Clearly, this post is a little late, since I’m done with all of my regular classes, but I figured I’d write about a normal school day anyway.
First of all, you don’t address teachers by their last name (like Mr. Thomas), you address them by their first name and patronymic (sort of like a Russian middle name). Also, you use different notebooks here. You can’t buy the big 3-ring wide ruled notebooks here; they’re all little tiny paper notebooks. Also, everyone writes in cursive. Everyone. And Russian cursive is significantly different from print. It was pretty confusing at first, but now I think I’ve got it down.
Anyway, our old classroom used to be a fairly standard classroom: two people per desk, in two lines. Then we moved downstairs to the better classroom, so now we all sit around one big table. I like it a lot better. We have two classes, Lexica and Grammar.
Grammar is pretty much how it sounds. We usually go through our textbook and learn a couple of grammar lessons, and then do exercises in our notebooks or orally. It’s a fairly boring class, but not too bad. We usually end the day with a Dictant, which is where she reads a passage in Russian and we write it in our notebooks, to practice spelling and grammar. Our homework is usually pretty easy, just some exercises. Grammar tests I always do the worst on, because I’m really bad at Russian grammar.
Lexica is a mix of reading, writing, and speaking. It’s focused more on comprehension of words and vocabulary than it is on grammar. This class is a little less structured. We’ll often read the essays we wrote the night before, and then sometimes learn a lesson or write and perform a dialogue. Some days we learn new vocabulary, or read a story or learn Russian sayings. Homework is usually just some sort of essay. The tests are fairly easy because they are usually a monologue and dialogue about something random, and sometimes they are pretty amusing.
That’s it, my school day. Class is for about 3 hours every day, with a break in the middle (for snacks). We study in the International Students building. Oh yeah, and our teachers speak to us only in Russian. That was pretty hard the first week, but it definitely helps us learn a lot. I know a bunch of random grammar terms now 🙂 Our teachers are really nice, which is good.
Culture Shock 