Yes, I’m 22, but I’ve been teaching English for three years now and have taught over 3,000 lessons. I am a teacher, although I had no intention of becoming one. This is how it usually happens: first, you help your friends and neighbors, schoolchildren, nothing serious – and suddenly you realize that you like it. And the stereotype that only women teach is just a stereotype.

I understand how much a good teacher means, because I changed five at school, but I still could not connect two words in English. But then I got to the right teacher – and everything changed: she inspired me to study.

My classmates and I were teenagers, Olga Stepanovna is already retired, but she showed by her example how cool it is to learn new things. She taught us that a teacher is not a machine, but a person. She was not afraid to admit that she did not know something, she laughed at our jokes, found new American books.

Of course, learning English in Chicago is easier than in Kremenets, where I lived. Immediately only you, your teacher and your computer communicate in English. But it is possible: a province, a no-name university – all this does not matter if there is a desire and a goal.

I also thought before: you must definitely go abroad, and then I realized that a small town and a university are even a plus. Here they can pay attention to you, unlike huge branded universities, in which no one means anything to anyone. And besides, American volunteers came to us, there were conversation clubs, the teachers spoke excellently – I never felt slighted.

I got to Skyeng when I was in my second year – and I hadn’t taught online before. I studied with students in a cafe or at their home. It was a completely new environment for me and a new approach. Well, and panic, of course! What if I forget something? What if your voice trembles? Here the adaptation helped a lot: I had a workshop, a test lesson with a methodologist, which went off with a bang – and only then did the first student.

In general, the nerves of the young teacher help: the more you get nervous, the better you prepare for the lesson. And then very quickly and the fear disappears. In addition, my first student Anton was very capable – he grasped everything on the fly, and this gave me confidence. By the way, we worked with him for a long time in the end – and got to the level to which he was striving.

I still remember my first lesson. Now I have a good desk and a comfortable chair, but then I put my laptop on a pile of shoe boxes. It was awfully uncomfortable! So it quickly became clear: everything should be grown-up, even though you just come to work in another room. Now I keep an eye on everything: even so as not to sit up and do push-ups between lessons.

Without coffee in the morning, this is already an attribute of the first lesson. I wake up at 9, shower, breakfast, coffee. Then the first lesson at 11, and the last one may end at 10 pm, and in between there are a couple of breaks. I teach 4-5 lessons a day, and then I can still check the student’s essay at two in the morning so that I can meet in the classroom in the morning and sort it out.

Now I have about 20 students and I earn enough to rent an apartment in a big city in Ukraine. In the summer and New Year’s holidays, there are “seasons” when students arrange vacations for themselves, then the income, of course, is slightly less. I reached this level because I wanted to make good money and was ready to work. And the students themselves motivated not to stop there.

Each lesson is like the first one for me: I carefully select a topic for each student, watch homework, build the course of the lesson in my head. My students have different hobbies, different language problems. I explain blockchain to one in a lesson, and discuss Guy Ritchie’s “Gentlemen” with another. Now I not only teach, but also work as a proofreader – I want to participate in the development of lessons.

I enjoy watching people develop. I like to go to the goal with them. With one student, we have already 264 lessons together: she came to prepare for an interview in English – and in the end she got a job. And now we have taken a special course on the platform: Irina works in a pharmaceutical company, she often needs specific vocabulary.

When the disciples say “it’s all thanks to you,” I say, “no, it’s thanks to you and our teamwork.” The biggest challenge in learning is English for myself. You should always look for goals – well, at least watch the same “Breaking Bad” in the original, and then you will practice in a completely different way. Well, to treat mistakes with optimism: read instead of housewife – it’s okay, just a reason to smile.

My age makes it easy to adapt to a student, I have no idea “I am a teacher, I am always right.” True, I am against it when they want to switch to “you” – I prefer to keep friendly-formal relations. I try to be flexible, understand trends, choose the latest materials. Now many students are interested in IT, artificial intelligence, and I myself began to study all this. Received a second education in applied linguistics.

I am glad that I have an interesting and challenging job, where you should never stop. In teaching, you will not get away with what you learned at the university. Therefore, next to me now lie a bunch of books in English, in order to go from Advanced to Proficiency. I watch TV shows and copy accents, read the Guardian, go to the British Council, take Cambridge IT courses and go to conferences. And I communicate in English – with those American volunteers whom I met as a schoolboy.

And if suddenly the students say “yes, I will never learn English”, I let them listen to the recording of their speech in the first lessons. And I say: “Well, if you don’t see the difference, I am powerless.” This is usually enough. You have to understand that there is no limit to perfection, there is no such thing that you have learned 500 words – and it will be easy in the future. No, it will always be difficult. But it’s worth it – because before you thought it was difficult even to say “My name is Masha”.

