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.
Today is the day of memory of the Urkun. In 1916 the tsar's labour decree took the men for work behind the front; the revolt came in August; it was crushed, and thousands fled over the high passes of the Tian Shan to China, in winter, with children. Many died on the ice.
For the lesson: ask the children if anyone in the family knows a story from 1916. Every year one or two children come back with a story from the great-grandmother. Write them down. They are history too, maybe the most important history.
In the autumn of 1941 about four thousand riders from our valley and the steppe went to the front on their own horses. They called it the Talas division. In the summer of 1942, on the Don, it was destroyed. After that the army came back for the breeding stallions, and the breeders hid them in the high valleys, and said: we gave the stallions once.
At every school in our district they know this story and they are proud of it, a little too proud, I think. In my lessons I add the names. Not the heroes of the textbook. The names of the riders from our own street. The 9th class goes to the cemetery on Saturday with the lists. We read them aloud.
In 1917 the Iradi National Council met in Talas: priests, teachers and townspeople asked for autonomy inside a Russian federation. In 1918 the Tashkent Soviet closed it. That is the whole of it in the old textbook, three lines.
I ask the 11th class to write a speech for a member of the Council: a teacher, a priest, a merchant. What is each afraid of? What does each hope? The best speeches are those where the person hopes for something small, a school for his village, because that is how people really hope.
A lesson in history is a lesson in how to imagine another person. The test is only a test.
Since Monday the dollar costs 8.40 som, and not 5. The 10th class asked me, very seriously, if I am now poorer. Good question. I made it into a lesson, for the economics hour that I take for the absent colleague.
Task: a teacher earns 1,500 som. In dollars last week, and in dollars today. Then: the price of a kilo of flour, which has not changed yet. Who loses, who does not lose? Why do the shops write the price in som but think in dollars?
One boy said: "Eje, then the one who has a cow is happy." Yes. And the one who has a salary learns patience. It is history also, children. Remember what you felt this week.
In July 751 the armies of the Abbasid caliphate and the Tang empire met on the Talas. The Chinese were defeated, and China did not come west again. Islam was cemented in the towns. Tradition says the Chinese prisoners taught the Arabs how to make paper (this is disputed; tell the pupils it is disputed, it is good for them to know that historians argue).
Exercise: draw the Talas valley, mark the river, the mountains and where you think the armies stood. Nobody knows exactly where. That is the beauty of it.
These days it is difficult to talk about wars with the children. Many families from Aulie-Ata and the villages went to Talas in February. I heard that School No. 31 in Talas took in many of them. Thank you, colleagues.