Teaching Spanish in Moscow
At the end of spring quarter when I was finally done with college I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my Psychology or Spanish degree. At that time I was just looking for a job and wanted to start a career in a new place. So, I decided to attend all the workshops offered at the ICC to maximize my chances of finding something. In the workshops I received great resources and subscribed to all companies or mail services and In one of the e-mails they offered an internship as a Spanish language teacher in Russia. I did not speak Russian or have any cultural or historical knowledge about the country, but I decided to apply. I had student loans to think about and Russia was going to be the host of the 2018 World Cup and I have always dreamed of going to this country someday. By the end of the month I had gone through the application process and even did the interview via Skype. Within a few weeks I had signed the contract and was e-mailed a work visa.
Five weeks later I was living in Moscow. The first two weeks I had to work on a four week program designed to train new inexperienced teachers. The tips and resources I received during the program were very helpful because I had no real teaching experience. I learned to prepare a lesson, how to supplement when the activities in the book were not enough and more importantly how to present a new language to foreign students. I think that the most challenging part of teaching a language is to make students understand the grammar and stay motivated without feeling frustrated.
In my classes I have had a range of students from six years old to forty-five. All of them wanted to learn Spanish because they loved the time they spent in Spain or South America. Almost all of them spoke English or had knowledge of another language; this made a big difference when teaching them because they had an idea of some of the grammar points and knew what to expect when learning a new language. Also, because I did not speak any Russian my students had to make sense of what I was trying to explain before translating it into Russian or English. They also seem to remember vocabulary better when presented in whole sentences.
Now, I don’t worry about the language barrier and I just want my students to be able to communicate when they go on vacation to any Spanish speaking country. I love the city of Moscow and my job, although I never thought I would be in a country so far away and doing what I like. Я люблю Москву.
About the Author:
Zuliana Castro lived in Sacramento before coming to Davis. She graduated from the University of California, Davis in Spring Quarter of 2014 with a degree in Psychology and Spanish. In her final quarter she discovered her passion for learning languages. Photo credit: Kirill Skobelev.