RUSSIAN
This page is dedicated exclusively to Russian, but my education and professional experience also involve math. For more detailed information, click on the RESUME link at the top of the page.
UNDERGRADUATE STUDIES AT OBERLIN COLLEGE
I arrived at Oberlin College in the fall of 1989, thinking that I might major in Chemistry. On a whim, partly inspired by my Russian piano teacher, Sedmara Rutstein, who had graduated from the Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) Conservatory, and partly inspired by Sibelan Forrester, a professor of Russian who taught me a Ukrainian folk song over the course of 10 minutes in her office, I decided to take an Experimental College (ExCo) course in Russian. I immediately fell in love with the language - especially the grammar structures and the intricacies of pronunciation.
I found that I had a pretty good memory for arbitrary patterns, so while mastering grammar was a lot of work, it was doable. Pronunciation, on the other hand, remained beyond my grasp for years, and it bothered me so much that I did not sound Russian that I hesitated to speak at all. |
I'll never forget the early days of listening to my teacher pronounce the Russian word "мама" and wondering why it sounded so completely different from my pronunciation of the English word "mama". That question haunted me for years, until I encountered the groundbreaking scholarly work and pedagogical approaches of E. A. Bryzgunova and I. V. Odintsova, which helped me find my own answer to that question much later, in grad school at Bryn Mawr College and abroad, at Moscow State University.
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GRADUATE SCHOOL AT BRYN MAWR COLLEGE
A back injury right out of college prevented me from accepting a scholarship to study for a year in Russia and provided me instead with a precious opportunity to realize early on in my life how we are all only temporarily "able-bodied". My graduation from college was followed by a year of recovery and then acceptance to the graduate program in Russian Language and Second Language Acquisition at Bryn Mawr College.
If Oberlin showed me new linguistic and cultural horizons, Bryn Mawr taught me the topography of myself. There I learned that while I enjoy scholarship, it is teaching that inspires and feeds me. I received my M.A. in 1997 and my Ph.D. in 2007 in Russian and Second Language Acquisition.
If Oberlin showed me new linguistic and cultural horizons, Bryn Mawr taught me the topography of myself. There I learned that while I enjoy scholarship, it is teaching that inspires and feeds me. I received my M.A. in 1997 and my Ph.D. in 2007 in Russian and Second Language Acquisition.
RESEARCH AT MOSCOW STATE UNIVERSITY
While at Bryn Mawr, I had the wonderful good fortune to write my M.A. thesis and dissertation under the incomparable (and inseparable) Drs. Dan Davidson and Richard Brecht. Each of them gave me an incredible gift.
Dr. Brecht - or Obi Wan Brechtobi, as a comrade dubbed him (ahem - Bill Rivers) - enlivened, entertained and inspired us all with his own personal brand of linguistic shenanigans and grammatical high jinx. The energy, verve, and extraordinary goofiness he brought to every lecture infused us all with a passion for his subject and taught us that the best learning takes place when a teacher successfully marries scholarly rigor with a sense of adventure and play. |
It was Dan who helped me crystallize my thinking into the central idea for my dissertation, and thanks to this gift, I enjoyed every single minute of my research with sixteen amazing subjects and five astonishingly brilliant and kind professors of Russian as a Foreign Language at Moscow State University. I will always be grateful for the twenty-five hours of interviews in which they provided the most sensitive and nuanced responses to the superior-level non-native speech of my research subjects, while at the same time sharing their abundant delight over the successes of these outstanding students of Russian.
TEACHING RUSSIAN AT SWARTHMORE COLLEGE
It was first at Bryn Mawr, as a Teaching Assistant, and later at Swarthmore College, as a Lecturer in Russian, that I had the opportunity to try to set my own students on a path that would lead to the same superior level of mastery that my research subjects had achieved. From 2001-2007, I taught courses in grammar, conversation, and culture at Swarthmore. I was also given license to create my own course on pronunciation, which had been my particular passion since the early days of trying to discover why the Russian "мама" and the English "mama" sounded so different.
For me, teaching at Swarthmore was an absolute joy. I felt as though I did get to "play" at work every day with students who were lively and perceptive and quick to respond to whatever I said or did. I found that I felt refreshed at the end of almost every class, excited about whatever epiphanies had occurred that day, and generally enthralled with the willingness of my students to work hard and have fun at the same time. Although later in my teaching career I discovered that the obstacles to creating this kind of classroom environment are many times greater at the secondary level, I have always been grateful that I learned early on what it felt like to play at work, and I'm working hard to learn how to achieve the same stimulating environment at the high-school level.
For me, teaching at Swarthmore was an absolute joy. I felt as though I did get to "play" at work every day with students who were lively and perceptive and quick to respond to whatever I said or did. I found that I felt refreshed at the end of almost every class, excited about whatever epiphanies had occurred that day, and generally enthralled with the willingness of my students to work hard and have fun at the same time. Although later in my teaching career I discovered that the obstacles to creating this kind of classroom environment are many times greater at the secondary level, I have always been grateful that I learned early on what it felt like to play at work, and I'm working hard to learn how to achieve the same stimulating environment at the high-school level.
WHY LEAVE RUSSIAN?
As I said above, I discovered in grad school that I absolutely loved teaching. In fact, it was so important to me that I decided that I wanted to devote my energies to developing my skills and knowledge as a teacher, rather than conducting research, and to devote my time to working with students, rather than writing papers. I knew I would not be able to do this if I remained in academia, which requires educators to divide their energies evenly between teaching and scholarship. So I embarked on a new phase of my professional journey, where, at the secondary level, working with kids could become the center of my world.
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The move necessitated a change in content area, since very few high schools can support full-time positions in Russian. I chose math as my primary focus, in part because I love systems (languages, music, etc.) and in part because I knew kids need help with math, and I wanted to be helpful. I taught math for several years, first at Radnor High School and then at Lower Merion and Harriton High Schools. However, in the summer of 2011, it wasn't a math position that Lower Merion School District offered me; it was a position that required me to co-teach an International Baccalaureate course called Theory of Knowledge and to conduct gifted education classes, in addition to math classes. Take it or leave it! So I took it...and followed a bend in the road.
RUSSIAN POSTSCRIPT - WRITING A BOOK
Just as I thought I was leaving Russian behind, it occurred to me that it would be fun to combine my love of Russian and music by writing a textbook and producing a multimedia mini-course in Russian phonetics. So I did! The book is called Unlocking Russian Pronunciation: A Supplementary Multimedia Mini-Course in Phonetics Based on Famous Russian Songs, and it's available from Kendall Hunt. You can find out more at unlockingrussianpronunciation.org. Enjoy!
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