Sophie January Update: Last names, Russian films, and crockpots

Dear Family,

I feel that I need to begin this letter by responding to my dad’s. At the end of his last letter, he mentioned that I started dating a boy named Luke Wo. this month and that he is from Maryland. I wasn’t sure whether I would talk about my dating life beyond jokes about blind dates in my letters, but my dad already did, so who am I to hide the fact that Luke was present for most of the things that I did this month.

Luke’s last name is of particular note because, as my dad mentioned, it is further down in the alphabet than mine. One thing that I have learned about my family since dating Luke is that we seem to have a mild fascination with surnames, which he pointed out to me while reading Dad’s letter. Earlier in the month, I had presented Luke with a hypothetical scenario on the subject. I asked him whether he would be willing to take his wife’s last name if she asked him to.

Most of my former mission companions and college roommates will recognize this as a topic that I had passionate feelings about at one point in my life. The passion has generally subsided, but I still think it’s an effective conversation to have with people who are thinking of getting married at some point in their future.

Even though I am not as determined to keep my last name now as I was a few years ago, I still see changing my last name as a significant sacrifice and would want anyone who is asking me to change my last name to know how much I care about the decision to do so.

Luke and I had a good talk about the various perspectives on it and the emotions associated with changing a name. This conversation alone left him feeling like I cared a little bit more about last names than many. Then my father’s comment in his letter, followed by my mother’s observation over a phone call that we could hyphenate our last names with desirably alliterative results left him slightly bewildered.

For me, it’s never too early in a relationship to start considering surname potential, which is reflected in the way I ask Grace what a boy’s last name is any time she talks about a particular boy with any frequency. Thanks to Luke, I realize that that’s a little weird.
The thing is, our family is not all that interesting. We do the crossword together every week, we send our daily Wordle attempts (and little else) into the family group chat, and we occasionally like to muse on the exciting potential of last names better or worse than our own. That’s all we’ve got.

Anyway, enough about Luke Wo., my alphabetically inferior and generally wonderful boyfriend. It’s time to talk about school.

It has been one of my scarier semesters so far, but I still love all of my classes. Because people always ask, I’ll just list them out here right now, though I know that if I ever talk with you in person, I will likely list them all again. That’s okay.

1. Teaching English Grammar in Secondary Schools (probably my favorite)
2. Digital Literacy and Technology in Secondary Schools
3. Intermediate Russian
4. Book of Mormon (Part 2)
5. Multicultural Education
6. Education for Students with Disabilities

When I described the semester as scary I just meant it’s a lot of credits at a time. It’s a party. Lots of pedagogy. I’m having a good time.

People tend to laugh when I tell them that Teaching Grammar is my favorite class, and I want to clarify that it’s not because I enjoy berating scared adolescents for their poor grammar. Instead, I am a big fan of noticing the (often unconscious) grammar decisions people make and noting in my head why I think they did it that way. And occasionally making fun of them if they say something very strange. In a loving way.

I do love learning how to help kids play around with language by recognizing the different roles it plays. I don’t know when I became passionate about language and grammar, but it certainly wasn’t in middle school. Hopefully, my students will have a good enough teacher who can help them learn to mess around with language, learning the conventions just well enough to make purposeful.

I also appreciate my Grammar classmates. There are probably twelve of us, and I have had classes with several of them before. Two of our class are men, which is a pretty good showing for an English teaching class, which tend to have even fewer men than regular English classes.
One afternoon, I was walking into class as one of these two men was speaking to our classmates. I didn’t have any context for this conversation, but as I was walking in I heard him make a loud claim.

Now, this classmate—we’ll call him Kade—is married.

He’s also not a jerk, so I figured I needed more context for this claim.

I, on the other hand, am kind of a jerk, and without saying anything took a dry erase marker and wrote on the white board:

“I think I want to cheat on her”
-Kade

Kade took a picture and sent it to his wife with no context. He still wears his ring, so I’m guessing they’re okay. He also still smiles at me when sees me, so if his marriage is failing, he probably doesn’t blame me. He did explain to me and the rest of the class who saw what I wrote on the board that the “her” in the sentence referred to his English teaching major, as he was thinking about changing after this semester.

