fourth day April 8, 2010

Today was another busy day with many lessons, first visiting Natalia Tretiak's English classroom. To apologize for missing her lesson yesterday, I brought her some US chocolate cherries from Washington. Her class was very busy with many activities planned; students created dialogues about being a tourist abroad and they had some of the quietest group discussions I had ever seen. I even had to video record it! (see the video post). In Oksana's classroom, she taught a Ukrainian language lesson, but I had trouble understanding the sequence of the activities. In one part she worked with them on numbers, using proverbs and sayings to help them learn. In Lyudmila's 9th form, there were only 9 of 19 students, as the rest had gone to the hospital to get their vaccinations. We worked on the "This Land is Your Land" lesson here and then later with the 7th form, who seemed more interested in the lesson and trying to pronounce things correctly. I videotaped them as well (see video post). I was so proud of how well they did! I also showed them some pictures of NYC, Moscow, and MJHS. Students seemed really interested in the skate park, the pool, and how clean the town was. They liked all the parks, too.
After this, we left school to get ready for our train trip. I returned to the hotel, packed, and rested until time for dinner. The hotel owner and his friends were "socializing" in the adjoining room; one of them came out to use the toilet and began trying to talk to me, and when he discovered I was from the states, he said "Utah" and "morman". Then the owner discovered him talking with me and had quite the time trying to get the rather drunk friend away from me. He was very apologetic, not that I knew exactly what he was saying, but I got the idea!
Soon, Lyudmila came to pick me up and we headed to the train station for our 7:30 pm train. There we got on, and found our seats in the middle of the 6th compartment, 2 benches with a small table between and a bench above each side and then a third, higher shelf for goods. Across the corridor were two small seats and a table with another sleeping bench above. Lyuda is always concerned that we have enough chocolates to eat, so much that I'm almost sick of chocolate! I thought that was impossible!