when I like Russia better than America: education

It always feels a little funny, to realize, “Oh! I wish we did it like this at home. This is so great.” Recently, I’ve had a lot of those realizations in class. Obviously, not all of these are workable in the regular American education system, but they’re still worth noting.

1. lots of class time. With language learning, it’s so helpful to have 5 hours a day having basically a conversation with a very intelligent, informed, and patient native speaker. The structure helps, and the fact that they are long and frequent means that I’m less likely to forget between classes.
2. little homework time. Assuming I do the homework carefully, look up every word I don’t know, etc, it’s safe to say I have 30-40 minutes of homework for every 90 minutes of class. That’s absurd. But what it means is that I have time, energy, and motivation to do what could be called “studying,” but which usually only appears in America the night or two before a test. So, I can journal in Russian for 45 minutes a night, reread all of my notes every day, make flash cards… and still get enough sleep to actually retain things.
3. quality homework time. The fact that we all live 30 minutes away from each other means there’s none of that “let’s study together” nonsense, unless both people know that it’s actually useful. 90% of the time, it’s not useful. In America, we know this, but we “study” together all the time anyway. Meaning that all of the mountains of homework we have take even longer than necessary, and we retain even less than we would in the first place.
4. small class sizes. I’m sure this has something to do with the fact that there are 9 students in my program to begin with. But it is really nice that my biggest class has 4 people in it (and it feels huge, because usually there are just 2 of us). The pace of the class is 95% adjustable to what we need.
5. super cheap cafeteria. This isn’t exactly a question of education, but still. The fact that I can get a bowl of borscht and a large potato/chicken dumpling-pie-thing for the equivalent of $1.80 is pretty cool. Or, if I go to the “expensive cafeteria,” I can get the same thing (admittedly, tasting better) for $3.
6. all Russian, all the time. I thought I would hate this. I found 75 minutes at a time of half-and-half-Russian-and-English really stressful, back at home. But putting it all in Russian, using my dictionary when I really need to, and just putting my brain in “Russian gear” for long periods of time is a lot less exhausting than switching back and forth constantly.
7. “just try.” I have never been so convinced that the quality of thought behind my answers to questions in class was irrelevant. When the topic at hand is “what type of transportation do you like best, and why,” it helps to have an idea of what I actually think (so I have something to say), but I don’t have to convince anybody. I just have to spout words in an intelligible manner. If it’s unintelligible or wrong, someone will tell me—I don’t have to worry about getting it right on the first try, because this is not an argument I actually need to win (where timing would be super important, or I wouldn’t be able to just try again).
8. tutors. So I can’t actually speak personally on this one, since my tutor didn’t respond to any of my texts, and I just recently got a new one (yay!), but from what I’ve heard/seen, the “talk with a native speaker your own age for two hours a week” model works really well.
9. “we do it till you get it right.” Our Resident Director told us, “You can spend all semester on verbs of motion, if that’s what you need.” What he meant was, “You WILL spend all semester on verbs of motion, if that’s what you need.” Talk about motivation to get something down… there is no relief if you don’t.
10. room to be …bad, or good. In talking with my friends in the top of the three classes, I’ve realized that we all have our gaping weak points. I am one of the better grammarians among everybody, because of the formation I got at school, and because my brain works that way. I’m also one of the worst conversationalists among everybody, because of pretty much the same reasons. Being graded according to your progress in the language instead of a concrete standard means that I won’t be tempted to leave my grammatical knowledge where it is and let my conversation catch up, and the others will still want to speak better at the same time as learning weird grammatical rules.

Basically, I’m glad I’m here. Like I said, not all of this would work in America, but it works here, and it’s very good.