Hopefully that anecdote adequately shows how comfortable I am with most of my English teaching peers, because I promise I try not to be impertinent towards people who I think might actually take it seriously.

Another significant class this semester is my Russian class, which meets for an hour every day! This past Sunday, I went to a Russian orthodox service up in Salt Lake with four of my classmates from that class. It’s a fun group, and I love having an opportunity to speak Russian every day.

Aside from grammar, something that I have learned about in my Russian class is Russian film. It’s SAD and kind of weird. For a required cultural experience grade, I watched a movie called “Stalker”, which my teacher Alexandra Sergeevna described as, “THE Russian film.”
I will say, it was certainly A Russian Film, but literally nothing happened the entire time. I think I defended the cinematography to myself and to Luke (who I was watching it with) for the first twenty minutes, but since ten of those minutes were basically watching these three guys sit in silence while sitting on a little railway car that took them to a deserted bog, I gave up afterwards.

Anyway, I did enjoy the movie. It became kind of funny because this one guy (the Stalker) was warning these other dudes not to…basically do anything while in this deserted bog. The whole time they build up this suspense very effectively and you think, “This time, something is actually going to happen.”

And then nothing does. It’s hilarious.

Allegorically related is the story of my ward’s munch and mingle last week: Watching Stalker is like watching soup in a crockpot. No matter how long and hard you look at it, nothing ever really seems to happen in the amount of time you want it to.

I recently had to learn that my generation has been spoiled on instant pots; they’re so fast and wonderful and secure. They have so many settings, all of which presumably do different things, but all of which in reality just heat things up at a rate FASTER than a crockpot (also called a slow cooker, which is a term I think we should go back to using for the sake of ignorant little college students who think that an hour is a long enough amount of time to put soup in a crockpot before serving it to people).

I’ll set the scene: It’s 10 AM on Sunday morning. I have just exited sacrament meeting to go upstairs and help the rest of my food prepping committee get our food prepped before the whole one hundred and something college students come upstairs for hot soup and chili at 11 AM. I set up my instant pot (which is actually Luke’s instant pot—before I had a boyfriend I had to drive to Orem to leech an instant pot from Hannah, but having a boyfriend has a few perks) and begin to fill it with the soup to heat it up. There is also one other instant pot and about five crockpots.

We have all of these set up on a table with two extension cords so as not to blow a fuse. We did anyway, but then we rearranged and things got better.

It quickly comes to our attention that the crockpots are not doing very much for our soups. The time ticks on and we’re getting closer and closer to our deadline when there’s a big flash from the outlet and one of the crockpots turns off. We decide to try plugging that one in on the ground somewhere else to give it space, but as soon as the prongs get close to the outlet, there’s another flash and it leaves a little scorch mark on the ground and we realize that the cord has completely BURNED OFF. So it’s just this cute little cordless crockpot that wasn’t even warming the food anyway, and there’s a black scorch mark on the ground and a lot of cold soup.

Eventually, we realized that the instant pots (bless their little souls) had made the food quite hot, and so we started spooning cold soup into hot soup and hot soup into cold soup to make warm soup. It worked well enough and people got fed with a lot of doing and scooping.

The thing about my calling is that most weeks I don’t have to do anything but take the sacrament. On weeks when I DO have to do something, it’s the most harried five hours of my month.

I feel good about it.

Moral of the allegory: Don’t use crockpots if you have fewer than four hours and don’t create movies that have pointlessly long scenes where nothing is happening.

Other eventful moments this month include meeting up with my district from the Missionary Training Center for dinner for the first time ever, having game nights with my Temple Square Mission friends, and generally spending time with my Ukraine Mission friends all the time, most especially my companion-turned-roommate. I’ve realized recently that most of the people I choose to spend my time with (and there are quite a few) I met on the mission.

There are so many things I am grateful for from my mission, and good friends is high on the list.

I’m sorry this letter is so late, but I doubt anyone really noticed besides my dad, and he loves me enough not to let my tardiness blemish his opinion of me. Just know that I’m alive and happy and that I love you all.

Have a happy extended February!

Love,

Sophie