Being a teacher in a foreign country (and a student) has really opened up my eyes to so many things. You really can learn a lot about a culture from it's young people. I'm going to focus on two things that I've been learning from my students. #1 cheating - I've written about this before… even the Russian word for cheating really means to copy from someone. My students attempt to open their notebooks, use crib sheets, talk to each other or any other cheating method… so I just had to get smarter… I made four completely different versions of our test on literature and made sure no one sitting nearby had the same test. You should have seen their looks of surprise. It really is strange to me and one of the most difficult aspects of the culture for me to get used to… I keep thinking, if you cheat now, when will you stop?
#2 superstitions - Russians are 'in general' very superstitions. I've learned such things as: don't whistle in your home (you'll lose money), don't point on your own body something bad that's happened to someone else (it'll happen to you), don't return home for something you forgot (bad omen -- but if you do, look in a mirror and you'll undo the omen), don't given even numbers of flowers (even numbers are for the dead), and don't hand things over the threshold (bad luck of some kind). This is left over from paganism, which has been gone from
SIDE: Well, this week, I was teaching all about famous works of art. How do you describe famous art, talk about it and engage in conversation about it. So we were talking about how painters paint, different time periods of art, etc (Honestly speaking, I had to do a lot of research just to teach for a few hours, because I wanted to make sure I could answer their questions). Well, our conversation became very interesting because so much famous art is based out of the B!ble! We talked about the prodigal son and the crucif!xtion! Just in the course of teaching a lesson on a topic that I was assigned to teach! Isn't that amazing?
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