About Raisa
Meet Raisa.
Thirty-eight years. Three languages. One teacher.
Raisa Lee has been teaching languages since 1986, when she stood in front of her first classroom at the Experimental School Complex in Yoshkar-Ola. Four decades later, she's taught children in Russia, adults at Norwalk Community College, university students at UNC Charlotte, and hundreds of private students in between. The through-line: language isn't grammar. Language is connection.
The career arc
From a school in Yoshkar-Ola to a quiet classroom in Charlotte.
Raisa earned her Master's in Foreign Languages from Mari-El State Pedagogical Institute in 1986 and went straight into teaching at Experimental School Complex #18 in Yoshkar-Ola, the small Russian city where she grew up. She stayed for fourteen years, teaching English to middle-schoolers and training the younger teachers who came through. In 1995 she sat for the Level 5 certification — the highest available at the time — and passed.
In the mid-2000s she moved to the United States. She taught Russian at Evrika Learning Center in Stamford, Connecticut from 2005 to 2012, and was hired as an ESL Instructor at Norwalk Community College in 2007. She stayed at Norwalk for sixteen years. Along the way she became a founding member of the college's foreign exchange program committee and trained, on average, eight teaching interns each year.
In 2023 the family moved to North Carolina and Raisa joined the ESL faculty at UNC Charlotte for the 2023–2024 academic year. Today she teaches private students full-time — adults, teenagers, and children — both online and in person from the Charlotte area. She has been tutoring privately since 2002, so the through-line of her career is unbroken: she has never not been teaching. Her current students fall into three groups — adult ESL learners, bilingual children growing up in Russian-speaking families, and adults learning Russian from scratch.
Her approach
Attention is the curriculum.
What makes a lesson work isn't a curriculum. It's attention. Raisa's students learn grammar, vocabulary, reading, and writing, but the reason they come back is that every lesson is built for them — the shy eleven-year-old who won't speak Russian in front of her grandmother, the Ukrainian lawyer who needs to argue in English by December, the retired engineer in Ohio who just started Tolstoy.
Immersive activities come in — role-play, debate, real conversation. So do the small things: a Russian poem in the middle of a grammar lesson. A cultural side-note that makes a word stick. Homework that feels like a gift, not a chore.
The result, after a few months, is what Raisa calls the goal of every lesson: a student who is confident, spontaneous, and capable of understanding complex topics — not just one who passed the test. She has written about the patterns she sees most — the intermediate plateau for adult English learners, and the passive-bilingual phase for heritage-speaker children — in the resources section.
In her own words
A brief introduction — in both languages she teaches.
Off the clock
A reader, a traveler, a polyglot — and an opinion about colors.
Outside the classroom, Raisa reads constantly — Russian and English poetry are her favorites. She speaks English and Russian fluently, teaches both, and has enough German, Japanese, and Spanish to travel comfortably. Her motto is seeing is believing, which is how she's ended up in more countries than most of her students. She also dances and loves cooking.
Credentials
Where she's taught, what she holds.
- ESL InstructorUniversity of North Carolina at Charlotte2023 – 2024
- ESL InstructorNorwalk Community College, Connecticut2007 – 2023
- Russian language teacherEvrika Learning Center, Stamford CT2005 – 2012
- ESL TeacherExperimental School Complex #18, Yoshkar-Ola1986 – 2000
- Private tutorNationwide and online2002 – present
- Master's Degree, Foreign LanguagesMari-El State Pedagogical Institute, Yoshkar-Ola, Russia1980 – 1986
- Level 5 teaching certificationRussian Federation (highest available at the time)1995