Category Archive

…that I turned 32 today and it was a nice birthday. Attended a congressional briefing on transportation and development alternatives at which my former housemate/landlady was speaking. (She rocks.) Grew a little despondent over the American way of life as it relates to transportation. Had dinner and drinks at a Marvin Gaye-themed restaurant called “Marvin” that I had heard about on NPR. Received a toy monkey.

Had a great time in Boston with Aunt Kelly. We had an afternoon in Portsmouth, NH, with fellow blogger W. Shedd of The Accidental Russophile (and maybe someday he’ll update it again) and his wife Katja. We went to The Improv Asylum and the Edward Gorey House on Cape Cod, which was super cool. We saw Ani DiFranco in concert, which gave me flashbacks to my emotionally tumultuous late teens and early 20s. Kimya Dawson, whose music was featured in “Juno”, opened for her. We ate lots of good food and went to the Apple Store and played with iPhones.

Now I’m in DC. My old housemate Barbara invited me to stay with her and so here I am, back in the house I lived in from 2002 to 2004, one of the best living situations I ever had. Barbara still has the two cats we aquired while I was living here, Bodhi and Leo, who are the coolest cats in the world. The neighborhood has changed a lot. Gentrification was just getting started when I lived here. Now there’s a Target, a Starbucks, and a Ruby Tuesday’s, among other things. I feel a mixture of appreciation and disgust. I’m staying in my old room, which gives me flashbacks to my emotionally tumultuous mid-20s. But really, it’s a great room and a great house and a great neighborhood and it’s great to be back for a few days.

I’m off to Boston tonight and then to DC on Tuesday. If you’re in one of those places, get in touch!

Yesterday was my first 4th of July in the US in four years. We started the day with blueberry pancakes at a nice little café with a slightly overbearing proprietor who, upon hearing that I had worked as an English teacher in Russia and Sweden, tried to persuade me that it would benefit the world much more if I worked at a for-profit American school in Gaza that he helped found. While I have sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians, I also have sympathy for the plight of the Israelis (not to mention the fact that Kostia’s brother lives in Israel), so I can’t say that Palestine is going to be my next big cause. I also can’t see how working in a for-profit school would contribute to the greater good. Oh well. It’s a nice café anyway.

We went to the Independence Day parade in Canandaigua, my dad’s hometown and the place where I’m spending most of this month. Here are some pictures. 

In the spirit of American democracy and bad fashion, I wore my new ill-fitting Obama t-shirt to the parade, hoping to irritate some Republicans. I think I achieved my goal.

Marching band. This was about the only one, surprisingly, though there were bagpipers…

There was all kinds of culture, including the South Bristol Cultural Center, which, according to their banner, celebrates culture. That sounds pretty vague to me…

Good old Uncle Sam on a Vespa

Patriotic fashion…

… which is not as cute on older people:

There were classic cars to make a Dalarna County redneck drool

And classic fire engines too.

 
After the parade we wound up on an impromptu wine tour, if two wineries can be called a tour. Those of you not from Upstate New York might be surprised to know that western New York state is a wine-producing region. Too bad for my grandpa, who has lived here for all of his 89 years, yet is a teetotaller. I wonder how many wine tours he’s been dragged on in his life.

It was decided we needed to pose in front of this barrel

View of Canandaigua Lake

And a vineyard

And a winery that I really liked - both the atmosphere and the wine

In the evening we went to the fireworks on Canandaigua Lake. It was a great fireworks show, but I’m not sure that arriving an hour and a half early to find parking and then taking an hour and a half to get out of the post-fireworks traffic jam was worth the 20 minutes of visual entertainment. Oh, the things we do in the name of tradition.

I’m in Upstate New York, USA. It is warm and humid. Humidity is such a novelty! I will write more soon, but I’m a bit sleepy at the moment. It’s 9pm here - I think it’s late enough that I can sort of start getting ready to go to sleep without being too much of a loser, especially since I want to go jogging in the morning and have coffee with my grandpa, who gets up at 6am.

