Book club online
Hello everyone! My name is Alexander, I graduated from the Philology Department of St. Petersburg State University (Department of Russian Language and Literature), wrote for Arzamas and Kolta, and for a year now I have been running an online book club for Russian-speaking teenagers living abroad.
Now I have two groups - junior (up to 14 years old) and senior (from 14 years old).
The junior is, in fact, more of an online school. A lot of attention is paid to the language there. When I need to explain what it is, I always give this analogy: it's like Shakespeare. We all read English, more or less, but Shakespeare, for example, is not even difficult for me or too lazy, but simply when I see all these Thou and Thee, I immediately close Shakespeare. So our children have the same thing with Pushkin. But if you read Shakespeare (Pushkin) at least once a week, twenty to thirty lines at a time, then after a few months Thou and Thee ("towns" and "shores") stop scaring you - I've tested it. And this is what I do first and foremost - I practice the skill of reading old books and create in children the feeling that they can handle such reading. Well, and at the same time I give some general useful knowledge - by the way, not only from the field of Russian history and culture (who are the Decembrists, what is the Bronze Horseman), but also world (this is generally a non-obvious side of our classes, but this year it became clear that children not only know little about Pushkin - the same problem with Goethe and Shakespeare). But the eldest is already a real book club, but still with some educational element. There we read and discuss great Russian novels - "Crime and Punishment", "Fathers and Sons", "Anna Karenina". With those who went last year, this year we will read War and Peace. And children really read - I myself sometimes can't believe it. Many believe that teenagers don't need to read all this - they say they won't understand anything anyway, they will only suffer and hate it for the rest of their lives. But there is such a paradox: yes, of course, it is better to read Anna Karenina at the age of thirty, having read a lot of other things, but can you imagine that you suddenly drop everything and read Anna Karenina? I - to myself - can't. I have neither the time nor the strength for it. That is, I read, but, firstly, it is my job, and secondly, I reread. And so, in order to reread Tolstoy at thirty, you first need to read him at sixteen. But of course, there is no need to suffer - and I am doing exactly that to make this reading comfortable. The quality of my classes can be described, firstly, by reviews - there are many of them, I will not provide them here (I have already signed up), but I can always send them, or just look at my Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agapov_lit/
And secondly, by the fact that almost all (or maybe even all - it is not yet clear with the older group) children who attended me last year will continue to attend this year.
And now - finally getting down to business - I decided to open enrollment for two more groups - one more older and one more younger. I believe that these are really cool classes that bring and will bring benefits to children - not only now, but also when they grow up. Because ultimately it's not about reading in the genre of "how will our children live without Dostoevsky" (Pushkin, as we know, lived, and nothing happened) and certainly not about any kind of culture, moral principles of Russian classics and, God forgive me, spirituality, but about the ability to read and understand texts - a universal and most important skill.
If you want to try, write to me in the comments or just a private message. There are almost no places left in the junior group, so you should hurry, there are still places in the senior group, but it's also better not to delay. Oh, and I forgot to say something important! Next week there will be a series of free trial classes, the next one will be on Tuesday. To get in, just fill out a short form: https://forms.gle/iGgc9VEmCgQ8cRr79/
Well, that seems to be all. I will be happy to answer your questions in the comments. By the way, now the club has children from Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Finland, Sweden, Israel, the Netherlands, and, of course, Israel, and even two from Israel. But I want there to be even more!
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