My advice to a novice teacher: do not be afraid of something “not to know”, this is natural. Always be interested in what the student wants and what his emotional state is. Sometimes a student comes overwhelmed after a hard day at work, and at such a moment it is important to show that learning English is fun and interesting.

Ross Ulbricht (Nick Robinson), 27, preaches libertarianism and wants to save the world. In his opinion, any of our actions outside the government’s control strengthens the market and weakens the state. The hero often thinks about the human right to use drugs.

He is for the safe and anonymous purchase of “grass” or something stronger, because it will take people off the streets and give them not only freedom of choice, but also protection. No one will rob you or kill you in a dark alley in a creepy area if you order drugs online and the postman takes you right to the door.

Having considered all the details, Ross Ulbricht learns to program and learns the basics of working on the darknet through the Tor browser. In an underground network, where it is almost impossible to track someone, the hero decides to create an online store and openly sell drugs. And in order to protect buyers and guarantee their anonymity, he puts payments in bitcoins – an electronic currency that cannot be tracked either. This is how the path of Silk Road begins – the world’s largest Internet site with soft and hard drugs, weapons and various illegal services.

In parallel with this, a former employee of the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) and almost retired Rick Bowden (Jason Clarke) comes out of a psychiatric hospital after disrupting a months-long operation to capture a Mexican drug lord. They do not want to leave him in the department, so the former boss arranges for Rick in the cybercrime department.

Here he has a 26-year-old boss, everywhere the Internet and computers. And old Rick doesn’t know a damn thing about that. Until retirement nine months, so he is asked to sit quietly and not interfere with work. But Rick is trying to prove to these fucking millennials that years of operational experience is everything, so he grabs onto selling drugs through the recently launched darknet site Silk Road.

The original name of the “Asocial Network” is Silk Road, that is, the “Silk Road”. But the localizers saw, and not without reason, parallels with David Fincher’s “Social Network”, so they sensibly decided to give the tape just such a name. After all, fewer people will go to the Silk Road than to the Asocial Network. The latter is both more modern, and in the subject, and refers to Fincher’s tape, and also promises something forbidden, which means there will be an intrigue.

And the very personality of Ross Ulbricht is ambiguous, he is an unrecognized genius, dresses strangely, burns with his work and makes a million dollars a day. Isn’t it a parallel with Mark Zuckerberg? True, he did not sell drugs, but according to some, he did a much worse thing – he created the most popular social network in the world, Facebook.

The director of the film, Tiller Russell, has shot few feature films, but he knows a lot about documentary works. He has a couple of three serious projects, including four episodes of the documentary Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer and the film Operation Odessa, an incredible story of an attempt to sell a Soviet submarine to a Colombian drug lord, started by a Jewish emigrant from the USSR.

Apparently the director decided to combine business with pleasure and make a feature film based on a cool life story. True, for the sake of cinematography, many unnecessary and unnecessary details were added to it, but they are honestly warned about this at the very beginning.

The creators took not very popular young actors for the main roles, but just in case they enlisted the support of experienced Jason Clark. The star of Terminator Genisys and Planet of the Apes: Revolution got the bloated role of a policeman, who was added the tragedy of life’s circumstances and, for some reason, the struggle of Generation X and boomers against millennials.

His agent, Rick Bowden, clings to a profession where it has failed, and his daughter has developmental problems, so she needs a special school with a payment of $ 40,000 a year. There is no money, his career is over, and Rick clings to the remnants of his past life and becomes close to the informant Rayford (Darrell Britt-Gibson). Their relationship is evolving too quickly from a cop – an informant to a tough loser – admired sidekick.

Apparently, the director liked the antagonist more, because he wrote it out much better than Ross Ulbricht, the real main character. And although the plot forced the policeman to break the law, but for the good of the family, which means for the viewer he at the end turned from an ugly duck into a white swan.

But with Ross Ulbricht and actor Nick Robinson who played him, it turned out the other way around. At first he is cute and cocky, smart and adventurous. His parents do not understand him, he wants to save the world and invents Amazon on the darknet. What is not a hero for the modern generation? But then the guy scores on the girl and his best friend, thinks only about the site, and then goes to serious crimes. As a result, Ross’s character becomes a lost something (or even nothing), and Nick Robinson’s play goes into one plane.

As the hero turns into an antihero, so does the chemistry between character and actor. Perhaps there is a problem here and in a poorly written script that does not reveal its essence, or maybe all this makes it difficult to understand important details left behind the scenes. The viewer is shown Ross Ulbricht as the one-sided head of the online drug trade, because of which relatives and strangers suffer.

