Russian Gymnasium

On 31 March, I went with Natalija Oševerova of the USA Information Center in Daugavpils to talk to students at the Russian gymnasium in town about study opportunities for students in the United States. There are a few exchange programs that are worth knowing about, one run by the U.S. State Department, another by an organization called the Baltic-American Freedom Foundation, and a couple of others. But those first two are the big ones.

A gymnasium (ģimnāzija in Latvian) in this context is not a large room in which to play basketball but a school. It looks to be a cross between an elementary school, middle school, and junior high school, to put it into American terms. After the gymnasium, students will go to the Russian lyceum (licejs), or high school equivalent.

These are smart students who are very curious about the U.S., so I would love to see some of them apply for these scholarships. After the information part was over, we just had an informal question and answer period about what American high schools are like. Obviously, one difference is that a teacher might sit on the desk.

In general, I would say that American schools emphasize breadth over depth: one takes a wider range of courses in an American high school (some of which, shock of shocks, you actually get to choose yourself), but they might be more cursory than the kind of in-depth work that Latvian students do. So they were likely to be advanced in their studies if they attended a year of high school in the States. This is especially true in terms of foreign languages. Bear in mind that all of these students are pretty much trilingual already -- already fluent in Russian and Latvian, their English was little short of superb -- and they would be the envy of their linguistically challenged American colleagues.

I also said that American high schools dominate social life in a way that they don't in Europe. It is curious that Americans expect their high schools to do much of the socialization work that might properly be left to the family, the church, outside clubs, and other institutions that do that sort of work. Schools are where you're expected to make your best friends, learn to become a good citizen, be involved . . . and I won't even go into how sports dominate the social life of high schools. As you might expect, a book-loving nerd like me was not popular in my high school, which honored prowess at football more than anything. I wish we had talked about pep rallies, an truly alien concept if there ever was one. I am guessing that the old American adage "High school is the happiest time of your life" and that you are supposed to pine wistfully about your high school experience for the rest of your life would simply not ring true here. Here high school (secondary school) is where you get an education. Happiness isn't the point. Why in the world would it be?

 

Chatting with the students informally was a ball. They were curious about American football, that game that is the love child of rugby and D-Day. They were pleased that real football (that is, soccer) was gaining in popularity in the States. (For my American readers, you may not be aware that in the rest of the world, football means soccer. Most American sports are not truly world sports at all. It is amusing to think that the annual champion pro baseball team in the U.S. claims to have won the World Series, when in fact it has done no such thing at all.)

One student was fascinated by the idea of a host family. "Why would they want to have us for a year?" she asked incredulously. I explained that cultural exchange is a two-way street: a host family will learn as much from you as you will learn from it. You want to see the world, and they want you to see it because they understand why living in a different culture is important. If they can't go live somewhere else, they can at least host you and introduce you to Froot Loops and Thanksgiving Day celebrations. For the record, they loved the idea of Thanksgiving, as everybody should.

Finally, one student was a gifted amateur magician, and his card tricks were really impressive. I was impressed also at how much these students had bonded with each other. The other students were as pleased by the magician's sleight of hand as he was. I think that they have been in classes together for most of their lives, and there is something to be said for that model that Americans adopt only until about the sixth or seventh grade and then drop in favor of "floating" schedules.

Visiting schools in the area is seriously fun. It's odd to be exotic as a native English speaker, and it's good to meet people where they are and find out what their own interests. As expected, the session ended with prolonged applause, which always embarrasses me, and a gift of Laima chocolates, which never does.