Out of my comfort zone

This English dad in Moscow has been making a few coins teaching other peoples kids English. Moscow is an expensive city and we are not rich, so every ruble helps with living costs here. It gets me out the flat and gives me a purpose and a use in life. These last few weeks, I have been teaching two twins, they are very young and don't speak any English.

Teaching young kids a different set of skills to teaching a teenager or an adult. I now think that in order to teach children, a teacher must have a teaching degree or teacher training. Children are vulnerable and like sponges that absorb or reject information and we should handle their learning very carefully. I'll be honest, teaching young kids is hard work, a little scary and I don't enjoy it. I am out of my comfort zone and a ship without a rudder teaching small children. I have been more used to teaching adults for these past six years.

We meet every day for set number of hours. I see the twins on a rotating lesson plan. One twin is a girl and fairly well behaved, although certainly not perfect. She can say a few words but cannot yet construct any sentences. She likes drawing and puzzles so teaching her is not so hard. The second twin is a boy, he hates drawing, sitting still and learning. I think he has ADHD (Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) we sit at the table for about an hour, he repeats words with pictures like a robot and just says back the words with blank distant look in his eye. We look at pictures of animals, I say the name and he repeats it, then we look at the animals again and he can only say about three animals out of ten animal pictures in the book. We sit for about ten minutes, then he starts stabbing the table with a pen, crawling under the table, running out the kitchen and jumping on the sofa, grabbing my hands and shouting. We fight through an hour and then go and play in the snow, in zero degree icy temperatures, he beats the snow with a spade and stabs the ground, rolls around in the snow like a demon and seems possessed by the devil. It's hard to tell a parent that there is a problem with one of their children. One twin is "normal" and the other is not. They are both a bit spoiled which does not help the situation. The parents are not mega oligarchs but comfortable middle class Russians, they want the best for their kids but have left it rather late for them to begin learning English. They want them to enter an English language school in a few months time, to go from zero to speaking English. The school only accepts children with a native English level of speaking, so its really rather mission impossible but I try my best.

I told the mother her son may have ADHD as his behavior fits the symptoms. The nannies (and they have one each) told me he is crazy. The boy will not have any chance of a normal life or education unless his behavior is addressed and repaired now, leaving it would be a disaster for him, he has been kicked out of several schools. On my recommendation, they only just took him to see a physiologist this week. I asked the boys mother to tell the psychologist that he may have ADHD, the psychologist told the mother that "half the kids in Russian schools have it". I know many conditions are trendy, convenient and more pleasant to label a child as having ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder), ADHD or Dyslexia rather than calling them stupid, lazy or mental but these conditions are real and many children have them. Society is cruel and will not give kids the benefit of having a condition. The psychologist may have said this to the mother for four reasons, one she did not agree with me, two she wanted to tell the parents what they wanted to hear, three the boy is just badly behaved and spoiled and four Russians don't always like to be told what the problem is or to associate things with the west. ADD and ADHD are "western conditions" that Russia does not subscribe to. I will never know the reason, but the mother was given some exercises by the psychologist to help the boys concentration. I am Dyslexic, so I can understand how painful learning can be. Many ignorant people still think conditions like Dyslexia are mental and that a person is subnormal. I understand how hard it can be to learn and speak a language. If you have Dyslexia or any other learning condition, the sad fact is you keep it to yourself, even in the 21st century and in these enlightened crazy times we all live in. People are still very ignorant and cruel about learning conditions.

Without sounding like the late Michael Jackson, all kids are beautiful and all kids, regardless of their background, race, gender or ability, deserve a good chance and should be helped by us adults. As the late Whitney Huston sang "children are the future", well Miss Houston, without them, the human race would stop. To be serious, we only have to look at my sad country, the United Kingdom, where gangs roam the streets, stab, loot and kill other kids. These kids have been let down my the British education system and by their lazy and moronic parents, who probably lack a decent education themselves. It is an endless cycle of failure and decay. My Russian student is in a better position and I am sure his parents will do everything to help him.

I earn my money at this family but I am adrift at sea out of my comfort zone of teaching. After teaching this family, I return to my own family exhausted. I will try my best with these kids as its a challenge and a learning curve for us all. How long will I last there before I achieve my goal, get fired or leave? Only time will tell dear reader.

