Category: Blog of the Site

Notes About My Educational and Professional Background

Before graduating with this BA, I was entering Kharkov University (Ukraine) at the age of 17 (after my high school). It was in different republic (Soviet Union times) and I did not proceed with that.
Then, I actually entered and studied for about a year in the BA program “Librarian” in Latvia State University. It is much like Russian philology in the first year. I left that program since it was not exciting enough for me. I was a graduate of a high school with the emphasis in English language and literature.
In a few years, at the age of 22 or 23, I entered English philology and Literature major at Latvia State University, and graduated in 1989. At this time it took me 6 years altogether, since I had taken at first a complete year of the entrance examinations preparatory course. There was a competition to get into the program.

Master’s degree:
At first I was for 2 years in CSUF (Fullerton University) in California. Then I transferred to CSUB (San Bernardino) because of the major. My majors in CSUF were at first Administration of Education, then Family and Marriage Counseling. After two years in CSUF I found “Counseling for Community Colleges” (Master’s) major in San Bernardino University, and so I transferred there while working for Victor Valley Community College as an ESL Adjunct faculty.
At the end of this Master’s I had an internship through Counseling Department at ESL Department with students of ESL at Mount San Antonio Community College.
I also taught ESL and Russian at Mt SAC in those years. (ESL – for a couple of years and Russian – for 8 years on Saturdays at Community Education Department. I passed a job interview with the Director of the Department).

After I finished this Master’s at CSUSB (California State University of San Bernardino) in June 2002, I started taking college Spanish credit classes right away.

I took Spanish for 9 years – in community colleges, face-to–face and online, and also a few classes at CSUF (California State University Fullerton).

After all those classes of Spanish, I, naturally, wanted to finish it with a degree in Spanish, but I was not lucky: in that year they said to me that they did not allow the second Bachelor Degree. I remember, I went for advising to CalState Poly to their Spanish Department (Pomona, California). Then. at that point. I was taking a few classes in Spanish major at CSUF, and there was a confusion with majors, and then I stopped seeing the point in my efforts. I was always working two teaching jobs at that time, paying for my education right away. I taught morning classes here, and evening classes there. I also was teaching one semester Adjunct ESL at Rio Hondo Community College, where I passed a job interview.

And why am I writing here all of this?
Just to explain that It is not just what we see in two diplomas. It is a lot of studies and teaching work around that and beyond that. I took only university classes for about 12 years plus languages – Spanish and French in University and community colleges.
Well, French was my 2nd foreign language from my BA from LSU – the diploma you see in this video.

In the last three years I have been taking German language credit classes from Arizona community colleges. I also took some German in the distant past – we were exchanging English for German with one teacher of German – before USA. In one of my UTube channels you hear me teaching beginning Arabic – explaining in Russian for Russian listeners. I was studying it by myself, in California, for a year. We can see the dates on my posts. Sometimes, as time passes, I may forget when and what happened, so then I go to my own video posts, and it’s all there.

The purpose of these notes is to give more details about my educational and teaching background, and also for identifying purposes – these two university diplomas show my maiden name and my patronymic, and my Master’s diploma shows my Burkhart last name that is the last name of my marriage of 1995 to 2006.

I came to California, USA, in May 1995, and I married M. Burkhart in June 1995. And all of this is described in my first book (in Russian language) “The Girl from California”.

I recently had to do a lot of documents for my personal identification in order to transfer just a few dollars of royalties from a Russian publisher (Russian Federation) to USA, where I live.
I almost spent more money in the process than my royalties actually were for my Russian books. However, I saw that it is possible to do it.

If anybody ever needs to know about my identity and who I am, they need just to look into my over 1000 videos, a few blogs, my website(s), the Google records, my books at Amazon/Kindle and Barnes and Noble (over 24), and for a few minutes all the curious researchers will find more information on my identity than they asked for.

It may take longer for me to find my own information in my own home files, than to find it right here – on internet.

And the talent of writing briefly has never been one of my strengths! Not that it has ever been required in my teaching profession, or my writing or translator’s occupation.
As an educator and a self-published (self-publishing) writer with such saturated background, I do not need the talent of writing briefly.
Brief letters do not get results.
The long ones – do.
It was proven by me – to me – just yesterday, and many times before that.

