Through modern technology, a group of Davis High School students are learning about Russian culture from the source.
The 11th-grade students of English teacher Michael Brown are corresponding via electronic mail with a class of ninth-graders in - take a deep breath before you attempt this one - Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, a city on the remote eastern Russian peninsula of Kam-chatka."I was on the computer one day and was just popping into different things when a note popped on the screen (saying), `Hello, I am Svetlana from Kamchatka. I am a teacher,' " Brown said.
Brown and Svetlana Doroga-itseva struck up a correspondence, and their classes began sending each other messages on their teachers' e-mail, asking each other questions, challenging assumptions and discussing differences and similarities between the two countries.
Brown's students say they have most enjoyed responding to a list of myths about Americans sent by the Russian students, as well as reading the Kamchatkans' response to a similar list sent by the Utahns.
"There's a lot you don't know about the people there," said student Anna Blair. "You know about the history and the art but not the people."
Take, for example, an assumption 11th-grader Matt Swain included on the list of myths sent to the Kamchatkans: "I always thought Russian women were big and strong and hairy."
Nyet, responded the Kamchatka students. Rather, "Russian women are very beautiful."
On the whole, Brown's students have found their Russian counterparts to be very much like themselves. Russian girls wear makeup, women don't always wear their hair up, and teenagers like to watch television, listen to music, read a book or pursue a hobby in their spare time.
"It has let us see them as they are," said student Tim London.
As for the Russians, Dorogaitseva said she likes the electronic relationship.
"We are thrilled about the results," she wrote via e-mail to the Deseret News. "It widens the outlook of the kids, who can get more knowledge about the U.S.A. We hope such projects will help to establish warm relations between younger generations of our two countries."
The Kamchatkan students have learned that U.S. culture differs somewhat from what is portrayed in the cinema. Their list of myths about America included such things as, "there is much bank robbing," "there are many car crashes," "there is much high-jacking," and, most telling, "many people are involved in movie-making."
The cyber-relationship has gone so well that many of Brown's students want to enlarge the correspondence by sending letters to individual Russian students by regular mail ("snail mail" to hackers), since the Russian students do not have individual e-mail accounts.
By modern standards, the Kamchatkan schools' technology is rather primitive. "We have only one modem" for all the school computers in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, Dorogaitseva wrote. "We've been working in Internet for three years, but our facilities are very poor."
Brown, though she has better computer equipment than Dorogaitseva, is also fumbling her way through all this high-tech stuff. When asked if she was computer literate, she emphatically answered, "No! But I'm learning."
Kamchatka is a short plane ride across the Bering Sea from Alaska. Geographically, it is closer to America than to Moscow.