Calling all in transit

The night sky was dark and vast, and to the left I could see the Orion constellation with clarity. It was nearly the perfect night ... except that it was 5:30 in the morning. This was how my first day working for Akcent-International House Prague began, and my friends who know that I normally enjoy an early wake-up call as much as I like purple cabbage bathed in tartar sauce will get a kick out of the fact that two weekday classes start at 8:30, two others at 8 and one more at 7:30. Baldy, I don't think we're in Korea anymore.

(UPDATE:  One astute colleague has accused me of grumbling too much about my schedule. Indeed, his weekdays start, on average, earlier than mine: 8, 8, 8:30, 7:30, 7. So this morning schedule is new to me, especially when compared to my 3:10 p.m. starts in South Korea, but far from unfair. Not complaining, just adjusting.)

Today, I caught the 7:03 bus to Budejovicka, rode two subway lines and walked five minutes to the modern and pristine Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty building. Radio Free Europe, backed by U.S. taxpayer money, began as a means to provide uncensored news to Communist-bloc countries and now is broadcast in 21 Eastern European and Middle Eastern nations.



Our school has been hired to teach two types of courses there: one for general English skills, the other geared toward the broadcasters, most of whom must read stories in English, understand them, and then translate or talk about them in their native tongue to listeners or viewers in their home countries.

The students in my three classes today come from Afghanistan, Belarus, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Georgia, Iran, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkmenistan. One student is a former press secretary for a ministry of defense. Another started several reformist newspapers in Iran and was shut down every time before he was told rather forcefully to leave without packing up any of the books on his shelves or any other of his possessions. One student from my advanced-level broadcaster-specific class has written a book, Cold Peace, that examines the Russian invention in Georgia and draws parallels between the Caucasus and Kosovo. In my general English class, the students include a guitar player, a singer, and a Ph.D. in math and/or maths.

To clarify the purposes of the two classes:

• English for Broadcasters enables the students to read or listen to news stories (or speeches) and examine the language used so they can make inferences and grasp detailed meanings or subtexts. There is some general English sprinkled in, particularly collocations that don't exist in their language. For example, I did a fill-in-the-blank from a BBC article about Vladimir Putin, who is expected to "return _______ the top post" in Russia. Some students took "top" literally and thought the missing word was "on"; I told them that the "top" meant nothing in terms of the missing word but was part of the verb-preposition collocation return to -- he is returning to a place he had been before. (The tough part about collocations is that there are no rules to many of them and can be learned only through repetition or a phenomenal memory.)
• The general English class is open to anyone, not necessarily broadcasters, and, as the name implies, teaches grammar, vocabulary, and skills for listening, reading, writing and speaking.

I'm scheduled to teach 12 90-minute classes a week, all off campus. I'll also teach at firms such as SAP and Allianz, and a course at the School of Tourism. It's 8:30 at night now, which takes on a meaning it hasn't had in a long time -- an hour or so until bedtime and nine more hours before another walk underneath the stars.