It's the season of the interns. About 50 newly-arrived Americans and Brits (for the most part), divided into six groups and trained at the school over the next six weeks. Both Monday and today a couple of them observed my evening pre-advanced class ("teaching observed is like shitting with the door open" -Onion).

Monday/Wednesday pre-advanced is pretty laid back. I think seven or eight people are signed up for the class, but a different three or four of them show up on any given night. They're all around my age, or a little older, and love talking about anything and everything. We usually start off sticking to the coursebook, then go off on various tangents. I spend much of class collecting mistakes to correct on the board as a group, and feeding them new vocabulary where they need it.

An American and a Canadian were observing my class tonight. They're both headed to Volgograd in a few days, after finishing up the training in Moscow. Aubergine threw them in my class about 30 seconds before it started and told me to incorporate them in the lesson as much as I could. My students (Evgenia, Kerrill, and Andrey showed up today) were eager to chat with them (I'm the only native English speaker most of them know, which surprises me).

The lesson today was about a Survivor-ish reality TV show where the students had to pick six of ten contestants to go on the show, argue about their selections, and learn personality adjectives along the way (Kerrill thought for 5 seconds and picked all the attractive women--which irked Evgenia--and also the black guy because maybe he can rap. Kerrill is the one who asked me on Monday what "stanky" meant (I deflected the question to the intern) and has recently been sporting a belt buckle with a fake-diamond-studded, four-inch-in-diameter spinning dollar sign).

The interns were fun tonight. I had them participate in everything, which livened things up, let them practice explaining stuff to students, and made my job a lot easier. It'll be a relief though when the school settles back to normal.