For the first time in an abridged version, this text appeared back in the same 1980. I wrote it for the Uchitelskaya Gazeta. I sent and received the answer: “The first impression is very strong. The story is life itself. But it is not only the village teacher who travels to the city for groceries. And a number of other points … So think and write again, standing on the ground and without clouds!"
Then I did not have such a journalistic experience as now, and most importantly, I still believed that the shortcomings, they … are, but are not inherent in the system itself. And also, since what was there to rewrite, if everything is true, the material that was, remained the same. And now many years have passed, I receive such wishes in the comments on "VO" and … why not respond to them and write about the events to which I was personally a witness? Again, this is not a scientific study, this is purely my personal impressions. But this was so, since the people referred to here must still be alive. Although, on the other hand, some of them could have a completely different look.
One of the few photographs that have survived from those years. The author guides her tenth graders as they cut down a tree in the school yard.
A strange thing is human memory. As you grow older, you don’t remember what you ate for breakfast the day before yesterday, but you do remember very well what happened 40 and 50 years ago, albeit fragmentarily. Also by leaps and bounds, but you remember quite clearly, as if it happened yesterday. Well, and then, if you tell the story from the very beginning, it will be like this: the spring of 1977, and my wife and I are standing in front of the distribution commission, which decides where to send us "to work out the diploma." The child is over a year old, there are no sick parents, so there is no reason not to send him to the village. But there is a problem: you need such a village and such a school where there are two rates: a history teacher and an English teacher. And there are no such schools in the region, especially close to the city. But there is a school in the village of Pokrovo-Berezovka, Kondolsky District, where, in addition to a teacher of history and English, a teacher of geography, astronomy and … labor is also needed! Plus hours on history, social studies and English - that's how. And this is where we are sent! “Why, you are an erudite person,” the head of the commission tells me, “you can handle it. But in money you will have one and a half bets for each! " And there is nothing to do. The diploma must be "confirmed". And "work out". After all, these are only very narrow-minded people in our country who believe that higher education in the USSR was free. Not at all! Having received it, you had to work not where you want, but where you need to, that is, you could be forcibly sent anywhere, but you couldn't even say a word, because you studied for free. And instead of economically motivating people to work in Kalmykia, from the Samoyeds or in Pokrovo-Berezovka, people were simply taken and sent, carrying out a typical medieval "non-economic compulsion to labor", because there was even criminal liability in the case of … evasion. True, it was not particularly used, but very few people wanted to start their career with a scandal, the opinion that “you should” in a totalitarian society is always dominant!
Well, all the questions were sorted out, at the graduation party … they fumbled, packed up our things and went closer to September. On the truck, all the furniture is in the back (and I am there), and in the driver's cab is the wife and the headmaster. Then there was no special cargo transportation and "Gazelles", there was no firm "Absolutely sober loaders", whose services I use today in Penza all the time, but there were personal agreements and "for a bottle." And at first there was nothing to drive along the highway. But then a country road went and … my reliably connected furniture … "came to life"! What did she do in the back and what did I do there, oh. But he stayed alive!
They brought us to a boarding school and moved us into a large spacious room. And for some time we lived there until we realized that living in a boarding school with the children is also free to work there, and to know no peace either day or night.
And we decided to move. And the school manager offered us to rent the house. Directly opposite the selmag. We were delighted and … rented, and paid for it, as well as for light, and firewood according to the law, the school, or rather RONO. At that time rural teachers enjoyed such advantages over other people in the village. Also, male teachers were not drafted into the army. That's how I didn't get into her ranks.
Since I never had enough money, and there was plenty of time in the village, I began to write first to the local Kondol newspaper Leninskoye Slovo, and then to Penza Pravda, Sovetskaya Rossiya and Sovetskaya Mordovia. I am writing about what interesting things will happen at school. And publicity school, and me a fee!
Our caretaker's height was up to my chest - a gnome gnome! And he built a house for the gnomes too: to look out the window you have to kneel down, and the ceiling - here he is, he raised his hands and at the elbow, without bending - he rested. Doors … oh, with my height I had to bow to them all the time, or else with my forehead on the lintel - here she is, waiting! Still, it was better than living with children in a boarding school. And… yes, opposite the store, which was very important at that time. But between our house and the store there was a road laid on black soil, and tractors DT-75 and … "Kirovtsy" drove along it! In winter and summer it was tolerable, but in autumn and spring - oh-oh-oh - it was necessary to see what she was turning into.
But let's continue our story about the house. A kitchen with a stove and a large hall, also with a stove, in which a small bedroom was fenced off by boards, which became our room for the games of our two-year-old daughter. We placed our old furniture in these rooms, which had been in our new four-room apartment since the days of the previous wooden house in 1882, laid rugs on the floor, hung carpets on the walls, and it became even very “nothing”. They also brought a TV, but no matter how much they did not connect to the antenna, it was not possible to connect. This is how we lived without TV for three whole years, but we listened to the radio and records with musical fairy tales, which our daughter really liked.
