Yet another facet to this large "school/company" of foreign languages: a camp for kids during the holidays! As strange as it sounded to work at a "winter camp," teaching English to kids for a week, I signed up anyway, figuring at least I would get a breath of fresh air and have some time to do some winter activities. Best of all, I would accumulate more vacation time by working during our break, which I could use later on. The seven of us teachers packed our bags, and headed out to the "Sanatorium," a building on camp property used for the elderly who need to rest and receive treatments.
As the name suggests, the building is a little creepy, and rather run down, with low lights and dark hallways. The elevators were turned off, a new program I can only guess to get us into shape as we trekked up to the 8th floor every day, sometimes twice in a row in my case, when I forgot my keys downstairs....During the camp the electricity often shut down, as the generator failed again, and again and again. Fortunately this usually happened during daylight hours. Unfortunately the photo copy machine suffered greatly without power, and we'd have to hope that the electricity would somehow start running before our classes....The food in the cafeteria was plentiful, thank goodness, with plenty of Russian style salads, covered in mayonnaise, plenty of hot dogs, and meat, including liver and tongue....but we never starved that's for sure, having unlimited access to food and no responsibilities to clean up the dishes after ourselves.
The rest of "BKC Country," as the camp is fondly called, is actually a very nice resort, with a river (rather frozen), trails great for cross country skiing, sledding, and a frozen basketball court which worked well enough as an ice skating rink. In the afternoon after lunch we would run outside, excited to try out a sport before our afternoon classes started up. We must have seemed rather ridiculous to all of the Russians around us as we struggled to ice skate, or screamed like little children as we sledded down the steep hill. I guess these things don't matter too much. We had our fun, especially as a group one evening in the "banya," a sauna like building next to the river. We became very daring, as we darted from the boiling banya room to river, plunging into the square hole of water cut out from the ice! The next day we went back to investigate our snow angels that we had made in our bathing suits in the snow. For teachers, we felt pretty hard core!
When we weren't outside (for those 1 or 2 hours a day), we were indoors, teaching kids about space and the solar system. I'd like to say that I am an expert teacher who knows exactly what to do when it comes to dealing with children or teens for that matter, but then again, who am I kidding? As the week progressed, I learned as quickly as I could what Russian kids and teens like, and what they absolutely will refuse to do. I couldn't blame them, they were at camp after all, who wants to sit in a freezing cold, dark classroom the size of a closet for an hour and a half learning about the solar system in English? But as teachers, we were also determined to make the classes as fun as possible, setting up running games in the hallway, art projects, various games of pictionary. I spent my evenings in the teacher's room with my coworkers, coming up with as many challenges, games, or ideas that we could think of. Anything to keep the kids on task, anything to draw their attention and make them actually enjoy the class. I felt like we spent so many hours lesson planning, all for a week at camp!
By the end of the week what started out as chaos turned to a loose order, a step up, and I got those hugs at the end of the week. There were smiles when we said goodbye, and plenty of thank yous. I wasn't going to win any popularity contests, but at least I wasn't hated. And best of all, I actually liked these kids. You could tell that they are good students at school, and they know their English, even if all they really wanted to do was play with their cell phones and iPods and speak Russian. But in the end, they won me over, with laughs and smiles. This is why I love teaching.
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