February 28

Just about my favorite class, among the classes that I have been teaching since the debacle at the gymnazium, is at a nuclear research institute.  On Friday mornings, I take the metro as far north as I can on the red line, and then take a bus farther north for 30 minutes.  At the final stop, I am deposited in a small town on the Vltava River, which contains pretty much nothing except the institute, which is right on the river.

I teach two 90-minute classes there, and one 60-minute one-on-one.  The students are all pretty advanced, and just need some practice and expansion of vocabulary.  So we read articles.  Today we read something about Mardi Gras, but we’ve also touched on such hot topics as the possible war with Iraq, SUVs, North Korea and Ted Turner.  Mostly I get the articles from the New York Times Web site, but the North Korean one I got from the Onion.

So there is me, a lowly 23-year-old English teacher who knows next to jack about anything, and a bunch of mathematicians and physicists (the one advantage that I have over them is that I am speaking my native language, but this isn’t really an “advantage” when you’re supposed to be teaching stuff) sitting around a table and discussing the Big Issues.  We all would have a pretty easy time solving the world’s problems, I think, if only the world would listen to us.  I explained to them the practice of writing a letter to one’s congressman, which they had never heard of.  Apparently it is not common in the Czech Republic.  I told them that anyone could write a letter, but not everyone would be listened to equally.  For example, my status as a young person who did not vote in the 2002 election and who is neither a mover nor a shaker in my community would almost without question relegate all my opinions to my congressman’s trash bin.

So it’s a shame that the world will most likely continue as it is and not take our advice.  But the goal of these lessons is language, and so they are not all wasted.  The students definitely pick up lots of new phrases and idioms and slang words.  “Flash” and “streak” were two popular ones during the Mardi Gras lesson, for example.

February 12

This week I finally got enough teaching hours to live on. I needed to get around 19 or 20, and for the past couple of weeks I had about 14. But at the end of last week, I got a call from the guy who runs English Services (the company that I work for now, rather than teaching at the gymnazium. Basically, English Services hires me out to businesses and I also tutor some individuals for them), and he said that he had six hours of teaching outside Prague, all in one evening. So I took the train up to Kralupy nad Vltavou (Kralupy on the Vltava (River)) yesterday and taught my little heart out. In these six hours, I see four individuals of varying skill levels. This is a big change for me; until mid-January I was teaching classes of 15 students every day, and they were all pretty advanced. Now I only have three classes per week (all smaller than 15), the rest is individual tutoring, and I have every imaginable skill level.

This new change in my job has had one unexpected effect: I have lots more free time. I find that I just don’t have to prepare for my classes now as much as I had to at the gymnazium. Also, since I don’t teach at a school per se, I don’t have to grade homework. I still assign it sometimes, but I just go over it with them during the next class.

So I have been trying to fill my time wisely by doing a lot of reading and writing. My penchant for taking a book with me wherever I went had already become a byword among the other teachers here, and now I read even more. I may not read at this rate for my entire life. But at the moment, at least, my natural curiosity compels me to pick up books of all shapes and sizes. I’ve said that I have read a lot since I’ve been in Prague. Here, for those of you who are interested, is a list of what I’ve read so far since August:

*Stephen Jay Gould -- Adam’s Navel and Other Essays

*Roald Dahl -- Lamb to the Slaughter and Other Stories

Blaise Pascal -- Pensees

E.C. Bentley -- Trent’s Last Case

William Shakespeare -- Hamlet

William Shakespeare -- Twelfth Night

Zadie Smith -- White Teeth

Justin Kaplan -- Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain

Kathleen White -- Jim Elliot

Haruki Murakami -- A Wild Sheep Chase

Bram Stoker -- Dracula (I took this one to Transylvania with me)

Bernhard Schlink -- The Reader (This was in Oprah’s book club. I don’t think that Oprah and I like the same kinds of books.)

Julian Symons -- The Tell-Tale Heart: The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe

P.G. Wodehouse -- The Uncollected Wodehouse

*Thomas Carlyle -- On Great Men

*Giorgio Vasari -- Lives of Three Renaissance Artists

James Thurber -- The Thurber Carnival

*Robert Louis Stevenson -- Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Charles Dickens -- A Christmas Carol

John Grisham -- Skipping Christmas

Anita Shreve -- The Pilot’s Wife (also an Oprah selection, and I feel the same way about this one as The Reader)

Michael White, John Gribbin -- Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science

Lee Strobel -- The Case for Faith

Benjamin Franklin -- The Autobiography and Other Writings

Dorothy L. Sayers -- The Five Red Herrings

Garrison Keillor -- Wobegon Boy (I love A Prairie Home Companion, but the stuff Keillor writes is just too dry and too ironic for me)

James A. Michener -- The Bridge at Andau (all about the 1956 Hungarian Revolution)

*Fyodor Dostoyevsky -- The Gentle Spirit

Augustine’s Confessions

Dave Eggers -- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

P.G. Wodehouse -- Piccadilly Jim

The ones with asterisks by them are smaller books that Penguin has put out that fit in your pocket and are good for tram reading. They’re usually excerpts from larger works.