Guns

I've become an insurrectionist on 2^nd amendment issues in just the past few months for a reason that will probably surprise you. I spend a lot of time on Skype and Second Life doing ESL – Conversational English with Russians. One of the great things about conversational English is that someone else is providing formal instruction in the language. All I have to do is provide opportunities to practice and a kind of quality control.

The quality control comes in because I work with Russians, some working adults and some still in school, who have been failed horribly by the Russian educational system k-20; a much lower percentage of Russians can converse in English well enough to, say, feel comfortable and confident negotiating a contact, than you would find in any EU country. This is a problem because English has become the de facto second language of the world. One big reason for this was the disappearance of a huge economic bloc, isolated from the rest of the world, where ambitious people learned Russian whether they were Russian or not because Russian was the de facto language of power and prestige there. Very few people in the old Soviet Union could speak English, though many more could read and translate.

Anyway”””. I provide practice and an opportunity to prove to themselves that they really are learning spoken English better and better as evidenced by the fact that they are finding causal conversation with a native speaker easier and easier as time goes on. We can talk about anything we want as long as we keep the conversation at least a little above the level of: ”Is there a book on the table. Is that John's book on the table”. My students are most interested in questions about how exactly life in America is different from life in Russia. The two things that most of them know about America is that all Americans eat out constantly and never cook at home and are armed to the teeth. It is definitely the part about being armed to the teeth that they envy greatly.

I've been asked many times if I own a gun and a few times how many guns I own. When I ask in response why this is so important to them, the ones who bring up guns, which is well more than half of them in the long run, immediately start giving me the insurrectionist argument for making and keeping the right of the people to bear arms absolute with genuine passion. If I keep asking questions so that they will tell me rather than waiting for me to tell them, this gets articulated into a very well worked-out and quite consistent theory of general principle privileging the right to own guns as one right that people must have in order to have any rights at all,. I love having this conversation because it causes the Russians involved to focus on stating clearly something they are trying to persuade me to accept as an important truth rather than on how they are saying things. This also helps me slide over into American politics, which really helps keep the conversation going given that I am a news junkie and they are fascinated by any description of what really goes on in American and why. This is the one hot-button issue in American politics where hearing what Russians have to say has changed my own stance.