Related stories: Best posts, Through The Keyhole

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Poor little rich girls

I've been teaching two non identical twin sisters for about a year now. We meet once a week at their flat, in a popular central area of Moscow, populated by wealthy expatriates and by wealthy Russians. We meet for ninety minutes and they pay me well. Their flat is on the top floor of an old restored pre-revolutionary building. The flat is massive and about 290 square meters in size. It has dark hard wood polished floors, high ceilings, a coffee table the size of a my flat and expensive heavy cream silk curtains on every window in the living room. The girls are well mannered and polite but rather matter of fact about their situation, probably because they don't know any different. The mother, we will call "Mrs S" is separated or divorced. She is the second wife of her daughters father. The girls father was married before, had a son, met Mrs S, married her, got her pregnant with twins (the girls I teach) , had an affair with another younger woman, left her and had a another baby with that new woman. He has fathered four kids, by three different women.

Mrs S, the blind fool of a woman, still loves him. She is employed by her Ex, maybe out of guilt, at his company and she works in advertising as an executive. Her daughters, are sent to summer school in Switzerland and go there every year for two weeks. They have just returned from a ten day skiing holiday over the New Year in Lech Austria. They stayed at a hotel called Hotel Kristiania in Lech (see this link and room photos). The rooms are 425 Euro per night and I would love to stay there without the rich Russians. Mrs S paid for two rooms and three club class plane tickets. If that was not enough, they had a daily private ski instructor. The resort is full of loaded Russians and wealthy loud Americans, that you would probably hear down in the bar from your hotel room as you struggled to get to sleep. The girls told me they spent 20,000 Euro on clothes shopping while on holiday and claimed back 2,000 Euro in tax at the airport when they flew back to Russia. The girls were each given an iPod and an iPhone by their father for Christmas. They have a nanny who collects them from school and who stays with them till their mother returns home from work each night. They see their father at weekends, he takes them shopping and cannot drive, he has a personal driver. Poor little rich girls, I'm sure their father has installed in them a healthy distrust of men and a distrust of marriage.

I thought I would dislike these girls but I like them, sure they are privileged but they have been raised well. Money has ensured that. They told me, when they reach 15, they will go to boarding school in Switzerland, probably marry a rich Russian, have kids, have a nanny or nannies and the pattern will continue to mirror their mothers sad marriage experience. Where they lack a father, they have a comfortable lifestyle and an unhappy, empty mother who shops. Shopping is their remedy and their drug. I don't like the mother at all, she is cold, unfriendly and treats me like a servant but she rewards me well, so I ignore it and her attitude. Why are so many women these days attracted to assholes and to men with money?

My reason for mentioning these two girls, is that it seems to be fairly common for wealthy Russian men to marry many times. They seem to have a preference for young women and an uncontrollable penis that does not know loyalty. As I mentioned in my other post "Through the keyhole", working in wealthy Russian families is very interesting and is a sociological study that I find fascinating. Since moving to Moscow, I have never seen so many wealthy people. Where they get their money from is a mystery to me. I would never socialize or be friends with such people but necessity and life's circumstance has meant that I now see these people in an English for cash relationship. As we say, don't bite the hand that feeds you but please have a damn good look at it, I certainly. I enjoy having peep at other lives and telling you about it my dear reader.

Related stories: A ski chalet fit for any oligarch, Russian bling, Through the keyhole

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Through the keyhole

Happy New year, in this my first post in 2012. Teaching in peoples homes, in a foreign country and in a country so alien to your own, is a wonderful sociological voyeuristic experiment that I recommend to any gossip queen or amateur sociologist. You can see how other people live, how other people function and how other people decorate their homes. I always used to like watching a TV program in the late 1990's, in the United Kingdom called "Through the keyhole", it was a bad cheap show, that sent TV cameras into celebrates homes and people had to guess who owned it. For me, seeing other peoples homes is as interesting as people watching.

I have just started teaching two twins here in sunny Moscow. I don't know how long it will last, maybe a few days, a few weeks or a few months but I get paid for it now and do what I can, I am slightly battle worn and battle tired, after teaching here in Moscow at some unusual wealthy dysfunctional families. The twins are the children of parents who own a business in Moscow. I went for the interview to meet the parents at their Moscow business. It was at an a old scruffy looking building, red bricked and historical in look, hidden behind several vulgar modern glass buildings, in a part of this vast city. I could not find the company and was lost, so I asked a girl in the street for directions, she kindly showed me all the way to the address to the front door and spent about thirty minutes of her own time to help me. I never stop to be amazed at the vast differences in human nature and by human kindness in our world of stark contrasts. OK I agree, some Russians want to practice their English for free but many just want to help a stranger. The girl that helped me, told me that she had travelled to England once and felt lonely and lost there so she had empathy for my situation, she brightened my day. Despite human kindness, that I know does exist if you look for it, I still have a rather negative opinion of people and of the human race and this opinion seems to get worse the older I get. When I was in my twenties and full of lust, love and young hope, I believed that seven out of ten people where good, this has now reduced to about four in ten people (40%). I know this is negative and wrong and I must change this attitude but I am becoming increasingly sceptical and cautious of the human race. I digress, I'm on another trail of thought dear reader that has very little to do with the subject in question. Sorry. I got the teaching job.