In my case, knowing the original story of Ross Ulbricht prevented a positive perception of the painting. I’ve written about him in a selection of the best technology documentaries. Therefore, I advise you to look exactly at the real investigation. Naturally, to a viewer not familiar with what actually happened, inconsistencies and a weak explanation of what is happening may not seem critical. But it will become even more difficult to understand this film.

Here, almost nothing is clear in the investigation, illogical explanations for the evidence are given, and a host of other mistakes are made that leave more questions. Without knowing the source, it will be difficult to understand the story. And we also need to monitor the development of the heroes’ relations and read the emotions from Ross’s face, because otherwise they cannot be understood. Therefore, the viewer has every chance to get confused in what is happening and sit with bewilderment on his face until the end of the film.

The story of the real Ross Ulbricht and Silk Road is much more epic and twisted than the film based on it. It is clear that they wanted to simplify it, because there are a lot of ambiguities and violations on the part of the authorities, and it was not Bowden that caught Ross, but the cop really stole Ulbricht’s money.

Life is often more interesting than any scenario. Our case is just such. Here it was necessary to take and shoot as it is, so that a slightly complex, but cool movie at the level of David Fincher’s “Social Network” came out. Anyone who is not afraid to make such an intellectual movie will become a part of the culture and may even get some good money.

Here they backtracked, so the history of the most controversial Internet genius of our time in the “Asocial Network” is simplified and leveled. The devils who are brought to the fore, and almost the main theme of the confrontation made an understandable, but long-worn clash of generations. And when this happens, it is better to turn to the original source, because a documentary picture can tighten much more, and any of the articles written on this topic reads no worse than a bestseller.

In the film there was such a phrase: “When you give people freedom, you do not know what they will do with it …”. So the viewer in this case also has the freedom of choice: watch this film, watch the documentary, or learn about Ross Ulbrecht on the Internet. What will you choose?

Supernova is a typical chamber film with a modest plot. He does not declare any loud truths, is completely tied to the interaction of actors, appeals to completely universal human experiences. This is a drama with two points of view – about how terrible it is to lose a loved one, and how terrible it is to lose yourself.

And the effect that the film has produced is really like a supernova explosion: with discussions on Facebook, cut scenes and rumors that the distributor asked not to position the movie as a gay drama. If we compare the descriptions of “Supernova” on the Internet, for some it seems at all that this is a film about the farewell of two friends.

At the same time, the director of the film, little-known Harry McQueen, is not against cuts: he is glad that in Russia they will see his films at all. It makes no sense to understand his position or the intricacies of modern Russian legislation. But such an attitude is especially absurd and unfair because it was Supernova that got it – a quiet premiere, which under other circumstances would not have paid attention at all.

The film follows the pianist Sam (Colin Firth) and the writer Tasker (Stanley Tucci), who take a short trip around the UK. They ride in a jointly purchased trailer with their dog, stay with friends, remember their past adventures on the shores of a beautiful lake. But, what is most obvious and sad is that Sam and Tasker are saying goodbye.

Dementia is an extremely common syndrome (but not the disease itself). Dementia affects about 5-8% of older people. According to WHO estimates, by 2030 there will be 82 million people with this syndrome in the world, by 2050 – already 152. It is dementia that affects Tasker. Like the drama Still Alice with Julianne Moore or the annoyingly iconic Notebook, he gets confused in words and events, can get lost in space, and finds himself increasingly helpless.

Every day brings Tasker closer to the moment when he no longer remembers his partner. Sam stubbornly refuses to leave him to someone else’s responsibility, in every possible way supports and even abandons his profession. It is impossible not to mention that the chemistry of Firth and Tucci is something transcendental, turning even the usual conversations of two grumpy men into poetry.

By the way, back in 2009, Colin Firth already played an openly gay man – in the drama of a good director Tom Ford “A Single Man”. The law on the promotion of homosexuality in Russia had not yet been passed, so the film received a rating of 16+: it contains obscene language and sex scenes.

In Supernova (let me remind you that it has a rating of 18+), no one has the time or energy for everything that is now forbidden to be shown on domestic screens. And literally there is no strength: a chaste scene was cut out of the film, in which Sam and Tasker fail to have sex. Quite an ordinary scene for a movie about serious illnesses, and not only about them.

But between Sam and Tasker there is a sea of ​​tenderness and care, and this is the very case when your soul mate is your best friend. Their relationship does not become the main subject of the film, it is about something completely different.

But even without them, the story simply crumbles: at least it is not clear why Sam is so afraid of losing his “friend”. If we accept that the relationship between them is not romantic, as they tried to edit in the final version – what are they then?