In Russia there is this amazing breakfast cereal, podushechki (little pillows). There are probably similar things in the U.S., but I am conditioned by my stern upbringing not to purchase “sugar cereal” at home. When you’re in another country, however, you are totally allowed to eat things that are bad for you which is why I’m an expat. Anyway, podushechki are crispy little things with goo of various flavors inside, and the goo is probably laced with crack which makes it impossible not to eat the entire box in one sitting. At the little shopping center near the last place we lived in St. Petersburg, you could buy them by the kilo.

Imagine my happiness when I spotted havrekuddar, what I assumed to be the Swedish equivalent, in my local supermarket the other day. Well, let me tell you, these tasteless little shitbiscuits are probably the first cereal I’ve actually added sugar to since I was about 10 years old. They do not have any goo inside. They are blander than shredded wheat. They are not podushechki. <Insert joke about how Swedes are too serious and health-conscious here.>

I’d been thinking about Marshmallow Peeps all week, and then I ran across Peeps for Passover today, and then I discovered Washington Post’s Peeps Diorama Contest. And basically, well, I’m really craving some Peeps now. I haven’t seen them here in Sweden. If someone in the U.S. wanted to buy a whole lot of Peeps and Cadbury Creme Eggs at an after-Easter clearance sale and send them to me, I could return the favor with some exotic Swedish candy. Salty licorice anyone? (Just kidding, that stuff is hard for the uninitiated to stomach. I’ll send something else.)

The Young Left is having a protest against the U.S. war in Iraq today in a square in downtown Falun. This will be about as effective as protesting in front of the post office in Ann Arbor (something I did on a regular basis about a decade ago) which is to say, not at all. Still, I’d like to show my support for these well-intentioned youths and take some pictures for y’all, but I’ve already biked downtown and back once today, so I think I’m just too lazy. Sigh.

I’m originally from New York State, and the first election I ever voted in was when beloved Governor Mario Cuomo was defeated for re-election by George Pataki, mostly because Pataki promised to reinstate the death penalty in New York, and all those “pro-life” Catholics in Upstate New York really seem to like the death penalty. That election broke my little teenage heart.

I was registered to vote in Washington, DC, and not New York, for the 2006 election, but I was pleased that not only did the Republicans lose control of the US Congress, but Pataki lost the New York governorship to Eliot Spitzer. I don’t follow my home state’s politics too closely - I leave that to my dad, for whom Albany is like a second home - so I really didn’t know much about Spitzer or what he’s been up to until the news broke this week that what he’s been up to is cavorting with very expensive prostitutes.

Between this and reading Natalia Antonova’s excellent blog, which often deals with issues of human trafficking and sex-worker rights, I’ve been thinking a lot about prostitution: whether it should be legal or illegal, its effect on society and women in particular, professional sex workers who don’t feel coerced but actually like their jobs, and the fact that they don’t call it “the world’s oldest profession” for nothing - that is, prostitution is not going to disappear, ever, so we might as well figure out how best to deal with it.

Part of me buys the notion that prostitution should simply be legalized. What consenting adults do is a matter of concern to themselves and maybe family and friends, but not society as a whole. The biggest problem with prostitution is that some women are forced into it, mistreated by their pimps and customers, and don’t get the medical care they need to make sure that everyone involved is safe. Legalizing prostitution, in theory, can minimize these problems because sex workers would have the right to form unions, contest their working conditions, and insist that clients use prophylactics, among other things.

But then I read this interesting article, which compares the Dutch model (legalization) with the Swedish model (selling sex is legal, buying sex isn’t), and says that the former has resulted in a booming sex industry which actually encourages the trafficking of unwilling, and often underaged, women, while the latter has reduced trafficking. This line hit me like a punch in the stomach: “the bottom line is that if you want to rape a 13-year-old girl imported from Eastern Europe, you’ll have a much easier time in Amsterdam than in Stockholm.” This guy has a way with words. The point of the article is the irony that Spitzer was pushing for legislation similar to the Swedish model, criminalizing himself.

