Russian, With Love

Learning a supposedly passé langauge can have its benefits, as students in Connecticut are finding out.

By Aaron Dalton

The sound of 17 9th grade students speaking Russian softly to themselves is like the sea washing onto a pebbled beach— whush ... russhh ... wasshh .Hunched at rows of computer terminals in Connecticut’s Glastonbury High School language lab one May morning, Jan Eklund’s Russian III class resembles nothing so much as a junior crew of telemarketers in hot pursuit of a commission. Though they could be practicing a sales script for selling refrigerators to pensioners in Vladivostok, the students are actually talking to software that allows them to record and later review their own pronunciation.

Fast-forward a few years, and one of these young Russophiles might just evolve into the next Erin Doyle or Jimmy Lodge. Considered a linguistic phenom by his teachers and school administrators, Lodge, a Glastonbury senior, has already been to Russia twice and won national and international gold medals for his Russian essays. But none of it would have been possible, he says, if he hadn’t already had so much Russian so early— by graduation, he will have taken five years of Russian. Still, the teen was a latecomer to the language by district standards: In Glastonbury, children start learning it in 7th grade—something virtually unheard of at a public school, especially in the post-Soviet era.

Almost since the moment the Berlin Wall crumbled, American schools’ interest in teaching Russian did likewise. But precisely because the number of Russian learners fell off so sharply, Glastonbury and the few other schools that have stuck with the language are finding their students...