About Mr. Holschuh

Mr. Holschuh joined Mansfield High School as an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher in the 2001-02 school year and currently teaches English in addition to Russian. He grew up in Grand Prairie (not too far from Mansfield), enlisted in the U.S. Navy upon graduation from South Grand Prairie High School in 1980, and completed 20 years as a military linguist and Russian language instructor in January, 2001. He began teaching Russian for the U.S. government in 1991 and has 68 upper and lower level hours of Russian in his bachelor's degree, earned in 1993 from the University of the State of New York. Mr. Holschuh has received two Fulbright-Hays educator grants to study in Russia; in the summer of 2004 he spent 6 weeks studying advanced Russian and teaching methodologies at Moscow State University, in the summer of 2007 he participated in a 5-week seminar through the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign consisting of visits to the central Russia cities of Vladimir and Murom, as well as to Moscow (shown at right in front of Lenin's Mausoleum on Red Square) and St. Petersburg. In June, 2006, Mr. Holschuh accompanied a group of students from Mansfield High School on visit to Moscow and St. Petersburg. And In the summer of 2005, Mr. Holschuh spent 4 weeks in Minnesota teaching credit Russian to high school students in a near-immersion camp environment through Concordia Language Villages (sponsored by Concordia College in Moorhead, MN).

Most of Mr. Holschuh's Russian training came through attending the accelerated Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced Russian Language Courses at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA, as well as a summer semester of immersion instruction at Norwich University in Northfield, VT. His military Russian studies have included: Russian history, literature, culture, economics, politics, and geography. Mr. Holschuh tries to maintain his language proficiency through correspondence and conversations with native speakers (here and in Russia via the Internet), television and radio broadcasts, and as a free-lance translator through the Metroplex Interpreters and Translators Association. Besides using Russian in the classroom, Mr. Holschuh is active in Russian-speaking community outreach through his church in Arlington. He is currently a graduate student at Concordia Theological Seminary in Ft. Wayne, IN, working toward ordination and continued Russian-speaking outreach as a Lutheran pastor. Mr. Holschuh is a member of the American Council of Teachers of Russian, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, and the Central Association of Russian Teachers of America.

You can email Mr. Holschuh at holsed@mansfieldisd.org.