So maybe the Swedish model is the best solution (isn’t it always?) but what about the question of criminalizing consenting adults? I mean, we all feel a little sick when a family man like Spitzer publicly admits to sleeping with prostitutes while his lovely wife is standing by his side, but that’s their problem to work out, not ours. What about a guy who doesn’t have a family? Whose business is it then? You might judge him on a personal level, but is it necessary to do so on a legal level?

I suppose I still think that legalization is the answer, but a government has to remain vigilant about monitoring the trafficking and mistreatment of sex workers. I’m not sure what the Dutch government is doing (or not doing), exactly - I guess I ought to do some research.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t think Spitzer should step down. Whether or not you agree with certain laws, a public official should obey them unless s/he is participating in some form of principled civil disobedience, which hypocritical Spitzer clearly wasn’t. He obviously wouldn’t have any political capital left if he stayed in office. So, he has to go.

The silver lining is that New York is going to have its first African-American governor. It’s unfortunate that it had to happen in such a roundabout way, but if he does a good job he’ll get re-elected and nobody will care how he got there. Good luck, David Paterson!

I just read this interesting article from the New York Times Magazine: Teaching Boys and Girls Separately, about experiments with single-sex education in public schools in the U.S.

I reject the essentializing of gender, the idea that all males behave one way and all females behave another way. Studies about gender and sex differences are inherently flawed: since people are always raised in a society with differentiated sex roles, there is no control group for testing sex differences.

On the other hand, in my (admittedly limited) experience as a teacher in school classrooms, it’s pretty easy to generalize about boys’ and girls’ behavior. When I was teaching eight-year-olds in St. Petersburg, I felt bad for the girls, who were sitting there quietly having their time wasted by the boys’ misbehavior. And we can all draw on our own growing-up experiences, I’m sure.

The article provides a lot of anecdotes about the benefits of single-sex teaching, which are believable. In one, it describes two different classrooms in the same grade in the same school, the boys’ one, with its cooler temperature, cooler colors, and active learning style, and the warmer, calmer girls’ classroom.

We can accept that different people have different learning styles. There may even be a relationship between behavior and sex, if not from biology then from society. But we also know that there are people who don’t conform to the stereotypes of their sex. Why do all boys have to go to the cool classroom and all the girls to the warm one? What about the boisterous girls and the sensitive boys? Can we not have schools where different learning styles are accomodated, but the children are actually divided by their learning style rather than by sex?

It seems to me that this is a way to achieve the supposed benefits of single-sex classrooms without being sexist. Sure, it’s faster and easier just to separate by sex than to actually evaluate each child, but would it really be so hard for a teacher to make a recommendation about learning style at the end of the first year of school, and give kids the option to switch classrooms later if the evaluation was inaccurate or they experienced some kind of temperment shift?

I wanted to write a letter to the editor of the New York Times Magazine about this, but couldn’t figure out how to do it on the website, so you get this blog post instead. I’m looking forward to all the extra hits I get from using the word “sex” so much.

Because I worked on the Nader 2000 campaign, I’ve received some e-mails from friends and family asking me what I think about Ralph Nader’s recent announcement that he’s running for president again.

I have nothing but respect for Ralph. I don’t regret the 2000 campaign, even with 20/20 hindsight. We had a chance to propel the Green Party to major party status by getting 5% of the vote. We didn’t make it, but we tried.

Ralph is right on all the issues. He’s the only candidate I’ve ever voted for with a completely clear conscience.

I disagree with anyone who says he shouldn’t run. I wholeheartedly agree with Ralph that in a democracy it is anybody’s right to run for president and everybody’s right to vote for the candidate who best supports their views. I agree with Ralph that someone needs to put on the table the issues that the Democrats are avoiding.

I just don’t think anything is going to come of this campaign. He got 3% of the vote in 2000, even less in 2004. As in 2004, he’s running as an independent, which means he’s not helping to build an alternative party. I think this is his biggest mistake. We know he’s not going to win, but there would be some purpose to his campaign if he were working with a progressive party.

