It's almost here. We teachers have introduced ourselves (through a very goofy skit) to our students, and now the clock is ticking, counting down to the first class, which is at 4:00pm on Thursday. I'm nervously excited. My first group will be 13 teenagers--I think 9 girls and 4 boys (the student body at the American Home seems to be about 75% percent female). I've been told by the previous level teachers that these teenagers are a good group as far as teenagers go, but still I'm expecting to have to lay down the law a bit, especially at first. I don't want to have to deal with blatant cellphone use and chatter in Russian (if they want to talk to their friends in class, it had better be in English). If all else fails, I can yell very loudly, and I've been told I can be pretty intimidating. But I'm hoping it won't ever come to that. 

Out of my five total classes, two are teenager-only, and the rest are mixed with young people and adults. It will be interesting teaching people 20 or 30 years my senior, but I'm told that Russians have unquestioning respect for any teacher. That's definitely a cultural difference: I've been in several university classes where older students have questioned and even argued with younger teachers, as if they assume that, by being older, they have more authority than the teacher.  

Material for the first lesson? Mostly, the goal is to get students talking, having fun, and dusting off their English. I know that when I was studying Russian, I could barely speak at all after a long summer bez Russkovo (without Russian). So, we'll play some getting-to-know-you games, go over introductions and greetings, quickly review possessive pronouns and contractions, and introduce vocabulary related to countries and nationalities (Pasha is from Russia. He's Russian [note the nice use of the target grammar there]). I hoping for enthusiastic students who aren't afraid to talk. My worst fear is not a rowdy class but a disinterested class, the kind of class that glumly finishes an activity in three minutes that you had planned for 20 minutes. If any of my future students are reading this--and you are awesome if you understand this after studying English for three months--just talk, use gestures, and make tons of mistakes. That's way better than being silent because you don't remember what the past participle of run is. Don't worry--most Americans don't know either.