This week, I started at the twins. They live in a typical, classical pre-revolution block of flats in a good part of town, on one of the main roads that leads to the Kremlin. I can only imagine that these flats where once reserved for members of the Russian population that had high positions within the socialists dream team as they are grand and imposing to look at. It can be hard to find a flat in Moscow, as you won't often see one block of flats with a building number on it but many blocks all positioned around a courtyard or grassy play area, looking like huge monoliths to a socialist housing experiment, intended for another time and for another population. They cast their shadows over the courtyard and will swallow you up if you let them intimidate you with a thousand windows looking down on you.  Each block, can have a dozen entrance doors all painted the same colour. These blocks must have once looked very grand, fifty years ago but now look mostly old and tired, like much of Moscow and in fact like many cities around the world that were built and designed long ago, for a different population and for a different set of ideals that are now dusty pages in our history books.

On the first day of teaching, I eventually found their block after spending ages looking for it. I took the rattly, cranky old lift with broken floor buttons, to the required floor and pushed the door buzzer. The mother answered. She is a nice enough women who clearly loves her kids, she is in her late 40's to early 50's, I suspect her kids may have been born by IVF. Her kids have three nannies. The kids are over five but don't speak any English, the mother wants them to take an entrance exam in a few months to enter a a foreign English school here. I called the school to ask what level of English was required to enter the school? I was told by the school they need to be at a native speaker level. I am not Jesus or a magician and cannot perform a miracle in five months to get two non English speakers into a school but I'll give it a good try. I made it clear to the mother that it would be a hard job, as I don't believe in just taking peoples money and running. I have a conscience when I should not, as we are all here to make money and survive, shit or be shat on is the new life mantra that I find hard to subscribe to. Russian's are used to buying and negotiating what they want with hard cash but the school that twin mum wants her kids to go to, does not apparently accept bribes.

Their flat is not "bling" by any level of blingness (you won't find this word in any dictionary, so don't look for it). It's a two room flat, with a small living room, with a sad looking parrot in large cage, the kitchen looks 1980's and has mirrors on the ceiling. They have an old worn leather sofa, covered in dog claw scratches and a drinks cabinet with full bottles of alcohol, so they don't drink very much or replace the empties very regularly. The twins share a room that's stuffy and squashed. Books are squeezed onto every shelf in the flat and the whole flat needs a face lift, the Russians call it "remont". This family is obviously liquid and in the money but not at all aesthetic or slaves to showing off what they have, which in a place like Moscow, is very refreshing, where the rich must show off what they have and often show it off in the worst possible taste. The family have a dog the size of a small horse, it has short hair and huge bollocks that swing from side to side when it walks. It has slobbery chops and leaves long trails of saliva everywhere, that look as if a giant see slug has just crawled along the sofa or floor. I left their flat the other day to take the metro home. On the train, I looked at my hair in the train window as I am so incredibly handsome and noticed I had a long trail of saliva slime in my hair, far better and stronger than any hair gel and free, so thanks Mr dog. I'm allergic to dog hair, so I spend most of the time sneezing but money keeps me as its slave and I have two kids to feed, so dog and me will have to get along for now, until I get fired, shot or taken to hospital to use a nebulizer.Both all strong possibilities.

I have met one nanny at the family who seems friendly enough, I briefly met the other one who seems to have a slight attitude and I only hope its not going to be a repeat flashback to the nanny I had to suffer at child X. Nanny jealousy can be hard to deal with. They don't respect foreigners, especially when they earn in two weeks what a foreign teacher earns in week. Working as teacher here, without a contract or without any rights, is a big gamble, you can be fired in a day, fired after a few days, or fired after a few weeks or months, you are at the mercy of the Russian who hires you. Cash is paid and no questions are asked.

 Related stories:Best posts, Life in the hen house,  A wind up toy in a wind up world

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