Now this is a story all about how, my Christmas got flipped
turned upside down…
Christmas in Russia is not on 25th December,
it’s on 7th January. 25th December isn’t just not
Christmas, it’s not anything. It’s an ordinary working day. In fact, it was
starting to look like it would be juuuust a smidge worse than your ordinary
working day. Two days before Christmas, I got a horrifyingly cheerful text from
one of my colleagues saying something along the lines of ‘Hi!!!! Are you free
on Wednesday, 25th December at 9am?’
…
…
…
?!?!?
My response read something like this:
‘Oh, you mean Christmas Day? Yes, in theory.’
This was to be no ordinary meeting. It was my first
introduction to a class in a local nursery who I will be working with next
year. I was going to be dressed up as Santa Clause, and I can’t say I was
particularly looking forward to it.
My prospects for Christmas were not much brightened on
Christmas Eve, when another colleague asked if I’d mind doing a whole eight-hour
day in the library the next day. ‘Oh on Christmas?’ I said through gritted
teeth, ‘sure!’
So on Christmas Eve, I wasn’t feeling optimistic about Christmas.
I’d already suitably adjusted my expectations in line with Russian holidays, so
I knew that this year my big celebration would be New Year and not Christmas,
but I was miffed all the same. On the evening of the 24th, I thought
to myself, I’d normally be sitting by the fire at home stuffing my face with Quality
Streets, cuddling Pip, doing a jigsaw puzzle, and rehearsing with my brother
for our song at the village’s Christmas Eve service. Instead I was copying and
pasting pages and pages of text from one website blog to another, with a view
of this overwhelmingly Russian attempt at a homely Christmas tree outside the library.
That evening I’d agreed to be on a panel of judges at a
local school’s ‘Christmas exams’. Don’t be fooled. Christmas exams may sound
like a barrel of laughs, but they actually turned out to be the low point of my
Christmas this year. In fact, they were probably the low point of all the Christmases
of my life put together.
The exams took place in the enormous school hall, where
there were a good hundred or so students, parents, and teachers sat in the
raked seating facing the stage, and a hum of excited conversation. I sat with
five other judges on the row closest to the stage. The teacher who invited me
bounced up excitedly. ‘Teo’, she said, ‘thank you for coming. Please take a
seat. Here is the document by which you will mark the performances. You are judging
them on the accuracy of their English.’
Then she twirled around, strode onto the stage, grabbed a
mic, and said ‘parents, teachers, children. My dear! How wonderful it is to see
you all here at the fifteenth annual Christmas exams…’
At this point, my mind was occupied by two thoughts:
1. Who is ‘my dear?’
2.
Fifteenth annual exams? That makes it sound like
exams are something you celebrate! Like the Hunger Games. Is this going to turn
out to be some sadistic ritual which glorifies the humiliation of the students?
It did.
‘My dear.’ Said the teacher to over a hundred people. ‘These
exams are a well-established tradition in our school, and the amount that the
candidates improve each year just shows how well the school is doing. This year
we have more candidates than ever – ten whole groups! Each one will give a ten-minute
performance on this philosophical theme: ‘a man’s character is his fate’. And
you know my dear, this year we have our first ever guest judge from London!...’
Then she kept on talking for another five minutes. I can’t
remember for the life of me what she talked about, but I remember being
mightily confused. I had been invited to an exam. I imagined it would be a
serious affair, maybe a one-on-one spoken test, or a debate of some sort. But this
was looking like more of a school production than anything else. And these
performances were going to be in English?
The judge a couple of seats along from me leaned over and
pointed at my marking sheet which had two boxes for each of the ten groups: one
for comments and feedback, the other for the mark – a simple grade of 1-5, with
5 being the best. ‘This box is for your comments about their English’, she
said, ‘but… you know… don’t pick out all of their mistakes. Maybe just one per
group.’ I’m not sure whether she was trying to prevent the students from feeling demoralised
or to save me time, but I decided to ignore her. On the marking criteria, it
clearly said how many grammar mistakes corresponded to each grade band: a grade
5 performance had to have no more than two mistakes. So although I didn’t write
down every mistake they made, I made sure to point out the categories of
mistakes that were made: wrong article, confused tenses, incomprehensible
pronunciation (x47). The first couple of performances were decent. I can’t
remember anything about the first one, but the second one had an incredibly
intricate but well-considered plot about princesses with magic powers getting transported
from their kingdom to a sort of dystopian world where Santa doesn’t exist
except in the form of a dishevelled homeless man and life is generally crap. But by convincing
people that Santa exists one by one, they restore Santa’s powers. The best bit of the script was:
‘Where are we? This place is horrible. Is this Hell?’
‘Excuse me young man, where are we?’