I appreciate everybody, who visits my channels, platforms, and reads my quite lengthy notes. And no, I do not use Grammarly. Grammarly is only English, anyway! 🙂 Why bother? 🙂

Zoia Eliseyeva
October 23, 2020 from CA, USA

September 14, 2020: No News – Good News

So far everything is calm, and I am busy with my English and German classes, teaching and learning. Just came here to say Hello! to all who visits here.

Update on “No News…”.

My royalties for September 2020 were 1 dollar 61 cents. Really?

Вот как надо официальным образом грабить людей: присвоил все их файлы и несчастный автор никак не может проследить – что там продается на тридцати сайтах и в сорока магазинах. Захотят 20 долларов пришлют, а захотят – один доллар пришлют. Это – капитализм., батенька. Беззаконие и угнетение богатыми бедных. Точно как в царской России. И что толку, что бедные – грамотные могут быть теперь. Ты бесправен и бессилен. Тебя грабят, а ты молчишь. Издеваются изощренно, при помощи мошеннических законов и регуляций. Держат тебя в страхе, как глупое животное. А орут, что это свобода. Это свобода грабителям. А бедняки – загнанные в сети, как роботы, все про них известно, все пронумерованы. Попробуй пикни – отнимут последнее, накажут. Будут больше издеваться. Вот и молчат бедняки. Их отвлекают политическими травлями. Zoia Eliseyeva on October 4, 2020, from Arizona, USA.

Hello, visitors of the site and readers!

The last news from my books’ fate: Amazon just discontinued paying me royalties that I have been receiving for my self-published books every month for 10 years. I had received insignificant amounts from a Russian newspaper in Hollywood, California, for their publication of separate chapters of my first book in Russian language “The Girl from California” around 1998 – just to make it clear here since when I have been in writing. Or, rather, first, my book was published by chapters in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1996. I started self-publishing on CreateSpace (USA) in 2010. It was so long ago, that I forgot the dates, but a few days ago I came across a royalty payment invoice of December 2010 from CreateSpace self-publishing platform. It reminded me that I started self-publishing with them in 2010. My royalties have never been big. I earn my living with teaching languages at adult education (in the past) or community college, and also, sometimes, with occasional lessons with individual students or occasional translations.

My monthly royalties were just the recognition of the big work I have done with my books: looking for good translations, matching them, working with them, creating the inside file, then creating the book covers. To create the front cover takes special individual view on the literary work it presents. I love the front covers of my books – they tell me a story about each book creation and the thought under each project.

Now we can see all my books – about 20-22 of them – on the multitude of Amazon distributors channels: many bookstores, Author’s pages in many countries of the world that are in many different languages. My books are mostly multilingual, that’s why it makes big sense to have them all over the world.

When Amazon speaks about its charities, it makes me think now: well, without asking a low-income educator, they took all the books from her, banning her from her self-publishing portal, and then they channeled her royalties into their charities (or maybe to their AI dream projects, or maybe to build more warehouses and buy more trucks for deliveries – we don’t know). That’s a wonderful way of doing business in the world: take from a teacher her life creations and put the label of your nobility and charity on your doings.

I wonder – is this a theft or is this business by Amazon’s way? Or the two notions have just smoothly grown into each other before our eyes?

What am I doing here writing this personal information? I am just documenting what’s happening. I guess I will have to change now the title of one of my books in English language written around 2011 “How I Published My Books by Myself and Sold on Amazon 96 Books in One Year”. Or, rather, I will write a new book “How Amazon…”. However, I have to wait and see what the three top executives will say, or their arbitration team before publishing something like that. Let’s get this story its own ending!

Dates of Events:

May 29, 2020 – AmazonKDP sent me an email note to notify they are banning me from my author’s platform. (They said I violated something with my book in Russian “Work in USA”. Really? The last time I touched that little book was in 2017, when I republished my three Russian books on the platform of Russian Federation, that is different country. They could just remove any violation they didn’t like. But they didn’t. Instead, they have all their distribution channels up and going banning the authors).

