Living The “American Jazz Dream”
Mariya “Masha” Vedyashkina says
learning to play the saxophone has
been a dream of hers, and her year
as an exchange student at Westview
gave her the opportunity to have that
dream come true.
In her home city of Saransk, in
Republique Mordovia, Russia, she says
there are very few opportunities to
play jazz, “Maybe just one jazz band in
the entire city.”
She took private lessons with Gail
Gore of LaGrange during her first
semester here this year and then was
in the high school concert band for the
spring semester. She had never played
an instrument before coming to the
U.S. and had to start with learning to
read music.
Masha lives with her Mom, as an
only child, in a city of about 350,000
in Russia. She attended a school where
she had about 70 students in her
grade. Most of those students have
been together from elementary clear
through high school. Another difference between her school in Russia and
Westview is that in Russia the classes
operate on a weekly schedule. In other
words, she has the same schedule every Monday, but the Monday schedule
is not the same as any other day of
the week.
With a
graduation ceremony
from
Back row: Woody and Brenda
Front: Justine, Masha and Drew.
by Dan Byler
her Russian High School coming up in
June, she needed to head back early to
be able to take all her high school exams with her Russian classmates. She
had worked ahead in all her classes
last summer before coming to Indiana. She h