At school, in addition to social studies, history, geography, astronomy and labor, I also had to lead a circle of technical creativity. It was difficult to make something out of nothing, but … I immediately wrote about it. And about what is good and what is bad and what the rural school lacks.
Conveniences, in theory, were supposed to be on the street, but our owner did not have them at all! Not built! There is a chicken coop! And chickens … they eat everything! Convenient, right? But they got by. The feces went into the stove, which is very convenient, by the way, if you think over this process in advance, and the liquid fractions went into the wash bucket.
Then they brought us briquettes and firewood for free. Not sawn or chipped! Well, it's good that I grew up in a wooden house with stoves and from the age of ten I sawed and chopped wood with my grandfather, who had replaced my father for many years. But if not for this, then what to do?
By the way, many of our classmates didn't go to work in the village. Including, even I would say in the first place, those who were originally from the village. Someone got married and had to be assigned to the husband's place of work! Someone skillfully gave birth so that at the time of distribution the child turned out to be "up to a year", someone (the son of the head of the pharmacy of the main pharmacy of the city) brought a certificate that he could not speak for more than two hours - that's how. Where is this in the village. And someone did … declared himself a nutcase and at the same time dodged both the village and the army. Such were the "conscious" young builders of communism among us at that time, although there were not many of them. But in the end, dozens went to the village, although hundreds of teachers were trained, and only a few remained there.
But back to the firewood. We sawed them together with his wife, a city girl to the bone, and it was a very funny sight. She was afraid of the stove, because she had never heated it and was very afraid of the hot oil that splashed on her hands from the frying pan. Then I pinned them, put them in the shed, and it was then that the August teachers' council took place, at which we were officially “accepted as teachers”, and September 1 came.
Children came from the neighboring villages - Novo-Pavlovka, Ermolaevka, Butaevka, their own came up, gave me class guidance in the 10th grade and I went to them to conduct a social studies lesson. I look at the children, all so strong, stocky, most of the girls have blood-and-milk cheeks, their uniforms are tearing their breasts. What a school for them - to get married and … to the barn! But the "general average" must be given. Party and government decision! So I gave a lesson, gave an assignment, then another, a third. It turned out that I would have a load of 30 hours a week and also a technical class. And in some classes there were 25 or more students, while in others there were only 5-6 - such a strange "demographic situation". There were unexpectedly many young teachers besides us: a writer who studied with us, a mathematician, another historian who arrived a year earlier, and a physicist who already worked here and … became famous for having married her student who worked as a cattleman.
Well, we were a little surprised at this, remembered the saying, "love is evil …" and got down to work. In the next lesson, I call the children to answer, and they get up and … are silent! They seemed to be listening well, the textbook was under their noses, what else is needed? I did my practice in the 1st school of Penza, the best one for that time, and when I asked something there, the next day I got what I wanted. And then … something strange? "Ready?" Silence! "I'll put a two!" Silence. And then, at the end, one girl tells me that they did not study like that before, with the old teacher who was before me, but the way I teach, they are not used to it. I ask - "And how?" - and they tell me that in the lesson they read the textbook out loud in paragraphs, then they immediately retold it, then read and retold it again, looking at the textbook. Well, how do you like the technique? I was not taught this at the university, but here … "new Pestalozzi", his mother … "So you can't retell what you read at home?" "Don't …" I have them this way and that. I am telling about my "discovery" in the teacher's room. And in response to me - and he was an excellent student of education !!!
It was even worse in English. Due to the constant change of teachers - one arrived, the other left, the children studied English for a year, German for a year, did not learn anything at all for a year … and now they had to learn English from a 10th grade textbook! With basic knowledge of the language to zero with a plus.
But this is a kind of "our answer to Chamberlain." At that time they talked and wrote a lot about this, and I also expressed my opinion as a grassroots teacher.
We studied for a week and we were told that we need to help the state farm and … go "to the beets." And we began to work on harvesting beets. That is, first collect it behind the tractor and put it in piles, and then chop off its tails with large knives and transfer it to heaps. We have been working since the 5th grade. But the kids only picked up and carried, and only the elders cut their tails.
And here you have the first and very serious problem of Soviet secondary education in those years. And so, rural children, let's say, for the most part, did not shine with intelligence, and then they were officially reduced their study time by 1, 5, or even 2 months, and they were advised to make up for lost time … "at the expense of pedagogical skills." But it's still good if 2 months. In Central Asia, cotton was harvested until December, literally with snow together. So it turned out that urban children in the field of education had significant preferences over rural children with the declared equality of one and all.