July 1, 2020 – no one cent of royalties. (There were like 10 dollars in the previous month. My royalties were melting from month to month in the last six months especially.) They banned me not only from the access to my files, but to the money that my books earn, too. You know, I had a letter about a year ago, from one reader from USA about my five-language book based on Edgar Poe. He was so grateful; they were staging the story.

February 2018 – AmazonKDP rolled over all the book files from CreateSpace to AmazonKDP self-publishing platform – massively. Nice, good CreateSpace, with easily manageable portal and templates for self-published authors stopped to exist. Amazon did not ask the author at that time which files I wanted to transfer to the new place, which not. They never asked the author – did I want to have my files in e-format or I didn’t. Actually I didn’t. Many of my books have three languages on one page, or four languages in paragraphs on one page, or even five languages on one page – it goes and shows badly on those little electronic devices. So, for this kind of books it is not a good idea to show them on a small screen. So, they are better to be just paperbacks.

Zoia Eliseyeva, July 7, 2020. CA/AZ, USA

Dear Readers, Visitors, Students!

Kindle just banned me, the author of more than 20 educational paperback books, from KDP/Kindle publishing portal.

I admit, that I have not published anything since Amazon took over in 2018 the convenient, low-cost, and later made free, Publishing Online Platform CreateSpace.com. By chance, I just found in my home files the invoice from CreateSpace (they were distributing through Amazon) dated August 2010. So, at least 10 years I have been publishing my books. (My first Russian book dates far back to 1996 St. Petersburg, Russia, as by chapters in the magazine “Nataly”, then I published 1000 copies of it – “Devushka iz shtata Kalifornia” – with my picture on the front cover – in “Golos” ruled by the writer F.A. Alyoshkin in Moscow, Russia, in 2004. Alyoshkin or his editors distorted my last name in annotation, and that’s OK, they could not remove my picture from the front cover! The picture aroused negative feelings by some moscovites – it was showing me in a bride-girlfriend’s dress that easily could be confused with a bride’s dress. You see, all small circumstances of my life are fighting against me, however I am fighting them back. And this is how my life goes. Sorry for a long inside-parentheses note!)

Kindle banned my e-format variant of my books. I do not care about e-books at all. I do care about my paperback multi-language books based on the world classics, like Tolstoy,, Dostoyevskiy, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Poe, Omar Khayyam, Chekhov, Albert Camus, brothers Grimm, and the like, that I, an educator and linguist, have created.

My books are sold all over the USA, and all over the world. My modest royalties (just a few dollars a month) have dropped in the last 6 months, magically, by 75 percent, comparing to the previous years.

I just received the reply from Barnes and Noble. Barnes and Noble has many of my titles on their site. They took time with the answer, and now redirected me to their other department. So I will follow with inquiring the stores who sell my books just to have a clearer picture how all this messy system works as regarded to my own creations. Then, I will be sharing my knowledge about my discoveries if I see it is valuable for other authors like me.

I wanted to write to the owner of Amazon. Actually, I did. I just took some kind of his email address from general online search and wrote him an email. That email unlikely reached him. I initially wanted to follow it with my physical letter to his headquarters. It happened in my past that I reached powerful CEOs and did campaigns fighting for my (consumer’s) rights. They actually stopped the unlawful charges after my letters. The courts changed their decisions after my contesting some traffic tickets, for example. (Faulty as charged! I used to like speeding a little bit when I was younger, when I was driving to two works and two studies – 4 different places every week.) As we all know the teaching profession does not exactly implies 40 hours a week. We, teachers, multi-language people, are looking for all hours we can get at different institutions, or the translations we can get from lawyers’ offices or other organizations or private parties.