The main conflict of “Supernova” rests on the fact that Sam refuses to give up and plan his life without Tasker. Yes, the loss of a best friend can be a huge tragedy and break a person – there are a lot of examples of this, including in the movies. But this is not at all the same as losing your only love in old age.

McQueen, Firth and Tucci have a very calm, low-key film – the same as the relationship of the main characters. It is fluid and devoid of drama in unnecessary places; the plot already has Tasker disease and all the consequences that follow logically.

Personally, it was this melancholy pacification that I liked the most. It shines through everything, including Tucci’s beautiful monologue under the starry sky. His hero has already admitted that very soon he will join the billions of particles that make up the universe. At the same time, at other moments, both conversations with Sam, and the occasional remarks with which he exchanges with friends, turn out to be very fragmentary and stingy. This is what adults say with a natural, not strained and not pretentious outlook on life.

In the same way, the well-established, even, long-deprived of a spark relationship between Sam and Tasker is shown. From the very first shots, it is obvious that over the years they have developed into an ordinary marriage – imagine, very slightly different from heterosexual.

And against the background of this total calmness and acceptance, all the hysteria that Supernova causes looks especially absurd and funny.

The ANNNWZZD MC12 Wired Lavalier Microphone features bright braided wire and a durable clip. There is a windscreen and a clip that rotates 360 degrees for easy attachment. The model connects to smartphones, PCs and cameras via a 3.5mm audio jack. To connect to an iPhone, you will have to buy an adapter. Users praise the microphone for its adequate sensitivity, sound transmission, frequency and dynamic range. ANNNWZZD MC12 is sold at a price of 328 rubles.

OLLIVAN Metal Mini Micro received a large metal clothespin. It is attached not only to clothes, but also to parts of the interior or furniture. The lavalier microphone is available with different plugs for PC and camera or laptop and smartphone. Depending on the version, the cable is available in regular silicone or with a nylon braid. Users praise the voice recording sound, passable noise reduction and voice enhancement function. For OLLIVAN Metal Mini Micro they ask from 220 rubles.

Aputure A.lav is a top-end lavalier microphone with Aliexpress. With a price of 3,697 rubles, it offers the user high quality voice recording at home or outdoors, with or without wind. The model has a battery status indicator, and the manufacturer promises up to 200 hours of operation. Comes with a convenient carrying case.

Ulanzi AriMic is equipped with a rich array of two microphones with filters and wind protection. All this allows two people to record audio or video at once. Users praise the dense and loud voice when recording and honor the studio-quality voice. The Ulanzi AriMic set costs 1207 rubles.

The MAONO AU-100 buttonhole pleases users with metal fasteners and a 6.5 mm adapter. The microphone is powered not by batteries, but by a built-in rechargeable battery. He has a high-quality voice recording, and some users even recommend him for working with vocals. MAONO AU-100 is sold at a price of 1,454 rubles.

The BOYA BY-M1 is one of the most popular budget lavalier microphones. The model is taken for a six-meter wire, simple operation with various devices, noise suppressors and good voice recording with low frequencies and excellent detail. BOYA BY-M1 is sold at a price of 1505 rubles.

BOYA also has a popular wireless lavalier microphone and it’s the BY-WM4. True, the price tag in this category is much more serious, but the possibilities are much wider. Depending on the kit, the model is equipped with a fur windscreen, a clip and a mini tripod. But the main thing that the user pays for is the quality of voice recording, and BOYA BY-WM4 has it at its best. Users also praise the long range and connectivity to literally all devices and gadgets, including iPhones. For this wireless lavalier microphone, they ask from 7,541 rubles.

The wireless Debra CM-02 model also has a good set with additional accessories. The transmitter with a range of up to 50 meters has an LCD display with important information and up to 30 channels in the UHF range are configured here. The model is criticized for not the best quality of plastic, but praised for its connectivity to any devices and good voice pickup in almost any conditions. The Debra CM-02 wireless lavalier microphone is sold at a price of 1605 rubles.

The XIAOKOA N81 is also a popular and affordable wireless lavalier microphone. The model comes with a rich set of receiver, cable, adapters and metal clamps. Users praise the fast charging and long range, the build quality and the detail of the voice recording. Of the shortcomings, some note background noise that cannot be removed. Prices for XIAOKOA N81 start at 1637 rubles.

The Fifine K037 is very popular among wireless loop microphones. This is a capacitor model with an LCD display on the transmitter showing important information such as channel frequency and charge level. On Aliexpress, the microphone is praised for its almost perfect assembly and quality of materials, flawless voice recording, noise reduction and detail. Some people don’t like the fast battery drain, the sensitivity of the model, and the presence of background noise. For Fifine K037 they ask from 2204 rubles.

If you didn’t like any of the lavalier microphone models, then go to the main page of this category on AliExpress and choose yourself.