Starting a student newspaper at Boiko School

Selma and I spent most of yesterday at the Boiko School, where we are helping students start a student newspaper.

Aleksey Soldatenko at JIA helped us hook up with the school, which (in U.S. terms) serves pre-K through high school. It's a private school based on the pedagogy of Sergei Boiko, who co-founded the school and teaches there (along with his wife, Anna). Aleksander, an assistant principal and teacher, gave us an extensive tour of the school, which has a Montessori-like feel -- a lot of student activities and free expression. We heard and saw kids singing, baking cookies, learning math, geography, law ...

Boiko is big on languages. All of the students learn English (to a level of competency that puts American schools to shame). The school also offers other languages, including Chinese.

After the tour, some cookies (made by the first-graders) and a hearty lunch in the cafeteria, we met with students interested in creating a newspaper. The turnout was standing-room-only (but we suspect that some students were there just to check out the visitors).



Selma led a discussion of why newspapers are important and what the students could do with a paper. Then we brainstormed possible names ("Boiko Eyes" seemed to float to the top) and story ideas.



A half-dozen students volunteered to do stories for the first issue. Our goal is for the students to write the stories and us to edit them by next week; do the layout the following week; and distribute the paper the week after that. We're going to do a bilingual paper -- English and Russian.

When we met Sergei, he told a joke:

Q: What do you call somebody who speaks two languages?
A: Bilingual.

Q: What do you call somebody who speaks many languages?
A: Polyglot.

Q: What do you call somebody who speaks just one language?
A: American! ;-)