So, my income never relied on my book-publishing royalties – it’s quite obvious. By the way, I found now articles from other authors online who were complaining about being banned by Kindle platform, and I do understand their lamenting of losing their life incomes from their publishing. Also, I found articles about different fraudulent activities of plagiarism made to income through Kindle. Well, both these causes have nothing to do with me, a self-publishing author and educator. My books are created in connection with my own studies of languages, my memories sharing, my experiences sharing. Each of my books is very different and my personal notes in each book explain how and in what way the book is different. Some books have grammar chapters or grammar comparisons across a few languages. Other books have my own translations of different texts, or passages. Some books have my personal notes with my memories back to the past in Russian culture or Soviet times. My books are very individually and custom made and I do not make much money on them.

I will finish now the thought why I decided not to reach further the Amazon owner by my passionate, craving for justice letter. Amazon’s stocks are more expensive than Google stocks. Google is way much more useful than Amazon. Well, I decided that there is no use for me to waste my time and energy, and emotions for that fight. I made a plan.

I will re-edit all my paperback most dear for me books, and republish them from another platform, and recreate links to my books. The old editions with corrupted links then will lose their value (if any) because I will extend my texts by improving them.

Look what Amazon Central Customer Service replied to me about my book just the other day. I asked him why I couldn’t connect my valuable paperback based on Leo Tolstoy’s complete novel, the trilingual book “Death of Ivan Ilyich” by Zoia Eliseyeva (Barnes and Noble has them all, so it’s easy to see my books there) – I couldn’t connect it by ISBN search to my Amazon Author’s Page – Zoia Eliseyeva. In past it was Zoia Sproesser, so Author Pages multiplied too because I changed my last name to maiden after the divorce with Sproesser in December 2014. So, the Customer Rep. very politely explained, that my above-mentioned book has Author Page in Singapore, China (I hope not in Wuhan! :D), and Arab Emirates. However, in USA, where I live, I cannot connect my main titles to my Amazon Author Page. Now I got it why, after his message!

This is because I have not been republishing my paperbacks since 2018 Amazon’s coup d’état of CreateSpace, and that’s why my Author Pages, by the CreateSpace worldwide distribution remained like that.

Dear friends! Do not be discouraged and perplexed when you see a stupid dog’s image when you click certain amazon-links of my books! (Some links still work, but my Author Page looks quite miserable at this time having only 8 old titles instead of about 18, published in 2014-2017 years.) Also, they have inconsistency with prices. You can see the price 499.00 dollars on my two-chapter 200-page-long Rus-Eng Dostoyevskiy “Crime and Punishment” – some weird mistake that possibly makes bad publicity for already suffering (my poor) paperback book. They made my links dead-end non-existent at this time, June 2020, but victory will be with us!

We all die one day because we are human beings. CEOs will die, and teachers will die. With big money maybe CEOs will buy their artificial imaging for future. Nobody of millions of people will know about it anyway, so what’s the point now to break our spears here?

The goal of this article is:

1. To notify the community about what just happened to my books since my books are spread widely in USA and in the world. (Last year one my book in English about self-publishing techniques authored still by Zoia Sproesser, since I found it unworthy to reedit as Zoia Eliseyeva, was bought massively for English pounds and Euros in Europe. I guess somebody taught a self-publishing class with that. So it was one time more or less big royalty. Majorly, like I said, my monthly royalties are quite low.)
2. To let my readers know that I remain myself – a very active, adjusting to the time educator: I teach languages, and I continue writing. If somebody is a writer, they write. They write their thoughts that are pouring out of every thinking educated knowledgeable writer. Let them frauds be frauds. Normal people will remain normal people and will not do plagiarism. Plagiarism is boring like hell (pardon my French)! Give me a fresh thought, a fresh joke from a real person. I do not have a bestseller about vampires, but I do have my two websites and my profile is public on all public platforms, and my UTube is filled with my creations. My voice exists and it can be quite easily found in audio/video and written creations.
3. To notify other banned authors about my case, about what happened to me, a published author of over 18-20 titles since around August 2010. Let them not be discouraged by the ban, but continue their writing finding other publishing platforms. There are plenty on internet. I am tying to find a free one or low-cost one as CreateSpace was. I am creating my books myself, from Front and Back covers, to inside file in pdf or document file. If my texts are all over internet to read, and one can see my texts exposed to tease customers to buy products – so let it be. Where is justice in this world, anyway? So, why to worry. Relax, and continue your life, find new, less corrupted people or organizations to deal with. Learn a lesson. Share your experiences in your blog or on your site, or on a public platform page. I just wrote on my FB page a couple of extended kind of “diary notes”. Like I said, writers will write, and grabbers will grab. And robbers will rob, and frauds will fraud. We cannot be upset over something we cannot control.

