her feel stupid. To boot, we kept getting derailed by Turkish nationalism.

The two best English speakers in the class were in a very heated argument (in Turkish) and so I asked them to at least argue in English. So, they were discussing whether Turkey was the best country in the world. Inevitably, I got asked to weigh in. This was awkward. One student was arguing, “Every country thinks they are the best, so you can’t simply say that mine is the best, end of story.” The other student’s perspective was basically, “Well, they can all think that, but Turkey is still the best.”

Thanks a lot, Ataturk. You’re ruining my class.

I tried to be diplomatic, siding with the student who (most rationally) argued that the whole question was relative. This response did not go over well with Ataturk Jr. Sigh. And then the genocide got brought up. AWESOME. That’s what I want to do during my British Literature class...talk about the Armenian genocide.

I restrained myself from making any comment, although I couldn’t stop myself from raising a skeptical eyebrow when he made the claim that no American had been an eyewitness to the events in 1915. Yeah, no. The American ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, was alerted to the events in eastern Anatolia when he received several American missionaries who broke down in tears in his office trying to explain what had happened. He wrote a BOOK (Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story) about it, for crying out loud. So, yeah. My eyebrow went up.

At any rate, I realized my facial expressions were throwing gasoline on the fire and brought things back to Beowulf rather ungracefully. And the rest of the class went fine, although I’m going to have to figure out a better way to present difficult material to the class. I’m just trying to teach without alienating any of the students. Sigh. I am only slightly comforted by the fact that there are certainly many American students who would have a hard time accepting the fact that not everyone in the world loves their country as much as they do. Actually, Ataturk Jr. told me later that I should join the Turkish students sometime at the disco here (after Ramadan). So perhaps things will be okay. Although this better not be some sort of effort to bait me into another Armenian genocide discussion!

After that stressful class, we had a departmental meeting, much of which went over my head. There was all this heated debate going on about student attendance, much of which I couldn’t quite catch. Then came time for class hours and paycheck amounts to become official, which resulted in more than a few raised voices. More stress!!! Ah! I really would have appreciated some alcoholic refreshment, but I felt drinking alone was too depressing. Actually, I went home and watched a local program about chess and ate some soup, which was pretty soothing.

I got in touch with one of the Peace Corps volunteers this evening, which was nice. Hopefully, we will be able to meet and share experiences soon. In the meantime, I am relaxing by listening to new Regina Spektor and some Armenian Navy Band...

Prepping for Classes!

This weekend, Stephanie, the other English Teaching Assistant in Moldova, and I went on a crazy adventure involving motorcycles, famish marches through the Moldovan countryside, and some extremely cramped minibuses. But! That will have to wait for a time when I have the energy to tell the whole saga. For now, I'm just going to make a few notes about classes.

Today, I had some small but significant victories. The white board in my room was completely covered in marker and thus unusable. Writing on it was more like etching. This was a source of major frustration for me. How can you have a language class without a board! After some Google searching, I discovered that you can use either alcohol or baby wipes to clean white boards. I did some price comparisons at Fourchette (the big, nice grocery store here) and discovered that baby wipes cost about half the price of the cheapest bottle of vodka, so I went with the baby wipes for a cool $2. Lo and behold, Google was right. I now have a functioning white board! Hurrah!

I feel the white board situation shows the importance of having appropriate technology. Both the American Center and the British Center at the university have white boards instead of chalk boards. Big surprise, nobody knows how to really clean the white boards so they become unusable. Meanwhile, the good old chalkboards are completely functional. Lesson learned here: if you're going to donate something, donate something that can be maintained!

My second victory was my triumph over the television and DVD player. Lying out on the shelves in the American Center was a broken DVD/karaoke machine (?) and a video player. But when I looked in the drawers, I found another DVD player which actually works! Pretty awesome. I can now show movies in class without students having to peer at my tiny little laptop screen. It does, however, lack a remote, so at this point I can only push play and let the thing run. (In my rummaging through the drawers, I also discovered a great book on phrasal verbs. Language nerd heaven!)

On top of my two victories, I had the added fun of designing lessons. I'm crossing my fingers that everything goes well tomorrow. I am teaching U.S. demographics in my Culture and Civilization class this week. We are going to watch "Island of Hope, Island of Tears," which is a documentary about Ellis Island. Should be cool. I spent this evening preparing for my British literature class. Who'da thunk that it would be in Moldova that I'd get reacquainted with Beowulf?

Today I was watching the news and I discovered that Vladimir Putin actually has a very pleasant voice when he speaks Russian. He sounds very calm. I would have expected him to be more strident.

On the utilities front, the water and gas have finally both come online. Unfortunately, we discovered today that the water heater doesn't actually heat water (it just makes the room hot), so I'm still bathing Little House on the Prairie style. We boil a bucket of water on the stove and then mix that with regular water. It's actually not too bad!