Читать книгу The English Teachers - RF Duncan-Goodwillie - Страница 15

Setting the scene: In terms of disposition, Heather is the primary school teacher every student and parent would like to have. Cheerful but firm, enthusiastic in presentation but reasonable in ideas. Her jovial English tone carries across the room and down the hallway, even although I am sitting right in front of her in an otherwise empty room. It isn’t a problem. I quickly find myself caught up in the fun.

Heather’s interview also taught me a valuable lesson about technology. Halfway through, I got a phone call from a certain British car insurance firm (which shall remain nameless!) which paused the recording application I was using. I only realised this at the end of the interview. Mercifully, both Heather and myself have very good memories and managed to reconstruct the script. If there are other budding authors reading this, perhaps this incident is something to keep in mind. If there are any insurance sales people reading, please find other jobs and never call me again!

She pauses for a long time after I ask my first question.

HB: Sorry, I’m just trying to summarise 20 years. I first came to Moscow in 1996 and discovered I quite liked teaching and quite liked Moscow. I ended up going home and doing a CELTA equivalent. I came back to work for BKC-IH in 98. Then around 2004 I went back to the UK which is where I’m from and worked as a TEFL teacher and teacher trainer. I came back here in 2015, mainly because I married a Russian and we’re kind of stuck between two countries no matter what we do.

RFDG: What did you like about teaching?

HB: I like explaining things to people. English is quite interesting and I discovered grammar. Woo! I quite like grammar, actually. There are rules and that’s quite fun, and I’m quite good at it which is a motivating factor.

RFDG: Was it a surprise to discover you liked teaching grammar?

HB: Yes. My family are teachers. Two of my grandparents on both sides of the family are teachers, my cousins teach and my dad ended up teaching. It’s sort of a tradition, so I said I would never teach. I ended up teaching by accident. I was teaching temporarily at first and found I actually quite liked it.

RFDG: So, there are some things you just can’t escape?

HB: Exactly!

She laughs at the futility of it all.

RFDG: What made you want to come to Moscow and why did you like it?

HB: I came to Moscow after I finished university. It was sort of my gap year, although it was after university and not before. I chose Moscow because it wasn’t hot. I had a choice between India and Moscow for various reasons and I thought, “I don’t like hot weather so I’d better go to Moscow.” And I did.

RFDG: So, the weather first and after that?

HB: Well, I’m a History graduate. Not 20^th century history, so to be honest Russian Studies weren’t my thing. But Moscow in the 90s was quite an interesting place.

RFDG: Was it dangerous or scary?

She looks nonchalantly into the middle distance while she searches her memories before thoughtfully saying…

HB: A bomb did go off once at the end of the street when I was teaching. That was interesting. I didn’t realise it was a bomb at first. This was back when the mafia were blowing up each other’s cars on a regular basis. There was this big CRUMP and sirens and glass noises. I was like, “Oh… anyway page 22, present perfect…” and then I got outside and found out. They also blew up a hotel with a small bomb. It wasn’t dangerous for me. I didn’t do anything particularly exciting when I was here.

RFDG: But there were things happening?

HB: I guess so, but there is trouble wherever you are. We were here during the apartment bombing in Moscow which was pretty grim because you never knew what was going to get blown up next. There was also the hostage taking while I was here and I had students connected to that which was very upsetting. Things were happening relatively regularly with the terrorist issues and the mafia in the 90s. But I grew up when the Troubles were happening and I was at university in Manchester when one of the bombs went off there. When I moved back to Britain that was when the underground bombs went off and I was in London when that happened.

RFDG: So, it’s always in the background?

HB: Well, yes in a big city.

RFDG: If you compare now to then, would you say it’s safer and more stable now?

HB: It’s changed a lot, actually. We were out of the country for quite a bit and came back because my husband has family here. We would come back for the occasional summer, especially after the kids were born, but because we weren’t living here we didn’t really hear or pay much attention to some of the things that had changed. But when I came back to live here I realised it really did look like a completely different city: clean, efficient, working kind of place… just before the sanctions hit.

RFDG: Obviously the sanctions are causing issues, but are they significant enough to be noticeable for teachers to notice?

HB: It’s difficult to say because I wasn’t really here. I came just after they started, so the drop in the rouble had already happened. For me, what I started with was the same as now so I haven’t got much to compare it to, apart from 10 years ago which really was very different. I was here in the ’98 crash when the rouble really did crash and every day there was a new price.

RFDG: You said initially you didn’t want to be a teacher. What did you want to be?

HB: I don’t think I’d got that far. I studied History at university, so you can tell I had no idea what I really wanted to do with my life.

She laughs at herself light-heartedly.

Because you don’t really study History unless you want to be a History teacher. Really, you can’t do much with it apart from be a History teacher or a museum worker or something. The idea is that it’s one of these general degrees, so I don’t actually think I’d got very far in terms of what I wanted to do apart from study History. But my problem with continuing that was that I don’t speak any languages.

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