It's a Small World

While in Nashville I taught at a couple of high schools.  I taught at Pearl Cohn High School as well as Maplewood High School.  While at Maplewood I had a foreign exchange student in my physical science class from Russia.  His name was Mikhail.  Because of the perceived language barrier, Mikhail was placed in my remedial physical science class that was for students who had previously failed physical science.  There were definitely words that Mikhail needed me to explain that typically pertained to science such as acceleration, velocity, force, etc...  however, Mikhail picked up rather quickly.  I forget the number of classes or subjects that Russian students have in grade school each day (I want to say around 15), but it was/is many more than the typical American student.  Because of Mikhail's accustomed schedule, he was able to complete his work much faster than the other students in the class.

One thing I did with Mikhail was that I set up a chess board in my classroom after learning that he liked to play.  Once he was done with his work he would move over to the chess board.  I would go around the room and help students that needed assistance with their work, but when I passed Mikhail, I would make my move.  Mikhail is a much better chess player than I am.  I believe I beat him twice out of 40-50 times.  This did a couple of things for our classroom.  For one, the other students loved the fact that I would get pummeled by Mikhail.  They would stay on task and finish their work as early as possible to see me get waxed.  Secondly, it gave Mikhail a little bit of a status.  The other kids liked him for his power over me in the realm of chess.  In other classes, Mikhail was often picked on, but not in Pollard's 4th period physical science.  Those were his buddies, which was ironic because these were remedial students who were more involved with gangs than they were with school.  And finally, Mikhail even taught a couple of the kids how to play chess.  I'm not sure if they stuck with the game or not but it wasn't uncommon to see him teaching another student how certain chess pieces moved.

Today Mikhail came and met me and the other American students as we rode the metro a couple of exits up to a small mall.  He sat and ate KFC with us and carried on conversations with the other students in our program.  They were impressed by his english.  We later went to the grocery store to pick up some stuff for our dinner tomorrow night (the Americans are cooking dinner for the French!).  He was a huge help with reading the labels of different items.  He's coming back over tomorrow to enjoy a dinner with the students of the program.  He'll be here through the weekend and I'm sure we'll get to hang out more.  It's great to catch up with him, remember old stories from the past, and joke around about how I need to come teach in Russia or he needs to come to America.  Over 5,200 miles away from home (as the crow flies) and I still manage to see students that I have taught in the past.  It's truly a small world.