Faraway's blog

Where's our education going?

2008-05-21T21:35:00.000-07:00

We used to have free, entirely state supported educational system. Higher education was available to any person of sufficient academic abilities. We might have had more universities and university graduates than the economy needed, but then high educational standards don't seem to do a nation any harm...Of course, facilities differ between the cities and the countryside, as well as between the centre and the provinces. But on the whole, I think, the system used to work.
After the switch to 'market economy' (perestroika) state funding has been persistently cut down and 'paid' positions appeared in universities, their number increasing every year at the expense of the 'free' places for students.
The scholarship schemes are virtually non-existent, loan offers are scarce and can't seem reliable to the populace that has yet to get to grips with the banking reality (I don't think my American friends can fully understand how different the 'money' reality still is in Russia...e.g. very few people use credit cards...and I'm not kidding!)
One viable option for a promising student who hasn't made it to a free place at a uni is finding a company that will pay his or her fees with a view to employing them after graduation for a certain period of time.
All in all, with around 50 per cent of university places still free of charge, hard-working students, regardless of their financial status, still stand a good chance of getting higher education.
Needless to say, money brightens one's prospects immensely. For instance, we have long been accustomed to having to prop up our limping school education with a crutch of private tuition. (We do it all the time one way or another for our own kids - and I also make a living from it :))
The unpleasant thing is that now the routine is sneaking into unis - with university teachers privately tutoring their students, writing papers and doing projects for them..ugh...and what is worse, selling out grades and credits...One 'paying' student's remark seems to sum it up: when asked to come and sit an end of the term exam in his university, he said,"Why should I come? I've paid for my studies, haven't I?'

Re.:'apparatchik' - that's a Soviet term...'Oligarch' and 'the New Russian' are the big words these days...

Getting old

2007-05-07T23:49:00.000-07:00

I suppose I am getting old. Hopelessly, incurably old. I'm becoming unable to relate to things which are such an essential part of this globalised culture that I seem to be an alien.
I bought a DVD (mea culpa) for the kids to watch in English (oh the educational purposes).
It was 'The Pirates of the Carribean - 2', the film my children seemed to be very enthusiastic about - I had heard their happy laughter as they watched it in Russian some days before.
Yesterday I joined my big son , who is a 17-year-old university student, in watching it in English. I struggled through, half asleep, trying to look at the screen as little as possible, bewildered at how the film-makers can actually enjoy creating images like that. My husband, who is an icon-painter, is simply unable to face this kind of visual stuff. As an artist, I suppose, he has a more delicate sense of the beautiful, which he nurtures, in a way. I asked myself and my kids if the people who get used to this art don't completely lose the ability to perceive and create anything beautiful.

eLearning ?

2007-05-07T20:35:00.000-07:00

My students and I have our very own community language forum. We created
it in January, after I'd made my first steps in 'cyberspace exploration'. So far the best-working and, in my opinion, the most promising aspect of our forum is its function as a writing workshop.
Well, 'a workshop' is an exaggeration - it would be great if it were just that - so far it's rather like a school magazine where students can read each other's pieces of writing.
It is also a good place to exchange web-references. Other than that, it seems to be kind of smouldering.
How much is online learning involved in a homeschooler's day-to-day work?

The rich and the poor

2007-05-07T05:26:00.000-07:00

'Both public schools and private schools in wealthy neighborhoods are able to provide many more AP and IB course options than impoverished inner-city high schools, and this difference is seen as a major cause of the differing outcomes for their graduates.' (Wikipedia)
How severe is this difference in the school budgets?

Education in the USA

2007-05-07T03:05:00.000-07:00

Our 'Education' quest continues. In one or two years' time my smart and hard-working secondary school students will go on to university education.
This time I've got some questions about both school and college education in the USA that I hope my American friends can answer.
Quest.1 is about exams. It seems your school is much more relaxed and less exam-oriented than ours. What surprised me is that there are fees for SAT, which is one of the usual admission requirements. Are there any compulsory exams for high-school students, or do they only get 'during term assessment' (there must be a technical term for it - sorry, I forget)?
Quest.2 is about college costs. Can they actually prevent the less fortunate from getting a higher education, even if they have high academic ability?

Schooling

2007-04-20T22:44:00.000-07:00

My students and I are studying 'education' (as a language area, of course) and I would like to give them a chance to look at alternative ways of getting one, as their own experience is entirely school-based. Homeschooling is very uncommon here. In their final years of school some children choose to study 'externally', which means they spend less time, if any, having formal classes, and just take tests and exams. This kind of 'external' learning exists within the state system of education, but unlike the mainstream school, it is not free of charge.

My fotki page

2007-04-18T23:37:00.001-07:00

I hope our fotki page can give a glimpse of our landscape, the background to our life ...
http://public.fotki.com/weirdo07/

14th April 2007

2007-04-13T22:48:00.000-07:00

I just thought I'd like to have a 'kitchen' in cyberspace...
The kind of kitchen that's a proper place for 'homespun' musings and ramblings of a very busy working mom of five.
I hope my friends will drop by and pause over a cup of tea...And what a relief, unlike my RL kitchen, I can save myself the bother of cleaning it... or can't I?