So, I can’t say I have a stance. I’m still supporting Obama. But I still believe in Ralph.

I watched “An Unreasonable Man” again the other day. At the end I got weepy. I wish we lived in a world where Ralph Nader could be elected president of the US.

The Swedish Ski Games are coming up this weekend and I’ve volunteered as an “attaché”, a go-between for the organizing office and a national team. They try to assign people to their home countries if possible, so I’ve got the US team. But since everyone in Sweden speaks English and the team is pretty self-sufficient, they don’t really need me to do anything, so it seems that my role is to wear this groovy orange jacket and attend the games for free.

Anyway, on Monday, when I introduced myself to the US team leader, he asked me if I was from the British Isles. I know that the way I speak English has changed a bit since I started teaching English as a foreign language - sometimes I try to pronounce “t”s like “t”s and not like “d”s (butter not budder) so my students understand me better, and I’ve tried to make my Upstate NY/Midwestern Standard vowels a little less nasal, ’cause that just sounds bad - but I didn’t think I sounded FOREIGN.

The really amusing thing is that earlier the same day I was introduced to a guy from Ukraine, and he thought I was Russian at first. I still make plenty of grammar mistakes in Russian, but I can fool people with my pronunciation if the conversation is short and we stick to the pleasantries. So now I’ve got an accent in English but not in Russian. :-)

There’s a very funny comment under this blog post. The post itself is worth reading, as it addresses the claim that Barack Obama is all style and no substance. For those not following the US election very closely, you should know that Obama’s campaign slogan is “Yes We Can” and that a lot of Democrats are having a hard time deciding whether to support Obama or Hillary Clinton. The comment suggests that the following doesn’t fit very well on a bumper sticker:

Might As Well Try And See If We Can, and If Not, Hillary Will Do All Right Too

And, well, that’s kind how I feel about it as well.

I’ve been trying to decide how I want to be involved and who I want to support in the US presidential election. I’m a registered Green Party member, but after the 2000 election I decided that the best way to build the party was from the ground up, meaning campaigning for local and state offices rather than the presidency, unless there happened to be a superstar candidate who actually stood a chance of winning. However, I’ve been a little hesitant to publicly support a Democrat, since the Democratic party has been a big disappointment for a long time, and although it’s on the left side of the American political spectrum, it’s still too far to the right for me on many issues.

Nevertheless, I’ve made a decision. I’m going to support Barack Obama. I actually feel that he represents something to vote for, instead of just being the lesser evil, which is all the Democrats have offered us recently. I like the fact that he opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, his stances on most of the other issues are more or less tolerable, and I feel that maybe there’s some hope for my homeland if we could actually put an African-American in the White House.

I’m going to contribute money to the Obama campaign, but to soothe my conscience I’ll send an equal amount to the campaign of a Green candidate who’s running for state office and has a chance of winning. I’m still researching who that might be, but I’ll keep you posted.

According to LawPundit, I am a “Swede in Russia writing in English”. Alas, no. I am also, according to them, a LawPundit reader. This list must just be a list of everyone who has ever clicked on their site. That’s pretty sad, but whatever. Hopefully I’ll soon be back to being an American in Sweden writing about Russia. We’ll find out about our new residence permits at the end of this week, and if all goes as expected, we’ll return to Falun in mid-January.

And just in time too. Maybe it’s just the gray darkness of mid-December, but St. Petersburg is really getting to me lately. Mostly all the little systemic problems that could easily be fixed if someone took five minutes to give a shit, like the disorganization at the post office or all the boxes blocking the aisles at the Pyatyorochka supermarket or the dirtiness of the marshrutka interior. Even though I usually respond to these things by saying “Grr, Russia”, I have to admit that my home country has its share of this particular brand of ”idiotism” too. Take this New York Times article (thanks to Veronica for the link) about the broken elevators at the Bronx family court and how people have to wait for hours to get into the building, missing their court appointments. Really, people. I cannot believe this. It is my fervent hope that this article will provoke such public outrage that someone in charge will actually have to do something about it (besides just making statements that the elevators are slowly being repaired), like moving the court to temporary quarters until the elevators are fixed, and/or letting people use the stairs.

