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Did I think it was cold here before? Oh, foolish optimism. The morning low on my way to school today was somewhere around -35, and at a certain point it doesn't matter if it's Celsius or Fahrenheit, it is still equivalent to Too Damn Cold. Some schools canceled their classes today, at least the early ones, and some students at the college just didn't show up because the bus would have quite literally cost them an arm and a leg. Or at least a bit of an earlobe. I am reminded of the New Cathedral back home, of the beautiful mosaics that line the interior with their seven shades of gold. The mosaics do not depict Hell as a fiery place, oh no—in this visual idiom, the world ends in ice. One of these mornings, I'm going to wake up and find that a wolf has swallowed the sun.

(Also, for the record, school closings are announced with a radio message that breaks into TV broadcasts; the soundtrack goes squawky and then a staticky man's voice shouts "Attention!" I was alone when I heard the first one, and for a little bit I was worried that we were being invaded, or that terrorists were transmitting subversive messages during Tatianna's Day. Didn't Oliver and Milo do that once in Bloom County?)

But this entry is not going to be about the cold—I will have the whole rest of the winter to bitch about that, before you all get sick of it and quit reading. In this entry I'm going to talk about two things, which are comments and staircases.

Part One: Comment On This Entry

I have noticed a lot of the exercises in our textbook tell the students to "comment on" something. I got one of those myself in my Russian homework recently—"Comment on the dialogues above." Sometimes they're a little less vague, like "comment on the use of tenses in the passage" or "comment on the use of the definite article."

I have a comment. What the fuck does it mean to comment?

Peace Corps education programs subscribe to what I suppose it a pretty American education theory, which emphasizes that your in class activities should be based on specific, measurable, objective end points. If I want my students to demonstrate that they know how to use vocabulary related to computers, I should ask for, say, a ten-line dialogue about buying a computer using said vocabulary. Students who produce all ten lines and use the vocabulary right with only a reasonable number of errors get fours and fives. Students who don't achieve that goal get threes. Students who don't do their homework at all and then ask to go to the canteen for coffee get a two for the day. This is not rocket science, and for students it means the criteria for getting a certain grade are totally transparent.

What is specific about telling students to comment on something? What is measurable about a comment? This isn't an exercise in grammar, it's an exercise in reading the teacher's mind. The students can comment on the dialogue, and then I decide if their comment is worthy, and then some alchemical process results in a number that will stay in a book in a vault somewhere for seventy years. The whole process hinges on the teacher's demands and desires, and it's completely opaque as far the students go.

No wonder my students seem equally divided into Hermiones and Rons—either they're so desperate for the fives that they go above and beyond or they've decided that their marks are effectively beyond their control.

So let me say that one of my goals for 2008 will be to declare war on the comment. I don't actually want students reading my mind—they will find non-school-appropriate things there—and getting them to take more responsibility for their own education can only be for their own benefit.

Part Two: Staircases

This is actually just a little bit of a rantlet. See, one of the booklets the Peace Corps sends out to accepted trainees is called "A Few Minor Adjustments," but it really ought to be called "Don't Panic." It describes how PCVs deal with culture shock, including a few horror stories of volunteers for whom some pointless silly little bit of local culture became the straw that broke the camel's back. It mentions a volunteer in the Philippines who wrote a long letter to his CD explaining how his work was basically pointless and everyone at his site hated him, and then added, as a post script, "Besides, the salt doesn't come out of the shaker."

Well, staircases in Kazakhstan are my salt shakers.

Because it doesn't seem like it should be that hard to build a staircase. Rise over run, right angles, right? It's basic geometry. In particular, it shouldn't be hard to build a staircase with risers of equal heights and treads of equal widths. You would think, at least.

After ice-related bus accidents and killer snowdrifts, I'd say my number-three way to die in Kazakhstan is "accidental header down a staircase." It doesn't matter what staircase. Any staircase. All of them have some trick—steepness, narrowness, uneven steps [particularly uneven steps, sometimes wildly so]—that makes every ascent or descent an adventure. And banisters? We don't need no stinkin' banisters. The addition of water in either the liquid or solid phase—say, tracked in on the bottom of one's shoes—is just gravy.

I should say that I've fallen on the stairs exactly once in this country so far—I slipped on the ice outside TsUM last week. But until I got my safety flashlight working, getting down the seven steps in the podyezd to the outside door was my morning gauntlet. But that's not so much a staircase rant as a non-functional electricity rant, so I'll save it for the next time I'm feeling ornery.

Part Three: Misc.

The gloves that Aunt Shannon sent me turned out to actually be two pairs of gloves—regular gray ones tucked inside red fingerless ones. This is another inadvertent step on my quest to assemble a good Anton Gorodetsky costume. Next I need the utility belt and the sharpened screwdriver with which to stab my long-lost son. Entry for the Skippy list: your safety flashlight cannot be used to explode vampires.

I have decided that the best way to combat the hibernation instinct is with regular exercise. We'll see how long this actually lasts. It's kind of hard to get up enthusiasm for a Sun Salutation when you can't actually see the sun.

I am still mystified about why the Peace Corps issues us Where There Is No Doctor, a book that provides instructions on how to treat explosive diarrhea with nothing but rice, mangos and twine, but is silent on the subject of back pain unless it's TB of the spine. Perhaps that's necessary for volunteers in Africa or South America, but for this region, the Mayo clinic's self-care handbook would be so much more useful.

I think the cats enjoy my bed more than I do. Musik was snuggled up to Lu the panda when I got home from school today. Also, one of them got into my wardrobe and carried a ball of socks around the flat.

Why are spicy foods bad for your liver in the Russian folk nutrition? And why is the same word used for spicy food and pointy features? I don't want to think about Draco Malfoy's spicy face.

I think "Bearskin" is probably my favorite fairy tale. Even if it doesn't have hedgehogs. "Hedgehogskin" just doesn't have the same ring to it.