‘Krasnoyarsk.’
It seems that the teacher who invited me saw herself as
something as a compere for the night, because she was snatching the microphone
at the end of every performance and saying something vaguely nonsensical like ‘Bravo
my dear! And every performance tonight is going to be just as good as
that one. How lucky we are!’
The performances weren’t all as good as that one. In fact,
they went considerably downhill. One of the later performances – I can’t
remember if it was seven, eight, or nine – was pretty near incomprehensible.
I was furiously trying to write down as much feedback –
positive and negative – as I could. I was worried that people would take
umbrage with my score and want to know my reasoning. If I was strictly marking
according to the criteria the mark scheme stipulated, no groups would have got
more than three. But I just thought the mark scheme was far too demanding. I
mean some of these kids were only about fourteen, it was just unrealistic to
expect them to make fewer than two mistakes in ten minutes. So I shifted the
whole mark scheme a bit to make it more generous. I gave just one group a Three,
five groups a Four, and four groups a Five. The judges on either side of me
were not quite as stringent or as generous as me. They wrote nothing in their
comments boxes. The guy on my right gave almost everyone a Three, except for
one Five and some Twos. At the end of each performance, we all said our scores
to the judge in the middle, who recorded them on a big table.
After two tiring hours, all the judges
went out into the corridor and ‘deliberated'.
‘Right, I’m just gonna say straight off the bat that we need
to give the groups from the Tenth Grade higher marks than the groups from the
Eleventh Grade.’ Said the woman who’d been recording all our scores. ‘The
senior staff want us to encourage the younger pupils.’
The judge on my right who’d given all the groups very low
scores added that ‘we can’t give too many Twos and Threes, the senior staff
wouldn’t like that.’
The judge on my right, a former pupil who now worked in
Moscow, waded in with her opinion of what the teachers’ superiors were looking
for: ‘Hmm back in my day the judges normally just gave everyone a Four. I feel
like we shouldn’t break that tradition.’
‘That’s not a tradition anymore.’ Snapped a fourth judge, an
English teacher at the school.
It seemed that, rather than finding the average mark from
all the judges for each group, we were just going to try to agree a grade out of
five between us. This seemed like a silly idea to me, but nobody else was
complaining, and I had no idea what standard procedure was, so I stayed quiet.
The first woman, the one who wanted the performances from the
Tenth Grade to get higher marks, seemed to be leading the discussion. ‘Right. I
thought Group Two was very poor.’ She said bluntly. Group Two was by far my
favourite. ‘I didn’t understand the plot.' She said. 'It was too complicated.’ I decided it
was time to pipe up. ‘I really liked Group Two!’ I said. ‘Their English was very
advanced and clear, and I understood the plot.’ She glanced at her table full
of Fives and Fours and sighed. ‘Fine.’ She said. ‘Let’s give them a Three then.’
Sadly, this was the precedent. The woman who was leading the judging would say something unsubstantiated and pretty much always wrong, then someone would contradict her and she’d ignore them and give the group whatever mark she wanted, regardless of the marks written down on the table she was clutching but not looking at. Once she’d assigned every group a final mark, she scanned them and tutted quietly. ‘Oh no, the Head won’t like this at all. Those marks are pretty harsh. Let’s give Fives to groups One and Three as well.’
In the end, the majority got Fours, three groups got Fives,
and two groups were given Threes. I disagreed with almost every single mark.
The judge who'd led the 'discussion' came up to me and thrust the score sheet into my hands. ‘As you’re
our guest, I’d like you to announce the results please.’
The teacher who invited me had presumably been talking
energetically at the audience for the last ten minutes. ‘Now, it looks like
our judges are ready to tell us their final scores. Who will be announcing the
results?’
I stood up slowly.
‘Ah it’s our guest Teo.’ She said. ‘Teo is from London! How
exciting that he’s announcing our results! Everyone listen carefully please.’
She said, handing me the microphone.
‘Um. Thanks.’ That was when I noticed that the audience was
really quite big. More than a hundred people were staring at me. I looked down
at the score sheet uncertainly.
‘I’d like to start by saying that I thought the general level
of English was really impressive. You should all be pleased with yourselves. These
exams are a fun tradition. ANYWAY. We gave Group One a Five. Well done Group
One!’
There was a burst of applause and a triumphant roar from
Group One in the seats at the back of the hall.
‘Er. I really liked Group Two! They should be particularly
proud of their English. And their sets actually! Oh and the plot. Anyway, we
gave them a Three. Well done Group Two!’
*Total. Awful. Silence.*
Someone at the back shouted ‘WHAT?’