There are a lot of things wrong with this world and plenty to be sad or upset about, but the things that really enrage me are the fixable problems, no matter how small, that are just ignored or dealt with incompetently. 

I need to go watch this video a few more times to be soothed by cute cute hedgehogs doing it like they do on the Discovery Channel. (Thanks to CrimeanElf for the link.)

So, in America, we’ve got a constitution, and it’s widely considered to be a pretty good one (despite some of the other problems my motherland has). It says stuff like:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

H. Res 847 is not only idiotic in more ways than I have the energy to explain here, it’s unconstitutional. You know, if this kind of nonsense keeps up I’m going to be forced to stop being a live-and-let-live secular humanist Unitarian and start being a vocal atheist. Here’s a link to get me started. 

Don’t know what to get me for New Year? Make a donation to the ACLU.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Perhaps I’ll write a proper reflective Thanksgiving post later, but not at 7:30 a.m. on a workday. Which is what it is here in the Russia.

Just a quick update as I’m on dial-up in cow country. Today’s my dad’s birthday, and he and my sister and I are in the same place for the first time in several years. At his birthday dinner tonight I promised to give blog recognition to my stepmother’s cooking, so: Thanks for all the tasty meals, Dianne!

Even though we’re a week into September, it’s mid-summer hot here in Upstate New York.  I even managed to get my back sunburned yesterday washing the family cars in my bathing suit. I don’t mind; I know when I get back to St. Petersburg next week it will be chilly and autumnal.

On the drive back from Boston on Tuesday I stopped by Simon’s Rock College, where I got my B.A. So much has changed in the 11 years since I graduated and the 8 years since I last visited. They’ve built a new science building, athletic center, student union, dormitory, and arts building. They’ve expanded the library, built practice rooms behind the music center, paved the roads and pathways and generally spruced the place up. It looks great. I envy the kids who are studying there now! I got to have lunch with several professors who I consider friends and have kept in touch with through the years. It was really nice, like a homecoming.

I’m spending Labor Day weekend with Aunt Kelly in Boston, where the weather has been outstanding and every other person on the street speaks Russian. Since I’ve been to Boston many times before, we’ve been mostly shunning tourist activities in favor of eating. I wanted to eat all the ethnic food that St. Petersburg doesn’t have or Russifies too much. Yes, I know that international food in the U.S. is adapted for American tastebuds and not necessarily authentic either, but that’s what I grew up with, and Indian and Mexican food with copious amounts of dill in is just wrong.

We met up with fellow blogger Wally Shedd of The Accidental Russophile and his family. We went to Stoli. Maybe it was silly for me to eat Russian food while here, but for everyone else it was an unusual treat, and it seemed appropriate to meet at a Russian place.  The borsch and vareniki were pretty good, and everyone else seemed happy with their food as well. The service was a bit weird (and sexist) but I suppose I could recommend Stoli for Russophiles in the Boston area.

OK, on the positive reverse culture shock front, I had forgotten just how friendly and helpful salespeople and waitstaff are here. I can understand how Europeans coming to the U.S. can find it overwhelming and fake, but I don’t really think it’s fake, just kind of exaggerated, and I think all parties involved tend to have a sense of humor about it. Our waiter at Tapeo last night, “Gordon”,  was certainly over-the-top, but it was funny.

For those readers who haven’t spent time in the U.S., “This American Life” is a radio program on National Public Radio of random, cute, and quirky stories from all over the country. It’s one of the nice things about America. But this post isn’t about that, I just like how it sounds.

The reverse-culture shock of visiting the US after two years away has mostly to do with things like the propaganda about the war in Iraq, and how much religion pervades daily life here. Some examples:

1. TV ad sponsored by some right-wing PAC trying to shore up public support for the war in Iraq, featuring disabled soldiers and bereaved mothers. “We are winning on the ground in Iraq; if we give up now everything we’ve sacrificed will have been for nothing; remember, THEY attacked US on 9/11″. WHO attacked us on 9/11? Iraq? And I’m sorry about your losses, I truly am, but they were for nothing, because this war was started on false pretenses and it is unwinnable.

