End of Second Week

At the end of my second week, I have four things of note.  First, I'm the only person whose name has been called for "reading" and/or giving examples in front of the entire group, every class.  At first I thought it was because my last name starts with the letter "B" so when she's going through her list of students, my name is one of the first on the list.   But, during that fourth class when it happened again and everyone noticed that I'd been called on during every class...yeah, I'm thinking it's not coincidence.  And it's not that I'm entirely comfortable either, maybe it's that my pronunciation isn't terrible?  No idea, but we'll see if it happens again next class.


Second - another student in class speaks Czech!  It was totally amazing and blew my mind!  He was speaking so rapidly that it was all I could do to keep up.  I wanted to say "please, it's been 8 years since I've really had a good conversation in Czech."  Plus, what I had been afraid of happening, happened, I started to reply in Russian when he asked me a yes or no question, saying "da" instead of "ano."  I hope we get to talk more than just the brief amounts of time we've had so far.

Three - She's a very Russian teacher, has a very European teaching style.  If a student asks her a question that she considers obvious, she might not even answer.  If someone asks her a question about a letter that she just introduced, she'll say "it's not that one" and then move on, without explaining why or when we will get to what the student is asking about.  When we're saying all the letters aloud, if a student because exuberant and is saying all of the letters quickly and correctly, she'll tell them "ticho" which means "quiet" but she won't tell them it's because they're doing a good job, or say "let the others have a chance" she just says "Grigor, ticho."  This has left some American students feeling like they're doing something wrong when they're told "ticho."  Her style of teaching is quite familiar to me, I spent a few years studying at Masarykova University in Brno studying Czech, nearly all of my professors there were this abrupt in the classroom.  The teacher is not unfriendly, but they do have a plan and do not like to explain themselves.  It's just a vastly different style than usually seen in the States.

Four - We got our homework back on Wednesday from our first homework assignment!  I got an A, YaY!  And now about to do my third homework assignment....
~