Section: CAPITAL REGION
Page: B1

Friday, February 2, 1996

TEACHER FROM TULA GETS RUSSIAN LESSON

CHRIS STURGIS Staff writer

Colonie You might think Nadezhda Shaidenko, the head of the Leo Tolstoy Teachers Training University in Russia, would have little use for a second-grade lesson in her native language.

But she came halfway around the world from Tula, Albany's sister city in Russia, and used the opportunity to observe teaching methods at Colonie's Maplewood School, where Russian lessons begin in first grade. Principal Jerry Steele said the Russian program was prompted by the heavily Russian- and Ukrainian-American population in the neighborhood.

Teacher Bonny Einstein bombarded her 7-year-olds Thursday with handfuls of consonant-rich Russian words, reinforced by repetition, gestures and phonetic spellings on the blackboard. It was much the way everyone learns to speak as infants and toddlers.

There was coaxing, rewards in the form of praise and smiles, and hand signals derived from American sign language for the deaf. Einstein said her students don't like the official sign for ``dog,'' a pat on the thigh, so they form their hands into begging paws, instead.

But at the beginning and end of class, the students responded appropriately, and matter-of-factly, when she used the Russian words for ``stand'' and ``sit.''

Einstein asked them if they would like to sing slowly, or bistra, quickly. They exclaimed ``bistra!'' Shaidenko told them their singing was zamyichatyelna, or wonderful.

Einstein pounced on that one-word compliment and asked her students to sound its syllables, using the familiar Roman alphabet instead of the Cyrillic letters used in Russia.

Breaking the words into smaller bites helped the students twist their mouths around the hairpin curves of Russian words, where dog wags his qvost, instead of a tail.

All that energy impressed Shaidenko, who said, ``She's a wonderful teacher.''

``Her method is not traditional (in Russia), but right now in Russian schools they are evaluating tradition,'' she said, using Einstein as a translator. They are weighing the merits of making learning more active and more `hands on,' '' she said.

Shaidenko said she thought Einstein's method would work for teaching foreign languages, but not for learning one's native language.

Einstein said her methods work best up to seventh grade. ``Eighth-graders are a bit more dignified,'' she said.

Steele, both principal and superintendent of the district with a total of 200 pupils up to grade 8, said a group of 10 students and 10 adults from Maplewood and the Shenendehowa Central School District will be traveling to Tula in April.

He first visited the place in 1993 and was happy to visit a place that was nearly inaccessible during his entire lifetime because of the Cold War. He said he was pleased to learn that the students of Tula were indistinguishable from the students of their sister school in Colonie.

``It's my small part to making the world better,'' he said.

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