A couple of people in the audience looked like I’d done
something utterly awful on stage. I’ll let your imaginations decide what
exactly. Something like take a wee, or even a poo. Maybe roundhouse kicked the
headmaster. Their eyes were alarmingly wide, their mouths agape. Some of them
had clapped a hand over their open mouths in a classic ‘the world’s about to
end’ kind of gesture.
I smiled weakly and continued. ‘Group Three also got a Five!
Good stuff Group Three. I enjoyed it. Excellent. *Ahem.* Group Four got Three.
So did Group Five.’
The audience looked so utterly mortified that I was starting
to think there was a man with a gun behind me. The compere was also staring at
me with a look of utter disbelief, her lower jaw swinging limply somewhere near
the bottom of her neck. As soon as I’d announced Group Ten’s grade, she grabbed
the mic from me and loudly said ‘Teo. Those are very harsh marks. A lot of the
children are extremely disappointed with the marks you’ve given them. Please
explain why you gave such low marks.’
This was one of those moments where, with hindsight, you fantasise
about going on a righteous and eloquently-worded tirade which puts all the
teachers and judges to shame. It’s since occurred to me that pretty much
everyone in that system was using me. The school wanted an English judge so
they looked good in front of the parents; the teacher who invited me wanted to be
the well-connected master of ceremonies; and the other judges had palmed off
responsibility for their crappy and arbitrary judging on me. The irony is that
I’d given all the groups (except for one) Fours and Fives. I was probably the most
generous judge, but I was held responsible for their collective harshness.
When I got home, I had two Instagram messages from angry
schoolchildren asking why I’d given their groups such low marks. One said ‘My
whole team has been crying for two hours.’
It’s fair to say Christmas Eve was a write-off.
When I got home, I decided to make a roast dinner, seeing as
I wouldn’t have time on Christmas Day. And from that moment, things started
looking up. My Christmas dinner turned out really well. With the exception of a
bearnaise which went badly wrong (kinda solid), every single part of the meal
was delicious.
 |
| In Soviet Russia , you dream of NOT white Christmas! |
On Christmas Day I opened a parcel from my parents, which
had a card, two books, some socks, a piece of cake which my grandparents made,
and loooots of chocolate. Then I took a bus to the other bank of the Yenisei for
my big performance in the nursery. That went better than I expected. To be fair,
all I had to do was say (in English) ‘Hello! Merry Christmas!’ then go around
shaking their hands. Then I got a basket of cotton wool snowballs out from
under the Christmas tree, and all the children ran around and threw them at me
and each other. There were all sorts of other events lined up for this
Christmas extravaganza. Some children recited poetry, with varying degrees of success
(one kid just fell over and started crying when it was his turn to recite),
they did a little dance, and then Ded Moroz (the Russian Santa) turned up and
they all played a game and received chocolate. The children were dressed up as
mice and Snegurochkas (Ded Moroz’s helper). I was being introduced to this
specific class because I’m going to be spending eight hours a week with them for
the next two months, as part of a language project. The idea is that I don’t
speak any Russian when I’m with them, and it should get them used to trying to
communicate with people who speak other languages, so that they pick up new
languages quicker when they’re older. I’d rather not have been there on Christmas,
but it was an encouraging morning, and I wasn’t feeling as daunted by the prospect
of working with them now. The highlight was when the teachers gave me a
humongous box of chocolates as a Christmas present. Then my Interra colleague
who’s in charge of the project took me to a cafe and got me enchiladas and hot
chocolate before work. At work, my friend Eldar came and gave me a book of
Russian folk tales, and then I skyped my parents.
But the best bit of Christmas Day was getting home. Max gave
me a hug and then told me that Kirill and Masha were coming over to celebrate
with us in an hour. We got out a fancy tablecloth and laid the table. We took
my Christmas dinner out the fridge and microwaved everything, and then I made a
bread and butter pudding because I felt like it. Kirill and Masha asked me
endlessly about Christmas traditions. I had some trouble describing what a
stocking was in Russian. But then I saw one lying on a chair by the Christmas
tree. ‘Oh look, we’ve got one here and I didn’t even notice!’
As we sat down for dinner, Masha said. ‘Santa Clause has brought
a present for you, but you’re going to have to find it.’ I looked under the
tree, but there was nothing there except for the Ded Moroz and Snegurochka
models Max and I had put out. I scoured the branches of the tree for a hidden
box or a new bauble, but it wasn’t there either. Then I searched the whole of
the kitchen. The present was in the stocking, which Masha had hung from the
fridge. It was a smart watch which monitors your exercise, your heart rate, and
your sleep. Christmas isn’t all about the presents, but that was a pretty kick-ass
one.
 |
| Oh, and also, the watch is invisible. How cool is that? |
So that’s how I had the crappiest Christmas Eve I can remember and a surprisingly happy Christmas Day, even in darkest Siberia.
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