As I walked out of the Center for Curative Pedagogy (the place where I teach English once a week), I had such a palpable energy and joy in my chest, I finally understand why people become teachers. What pride when your students succeed! And it isn’t a selfish pride; I’m aware that none of my incompetent attempts to teach English could produce such speedy improvement. I think maybe for the best teachers, teaching is like parenting. It ought to mean one takes a vested interest in another’s development and does whatever one is capable of to foster that development. At best this is accompanied by the understanding that one can only have a small impact but a determination to proceed anyway in the hope that other influences in their life work toward the same positive end.

Today, I split the class into two groups and handed each a bag with some various objects and asked them to create a skit using all the objects and all the group members. In the US, activities like this are so standard students often approach them with a kind of arrogance (though they usually end up enjoying themselves anyway), but here it is such a foreign concept to bring fun into adult education that everyone was eager to participate.

I was so impressed the two groups. They were very creative in coming up with ways to involve everyone and everything and managed to both plan and perform in English. Best of all, during both skits, the group that was watching laughed. Not derisive laughter, but appreciative laughter. Any student of a foreign language knows that one of the best feelings in the world is to be able to laugh at a joke in that language the first time it is told without any explanation. (Conversely, one of the most uncomfortable feelings in the world is to be surrounded by people who are laughing when you have absolutely no idea what was so hilarious.)

Afterward, I decided to prolong the pleasant emotion and went to Sparrow Hills then Tsaritsino—two of Moscow’s most beautiful parks, especially in the fall—before going back to the dorm. Photos from Sparrow Hills and Tsaritsino