Classes as usual today. I sat in on the third-year course today. Things look good there on the whole. One of the topics was means of transport, and one of the words mentioned was пла́нер. One of the teachers thought it meant "great big airliner," but to my memory it meant "glider," although to tell the truth, it had been so long since I've seen the word that I feared I might be mistaken. I got home and checked the dictionary, and, lo, the definition is «Безмоторный летательный аппарат тяжелее воздуха для планирующего или парящего полёта». Hah! Score one for the foreigner! I also know three different words for mucous in Russian. It's things like that we linguists build our self-esteem on.

Today we had to do an emergency contact test as well, which is something required by our study abroad office. In the past I've pretty well always gotten in contact with all the students within an hour or two of starting, but alas not so today. It's already seven hours later and there are still two who I can't get in touch with; they have turned off their phones. There was also a set that was working out at the gym with their phones off. I fear I may not get them until the morning. Tomorrow I'll have to ask them to keep their phones on when they are not in class or working out.

All of this summer's instructors are women. In the fUSSR it is almost always the case that language teachers are women. I would like to see more men in the profession. The other day in the second-year class the students commented that it was tougher to recognize what male voices were saying, and I strongly suspect that has something to do with simple lack of classroom exposure. There is a certain timbre to Russian spoken with a male voice that I have never heard in men speaking English. I have occasionally wondered if there was something physiological there as well. Some Russian basses when singing can hit these incredibly deep notes that cause walls to tremble.