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| Secondary Education Blog |
My Summer Vacation
|  by Elizabeth Ostrow Smith, Secondary Education Representative
I’d like to share how I spent part of my summer teaching English at a summer school in Yakutsk, Russia for two weeks.
You may recall that last year the students in one of my ESOL classes and one of the Yakutsk English classes began a web-based collaboration that lasted about 5 months. As a result of this project, Yakut TESOL invited me to come and teach English at a two-week English summer camp in Yakutsk. When I told my husband, he said that if I was going to go to Yakutsk, the whole family had to go. Yakut TESOL agreed and asked if he could teach some classes, too. They also loved the idea that my daughters could help out and speak with the students.
At the Yakut TESOL summer camp, my husband and I taught English 3 hours every morning. My daughters quickly bonded with the kids and helped us out by singing songs, performing skits and talking with the students. The students enjoyed their time with my girls and found it very easy to talk to people closer to their own age.
We focused solely on oral work, encouraging the students to talk and use spoken English creatively. We were the first Americans these students had ever spoken to, and they asked us many questions: Which did we like better KFC or McDonald’s? What did we think of Obama? Had we ever visited Disney World? Had we been personally affected by the economic crisis? Was it true that the American media portrayed Russia as the aggressor in the conflict with Georgia? One student even asked if it were true that American police liked to eat donuts, something she had picked up from watching “The Simpsons.”
In the afternoons, the teachers of Yakut TESOL arranged excursions for us in and around Yakutsk. We took trips to local museums, spent a lovely afternoon at the dacha of one of our students, swam in the river, visited the permafrost museum, and even went to a wedding.
All in all, teaching in Yakutsk was absolutely incredible. I wanted to scoop up all of these kids and bring them back to the United States. They were smart, motivated, eager, and hungry to learn.
The teachers from Yakut TESOL not only became new colleagues but also dear friends. I hope that the alliance between TexTESOL V and Yakut TESOL will continue to grow and flourish. The possibilities for our friendship are endless. I am grateful for the hospitality, generosity, and warmth that Yakut TESOL showed my family and me. They welcomed us like family. I was so inspired by all the people I met – teachers and students - that I hope to return one day, and I invited all of them to visit Dallas!
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Created on 08/25/2009 09:27 PM by MaryPeacock
Updated on 08/30/2009 08:43 AM by MaryPeacock
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