2. Ad for the US Army I was subjected to before seeing the Simpsons movie last night. Pure propaganda. Made me want to throw up.

3. Young woman on a game show repeatedly kissing the cross around her neck and thanking god before and after each and every answer. Honestly, if there was a god, wouldn’t s/he have better things to do than worry about how some ditzy girl was performing on The Power of 10? Apparently so, because she only won $1000.

4. The anti-abortion protesters with their crosses outside my hometown Planned Parenthood who inspired me to stop the car, march in there, and donate $50. If you want to save lives, folks, go protest the war in Iraq. And another thing? By providing birth control and counseling to women, Planned Parenthood prevents abortions too.

But it’s not all bad here. At the moment I’m at taking advantage of the free wireless at the Bagel Grove, which sells free trade coffee, and, judging from their newsstand, more New York Times than USA Today or the local paper. The community bulletin board is covered with ads for local crunchy causes. And I just had cream cheese and lox and capers on a salt bagel. Mmm.

After a lot of meaningful conversations, academic and non-, and a lot of drinking (and, I must admit, cigarettes), I left Falun on Saturday morning (thanks again to Lenka & Dima, Elena & Andreas for your hospitality), had lunch in Stockholm with Vilhelm and Josa, took the ferry to Helsinki (this time in a cabin, which wasn’t so much better for sleeping than a bench, but it wasn’t so much more expensive either) took a bus to Helsinki airport, nearly managed to resist the Moomin Shop, flew to Heathrow with a spectacular view of central London on the descent, started to come down with a cold (probably thanks to the cigarettes, this always happens when I smoke, which is good I guess, keeps me from smoking more than a couple of times a year), then flew to JFK. British Airways was nice; tasty food and separate TV screens for each seat where you can choose your own movies. I watched Goodbye Bafana. I’m not sure what I think about it. Considering that it was a movie about Nelson Mandela’s prison guard, the character development wasn’t very deep.

After asking me the standard questions, the guy at passport control said “Are you all right?” I guess I must have looked tired or grumpy or something. Or maybe I had my Russian poker face on. In Russia I have to remind myself not to smile too much in public to avoid looking foreign; here it’s the opposite.

So here I am in the U.S., if being in the airport counts as being in a country. I realize now that I missed coastal America’s diversity; I didn’t miss being surrounded by American accents, even if I have one myself. 

My flight to upstate New York isn’t until 9am, so I broke down and paid for wireless internet to get me through the night. With this cold and sleep deprivation, I’m going to be a wreck by the time I get to my dad’s house.  

I still need to put my list of links to “Things I Like About Russia” on this blog, and I’ll do it soon, I promise.

This outrageous story I saw on BitchPhD reminded me of one of the things I really like about Russia: a lot of medication that is prescription-only in the U.S. (and most certainly in heavily-regulated Sweden where you can’t even buy aspirin outside of the state pharmacy monopoly) can be purchased over-the-counter in Russian pharmacies. From a public health perspective this is probably a really bad idea, but for the individual who feels competent enough to do her own research about medication, it is extremely convenient.

By the way, today is the five-year anniversary of the first time I set foot in Russia.

Thistles said:

Totally unrelated to your post but I was just reading an article in Mothering Magazine written by an American ex-pat in Sweden. She was writing about the attitude towards children and independence she found when living in Sweden. For example, when playing on the playground parents mostly hung back and watched. Little children were allowed to take their chances on climbing structures, etc. and parents would only intervene if it looked like bodily injury was imminent. Contrary to our American expectations, there were actually fewer injuries because children were encouraged to test out and practice their physical abilities.The more I read about that place, the more I wish we could live there. I know you’re not working in a preschool now but I wonder if you’ve noticed any difference in the attitudes around “doing things properly” versus “letting them work out how to do it” between Sweden, Russia, and the US?