Thank you for reading me. Zoia Eliseyeva, June 3, 2020 from California, USA. In Russian my full name is Елисеева Зоя Владимировна. I am an educator living in USA for 25 years. I have an extensive UTube channel named zoiacalifornia (only around 2 thousand subscribers: honest one-teacher education does not sell) where my 2 universities’ diplomas are posted (Russian BA, and American Master’s Degree in Education, rather Educational Counseling for Community Colleges). Let’s not confuse me with other Russian people, who may have the same last name and who live all over Russia and may be in other countries too.

Good luck to all readers of this site!

I am enclosing here a song. It is a historical poem by Valeriy Bryusov, a famous Russian poet-symbolist (beginning of 20th century) about love, that he obviously translated from Armenian language poem dated back to the famous Farsi-Armenian-Azerbaijan-Georgian poet of 18th century Sayat-Nova. Valeriy Bryusov is highly valued by Armenian culture institutions for his contribution to popularize Armenian texts for Russian readers. It is the most beautiful poem with its brilliantly fine and rich vocabulary. I am singing it in Russian language. The melody is approximately like melodies of Armenian popular songs. Thanks to all, who devote a little bit of their personal time to read, or listen to my creations!

Some Thoughts About AI – Artificial Intelligence – and Where We Are Now in May 2020

I am the kind of person who does simultaneously 4-5 tasks, working on PC, a regular desktop computer, or a laptop. I am not talking here about IPads and all variants of tablets – they are inconvenient, unpredictable, insecure, and I prefer to keep them turned off after I quickly do what I need on them. I know many people will be surprised, but a cell telephone is in the same category as “all variants”. Sorry, cell!

So, working on a PC, I am dowloading a 25MB my own video from my yahoo email, and it goes so slow, that I am opening my German class text and starting editing it.

So my thoughts on Artificial Intelligence are:

1

Aren’t all these downloads of average size file like 25MB supposed to be a matter of the past and be very quick?

2

If a regular person is doing a few intellectual tasks at the same time, will AI creation do the same? And with that, experience different emotions, and simultaneously look into other things. For example, suddenly stop and change the activity because something more important just came up, like a mailer brought a box to the house, and I jumped up and ran out to the front door to see if it is for me?

3

Can we possibly create more complicated things, like workable and serviceable AI, if our internet connection is still shaky and pending? With all the space we have on the planet and out of it?

Isn’t the internet supposed to be free already?

4

What’s the point of the turn-around screen feature when you read a simple pdf book on a tablet, if during turn-around it loses the page I am reading and I have to scroll every time all from the top beginning of the book to the page I need, that takes about 2 irritating minutes?

5

Are all the imperfections with electronic devices and their functioning directly connect to the summarizing knowledge of creating a faster thinking device, named AI, that will be imitation of a human being?

6

I have some – sorry “my French” – stupid reader, or notebook at home, that I never use. It is good only for a few tasks, and it is too slow. How many of these stupid electronic devices we have that we don’t use? Why they keep creating them? (Money, I know. This bad commodity of human race).

7 

Why do I need an AI-robot that looks like me? Isn’t it freaky? Does a scientist who works with such a robot have psychological issues of self-importance that is blown out of proportion? Until now I have seen at least two women who work with a robot who is their spit-copy. One was a stand up, and the second was a lab scientist. These are women at about 39 years old.

Aren’t they are going to be irritated when the robot remains the same age and they look worse in 5 years, older, not as young?

I have many questions about AI and I decided to start this article to put down my thoughts. Things documented may lead to something interesting. Things not written can be forgotten and they will never lead to anything. They are waste of human brain’s time.

May 17, 2020

CA, USA

ZE

April 25, 2020 from Los Angeles, California, USA

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