Albert Girshik shifts from foot to foot as the video camera trained on him records and his fellow students watch expectantly. This is his first appearance this semester before the whole class, and Girshik feels the discomfort of a sixth-grader giving a book report.
But this student is a 46-year-old Russian immigrant, an engineer in his old country, a clerk in his country of choice. He's in school, as he tells his classmates, because "right now I'm a small glass of water in a sea of English."
He'll need English fluency "as my first step to my previous occupation," he says. "I hope this land named the United States of America will be a good place for my family, and I guess we will have good future here. Thank you."
His classmates applaud as Girshik sits down.
He is one of about 400 Russians, most of them Jewish refugees, who pack the third-floor classrooms of Catonsville Community College's Owings Mills Center throughout the week. Many are well-educated. Many left good jobs in the former Soviet Union to move to America, aided considerably by Jewish social and employment agencies. More than 5,300 Russian Jews have resettled in the metropolitan area since 1990, according to the immigrants' sponsor, the Associated Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore.
Girshik, a two-year U.S. resident, is blond, but several heads in his English as a Second Language (ESL) class are flecked in white, and bifocals are in style. Of 14 students one night last week, three had been teachers in their former homeland. Nine had been technicians or engineers.
Girshik's classmates come from several of what his teacher, Beverly Bickel, describes to the students as "your countries" -- the Soviet Union is no longer one -- but they speak a common language and they share something else: an almost religious zeal to learn English as quickly as possible.
Ella Korostysherskaya, who says that when you say her name "you have to pronounce the whole alphabet," rises to her feet as she declares that she will soon have been in the United States for a year. "And I am learning," she says. "To live out in this country, to get a decent job, to understand the life, you have to have English."
Raisa Matsiyevskaya, 33, is the baby of the class. Like many of the Russians, she followed her parents to the United States. Her former home, Minsk, Belarus, "was not a very good place for my children," a daughter, 10, and a son, 13. Her children, she says, speak English much better than she.
Bickel gets her students on video early in the semester, then hands them their individual tapes for private viewing. At semester's end there will be another taping, this time with fellow students joining in a critique.
Learning English in middle age is no bed of roses, say Bickel and her colleagues at Catonsville Community College, which has educated some 4,300 ESL students at its Owings Mills branch since 1990. (The Russians typically begin their language studies at Baltimore City Community College.)
The difficulty is illustrated in that common figure of speech, "bed of roses," which Americans take for granted but which could befuddle a non-English speaker. "The language is complicated, particularly for people who have gone through life with practically no exposure to it," says Deborah E. Trevathan, ESL coordinator at the Owings Mills center. "But these people, and many of the non-Russians we have here, are great joys to teach. They're extremely motivated. They want to hear English spoken. They're fascinated by the language."
That's demonstrated in Bickel's classroom. Her students laugh frequently as they grapple with English, occasionally lapsing into their native tongue. That's a no-no in an "immersion" class, but Bickel allows some of it. She writes the English sticklers on the board: "trouble-shooter," "bottom line."
"The hardest part is speaking," says Trevathan. "When you think about it, the other functions of language, listening, writing and reading, can be done with reflection. In speaking, you have to verbally expose yourself instantly with little or no time for reflection."
The students agree. Yelena Pavlovsky, 24, now a student assistant at Owings Mills and fluent in English, remembers her first days in the country as a bus girl five years ago. She spent a lot of time crying, she recalls. "I was so afraid I would say something wrong and people would punish me for that." Pavlovsky will graduate from Catonsville this winter and move on to Towson State University and a degree in education.
JoAnn Crandall, an ESL authority at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, says there's a big difference between ESL teaching in Owings Mills and in a country where the students are natives.
