I suddently remembered how I got along with students from various countries. In the longest chapter in my professional life I closed about two years ago - a 30-year-long chapter called academia - I taught students from about 30 countries.
When I talk with specific individuals, I never label them according common stereotypes of national characters. But when I talk about social collectives, including those who live in any politically and/or culturally delimited country, I often allow myself to generalize about their national characters. From my own experience of observing various social collectives, at least 80% of the members of any social collective unconsciously follow most rules of its respective collective ego, which are also known as culture. It's thanks to these people that any social collective can survive.
I remembered students from which country I got along best - Russia! When I first noticed this, I myself didn't understand why. But as I had the same experience again and again with different students from this country, I understood that there might be something that characterized people in general and students in particular from Russia. After making several visits to Moscow, I've come to understand why I felt most comfortable with more students with Russian cultural background than with those with any other cultural background.
Again I'm generalizing. The characteristics I write below may not apply to every student or everyone with this cultural background, but I've met more students with these characteristics from Russia than any of the 30 countries whose students I taught:
- Warmth: Those who have never had any close personal relationship with people from Russia may be surprised to hear that they are so warm. They are! But only after you become close to them, and they open themselves to you. The initial psychological barrier may be impenetrable, but once it has been broken down through mutual friendship and trust, the sky is the limit. On the other hand, people from certain other cultures seem sociable from the very beginning, but the interpersonal distance remains. I realize that they were not so sociable in the first place as they seemed in the beginning and their friendship was rather shallow.
- Intellectual curiosity: This character may be specific to students. This was crucial to me as a teacher. I had a very hard time trying to instigage students with little or no intellectual curiosity. I especially suffered a lot when I taught students from two countries though their respective lack of intellectual curiosity manifested itself in two rather different manners.
- Sense of humor: My method of teaching was highly interactive - I always bombarded my students with questions. I often said rather harsh things, though nothing was personal. In such a case I tried to "detox" the possible poison in my language by using spontaneous humor. Here again students from Russia responded best and in the way I expected them to.
Having written thus far, I recall now with great nostalgia the most unforgettable teaching experience I ever had in my entire academic life. It was when I attended a summer school of linguistics in September 2017 organized by a team of leading typoligists in Moscow with guest speakers from other countries. I only attended this school as a student, but I volunteered to contribue to the entertainment program on the last evening of this unforgettable summer school. I had the chutzpah to teach traditional Ashkenazic folk dance I studied in three workshops taught by my former teacher Walter Zev Feldman. I enjoyed this teaching experience so much as I had never experienced such curiosity and joy in my students!