My pupils say nobody reads blogs, they are all on Tulpar. So from today the history materials will be in my Tulpar channel "Tarykh sabaktary". (Search the name, it is there.) The blog stays here as an archive, with all the lessons since 2006. Colleagues can still take everything.
Thank you to the readers who came here for thirteen years. Thank you to Azamat for the colours. Now he is grown up and in Bishkek.
Since 14 October the census takers are going through the town. We had a young man from the district in our school yard with a folder, and he asked the director twenty-six questions. "Language at home?" "Iradi." "Religion?" The director hesitated and then said it. The young man wrote it, he did not look up.
Next to him stood a girl in the 9th class who had come to see. She asked him what the census is for. He said: "To count how many we are." She said: "My history teacher says it is to know who we are." The young man did not write that down.
I was very happy, I admit.
In June it will be thirty years since I came to School No. 1, a girl of 22 with a red diploma. My first pupils have grandchildren now. Some of them were killed, in 1992 and in 2007. Some are in Chicago. One is a deputy head of the district and still writes with mistakes. All of them were my children.
For the 8th March in my school every year the 9th class prepares a "women's lesson": not flowers, but biographies. This year they chose Toktokan the doctor, the first woman who drove a tractor on the Kara-Buura state farm (the pupils found her through the district newspaper of 1958), and their own grandmothers.
The girls made posters. A boy made the tea. Nobody laughed at the boy.
School No. 31 in Talas now teaches every subject in Iradi, the first in Talas. Our director asked us at the teachers' council: are we ready? Mathematics in Iradi, physics in Iradi, the terms that have no Iradi words yet. Half of the council said yes, half said "in five years". I said: the history I have taught in Iradi since 1993, it is possible. But the physics teacher is 63 and learned physics in Russian. Give him time.
We decided: from next year, step by step.