The English Teachers. RF Duncan-Goodwillie
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 20th 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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Christopher James Leckenby (CJL)
Setting the scene: We move around a lot between one room and another as we start our interview, just before the bulk of the staff come into work. It’s midway through the academic year in Moscow and everyone wants to get things done. Chris is of this mindset, but he takes his time to speak about things. His careful deliberation while thinking, talking and working is something I’ve seen in many Canadians I’ve met. The same goes for the strong opinions the tall Canadian is ready to voice.
CJL: I’ve been working here in Moscow since October 2014. Prior to that I had some work experience in northern Canada and TA-ing at university. Apart from completing CELTA and another teaching course, that’s the extent of my exposure to education as a field or as a career. I specialised in Political Science when I was in university. I was initially hoping that would be my career field and I’m still hoping it will be. It was what I was initially aiming for when I was doing my studies. Teaching was something I sort of fell into as a result of changing circumstances.
RFDG: If it’s not too personal, what was the change in circumstances that made you change to teaching?
CJL: When I was in university, I had certain ways of doing things. Ways I would tackle work, ways I would prioritise, ways I would manage my time. They were sufficient when I was in high school and they allowed me to do very well. They worked for a little while in university, but as I started moving up through the years and the work got heavier and more intensive they weren’t really cutting it anymore.
Consequently, I ran into a bit of a wall where I wasn’t able to do it anymore, so there was work that didn’t get done because I couldn’t finish it and that was quite a big blow to me – a big blow to my ego. It was a blow psychologically because school was really my whole life at that point. I didn’t really have anything outside of school that I invested a lot of time and effort in. So, when things started going wrong it was really, really destabilising and I didn’t really properly recover from that. I think I underestimated just how serious it would be.
So, by the time I finally finished my undergrad I thought, “You know what, I need to move in a different direction for a little bit and try a different field and a different life.” You know, get some new experiences doing something else, so hopefully I could kind of hit the reset button and salvage what had been, in some ways, a disappointing couple of years.
RFDG: That makes sense, but most people would not move to a completely different country like Russia. What made you choose Moscow?
CJL: Moscow is somewhere I’ve wanted to live and visit since I was about 12 years old. It was number one on my bucket list for years. It was sort of two