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VOLUNTEER INFO | |
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| Volunteer: |
Kristine Fredrick |
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READ ME: The teachers, students, neighbors, artists and musician of [Ussuriisk] kept me busy for two years. It was lonely at first, so I adopted a little dog to keep me company. That was how I met my neighbors- walking the dog. I arrived at the beginning of winter. A group of first-year students were assigned to come help me seal up and insulate the windows. My job included teaching several sections of Home Reading, a literature and conversation course for building fluency among the future teachers. Through this course I also modeled collaborative and communicative activities for language learning. I also required regular journal writing and and some analytical essays. I wrote a grant to get internet access at the English Center and added a computer with email to the center which had no previous access. The school internet center was then located in a different building.
I worked with the Ussuriisk Rotary Club. It was new and paired up with the Sacramento Rotary club. I attended regular meetings and offered English classes at the worksite of one member. I went with the club president on an international conference to act as a translator.
Lara Bethke was a volunteer in Khabarovsk who helped put together an international TESOL conference together in 1998. I presented three workshops at that conference on teaching writing to ELL's. I helped put together a mentor program for volunteers with no teaching experience to be paired with volunteers with experience. We had a good group of us who had taught for a while before joining PC including one retired couple, the Carey's.
It was a quiet town when I was there. In summers, people worked and then left for the dacha. In winter people stayed in. I was able to expand my knowledge of Russian and Russian literature by studying and reading and listening to the radio. I walked my dog, planned lessons and graded papers. Not too glamorous or different from my usual routine in Rochester. In Ussuriisk I could hang out with my colleague Andrei Shamin, the Chinese professor and his heavy metal band. Or hang out with my neighbors, Sacha Verbitsky and the middle school kids and learn to play dorok. Volunteers from small villages came to visit on weekends for trips to the market. My nearest neighbor was Rachel Bush in Snegerovka.