Studying Russian

George M. Cummins, III, is a retired associate professor of Slavic languages and cultures at Tulane University, where he taught from 1972-2010 and served as Department Chair of Germanic and Slavic from1998-2007. His specialties were Russian and Czech language and literatures and undergraduate teaching. In recent years he has been working on Czech and Austrian music and cultural history. He is the author of Mahler Re-Composed (2011) and is now writing about the Czech composer LeoS Janácek. He lives and works in New Orleans and has three children, a son Kit, who is professor of inorganic chemistry at M.I.T., a daughter Liv, a singer-songwriter in New York, and a son George IV, who is a student in New Orleans. He runs along the Mississippi river levée in New Orleans, follows his home-town Chicago Cubs, and travels to his favorite destinations in the Czech Republic - Brno, Prague, and recently Hukvaldy. In my last year of undergraduate teaching (2009-2010) I wrote a blog for my students in Introductory Russian and in the second year language course. It turned out to be a valedictory to a work I have loved for many years, touching a range of subjects and ideas, most of them circling around strategies for acquiring a second language in the university environment and the fascinations of human speech in general. Professors learn along with their students; they learn the craft of teaching as well as their own subject, which is endlessly an object of scrutiny and discovery. Teaching has taught me humility and respect for my students, although this may not be as readily apparent in my blog as I imagine it to be. I put these essays to print as an affectionate retrospective.