This week has been as eventful as usual. We’ve been teaching a lot of Sasha’a English classes, as she’s still very busy at the farm with Buttercup. We’ve managed to find the teacher’s books for the 4th, 5th, and 6th forms, so we use them, as they have pre-planned lessons in them, although they are pretty dull, so we attempt to spice the lessons up a bit. We’ve found the 4th forms lessons especially repetitive, and it’s not helped by the fact that our two pupils, Katya and Vika, have no enthusiasm. Vika often pretends to fall asleep, and both of them are late to class, which led up to today, when they were 25 minutes late. The lessons are only 45 minutes long! Luckily big Katya was around, so she told them off and made them apologise to us, but it is really annoying, because we are supposed to be helping them, and if they don’t want help, then we could me much more useful elsewhere in the village. Hopefully after today they won’t be that ridiculously late again! Apparently they went back to Vika’s house to fix her shelf or something.
Luckily, our other two classes are much less stressful. The 5th form is made up of four boys, Petya, Vanya, Maxim, and Dima, so I was a bit worried at first that they would just mess around and not listen to us, but they are my favourite class! Although three of them were a little late, they made up for it by being very enthusiastic, and I was especially happy with Vanya because he tried really hard, and did very well. The 6th form is made up of Zhenya and Roma, who, although less enthusiastic than the boys, tried hard, and we tried to make the lesson a bit more interesting, since the lesson plan wasn’t particularly inspiring. So overall, I think the lessons are going okay.
The kindergarten are having an exam in behaviour this week. If they keep up their messing around with us, they won’t have lessons with us anymore. Katya helped us begin our lesson with them on Monday, and that really helped, because she made them listen to us, and I think we actually got something done; Nastiya even learnt numbers 1-5 (Dariona and Sonia already know this, as they are in the 1st form). Today we managed to get them to play a counting game with a balloon, after 15 minutes of them messing around, so it’s an improvement at any rate.
This week, Maxim has been hanging around with us a lot, even convincing us to play his Game of Thrones game with him, which is ridiculously complicated in English, so it was almost beyond comprehension in Russian! We did try though, and I think he appreciated the effort. He’s also been coming to a few of our lessons with the kindergarten, which is helpful.
On Sunday evening, the kindergarten and the 4th form put on an Autumn show for us all, which was really funny. Apparently it’s traditional to say farewell to Summer, and greet Autumn. The kindergarten all recited poetry, and Katya was dressed up as Summer, with a green tutu and green wig with flowers on it, while Vika was Autumn, in a metallic gold dress and matching wig. They gave us tasks to do, such as write a poem about Autumn (one team), and Summer (the other team). We were given Summer, so we helped write a bit of the poem in English, which big Katya translated for us when they were all read out to everyone. Then there were two teams to see who could pick up the most leaves off the floor. Then all of them did a little dance with leaves. It was really nice, and they’d obviously put a lot of effort into it, as they were all almost completely word-perfect. It was great to witness a piece of Russian tradition.
A piece of Russian (or maybe just Orion?) culture that we have difficulty understanding, however, is their attitude towards mice. We have some in our house at the moment, and Galia told us today that she had some superglue, which she was planning to put on some cheese, and then the mice get stuck to the cheese?? We were really confused, and though Galia was talking rubbish again, so we told big Katya, who said that it was correct. Apparently mousetraps don’t work, so they have the option of having a cat, which obviously makes a mess, or the glue method. So we are expecting to find lumps of gluey cheese around the house soon….! I don’t know what they do with these live mice once they get stuck to the glue, but if I find out I’ll let you know…….
I’ll leave you with that, genuine Russian hilarity!
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