The following are completely non-scientific and highly subjective observations.

One thing I noticed straightaway in Sweden is that kids in preschools wear helmets when they play outside. Just playing, not riding bikes or anything. It looks a little funny, but as a former preschool teacher I can say that it’s a good way to both protect kids from harm and protect the teachers from liability. In the preschool in St. Petersburg, the schoolyard contained all kinds of monkey bars and things that were simply not appropriate for small kids, and the only way we were able to deal with it was to yell at them all the time not to climb on them. Of course, that’s about the worst way to deal with it - it stresses out kids and teachers both to be scolding all the time. It would be much nicer to have them wear helmets and go at it.

As you said, I haven’t experienced Swedish preschool first hand, but I am observing a third-grade class in an elementary school for my Swedish Education System class. On the question of “doing things properly” vs. “letting them figure it out”, they are definitely on the latter end of the scale. I’m struck by how much of their work is pairwork or groupwork - very different from the US or what I observed in Russia. The kids really are encouraged to find things out for themselves, and more significantly, with each other. I haven’t seen first hand whether the same approach is taken in the preschool level, but I did read a book that said that in the Nordic courtries there is a lot of resistance to “teaching” at the preschool level. Rather, children are supposed to explore things for themselves.

The St. Petersburg preschool was quite the opposite, particularly with the drill-sergeant head teacher I worked with the second year. Every minute of the day was planned, with highly-structured lessons. Even when we had “free play” time, the children were supposed to play quietly and independently from one another, and they were taught to play with particular toys in very particular ways, and were scolded for playing with them wrong. Creativity was strongly discouraged. And when we played outside, we were supposed to be playing teacher-led structured games all the time, though I tried to avoid doing that whenever possible, feeling that they were herded and scolded and told what to do the whole rest of the day, and they should actually have some time to do what they wanted and interact with each other on their own terms. But ours was a special private preschool with specific educational goals and claims made to parents about how much their kids were going to learn, so is not representative of Russian preschool in general.

As for family life rather than school life, from what I’ve seen of kids and parents out in public in Sweden, kids are often allowed to roam around a bit, as long as they’re in view of their parents and not doing anything dangerous. Parents seem quite patient and tolerant.

In Russia, kids don’t seem to be allowed to roam around so much (but there my fieldwork was performed in a large urban area :-), but parents don’t seem to scold their kids in public as much as American parents, and kids seemed better behaved. I think the American practice of saying “don’t-do-this-don’t-do-that” all the time actually backfires, because eventually kids start to ignore these admonishments, and then they don’t pay attention when it’s really important.

So, the short answer to your question is that, from what I’ve seen, Swedes seem to be pretty into letting kids figure things out for themselves both in school and in families, Russian families seem to be pretty mellow but Russian schools are highly (overly) structured, and, well, my American school experience was pretty highly structured, and I don’t even want to talk about my family in this regard, but let’s just say it wasn’t healthy.

Interesting that none of the mainstream news articles about the freak weather in the US recently mention climate change as a major contributing factor. (Yes, believe it or not, snowstorms can be caused by the misnomer “global warming”.) When will we take responsibility for the fact that our lifestyle is destroying the planet? For those unwilling to make major changes (like not driving fucking SUVs, would it really be so hard?), a few small lifestyle change suggestions here. Sorry for being preachy, but it’s all so irritating.

From Jane’s blog, where she’s been posting some amusing photos from EFL textbooks. And while we’re at it,

From this site.

I’ve been feeling rather despondent lately over the state of things in my native land. Well, “lately” could mean most of my life, I suppose, but the past few days I’ve been feeling angrier than usual about Bush, the Christian Wrong, and all of that.

But there’s not much I can say that would surprise you. So I’ll just say that I think Barack Obama seems like a decent human being. Except for this “reconciling faith and politics” stuff. I know that in the US you have to pay lip service to Christianity to get elected, but I really wish that wasn’t the case.

Take the quiz before you comment.