This has been an exhausting day. Great, but exhausting. It was, as the Russians would say, насыщенный, which means something along the lines of satiated or saturated. Today, three teachers presented their lessons; fortunately, I was third. The extra few hours of time to think about my lesson and the experience of watching the first two presentations definitely helped.
That said, my first "class" did not go very smoothly. It started well enough, and we played some icebreaker games (draw cards and answer questions based on the suit of the card, toss a koosh ball around the room and introduce yourself), but I wasn't quite as prepared for the grammar presentation as I should have been. I reviewed how to form and use possessive adjectives (I goes with me; you goes with your) and talked about contractions (including the infamous its versus it's). It was tricky to "teach" this material to a bunch of native English speakers, and that had me a bit off balance, but at one point I wrote "her's" on the board where I should I written "she's." We all had a good laugh about that one. I also jumped ahead in my syllabus and assigned the wrong in-class activity, so had it been a class of real students, I would have completely confused everybody. But, I more or less recovered and finished the lesson with my pride only mildly dented. The other teachers and staff were very supportive and complimentary, and I definitely learned that it is critical to really know your syllabus and all the ins and outs of the grammar you are teaching each day. But, damn, that was hard!
Of course, listening to and teaching mock lessons was not the only thing I did today. When I arrived at the AH at 9:30 this morning, there was a group of American and Russian businessmen in the kitchen (the main meeting space) giving a presentation about a plan to build a gas-pump manufacturing facility somewhere in the Moscow-Vladimir-Nizhni Novgorod-Ryazan area. We met with the businessmen and learned a bit about their company, which was something I definitely didn't expect to do this morning.
Then, this evening, we did placement testing again. Best English mistake of the day? It's the totally grammatically correct sentence "I go to the toilet on Mondays;" I think she meant that on Mondays she goes to the banya, which is the Russian equivalent of a sauna, but it took all my strength not to laugh. By the time we interviewed everyone and graded all the tests, it was past 9:00pm. The bus ride back home was completely packed, but, strangely enough, there was a very clueless and very obviously American guy who spoke almost no Russian on the bus. I have no idea how he ended up in beautiful Dobroe, but he certainly was confusing all the Russians.