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.
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.
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.
At the last bell the little first-year girl on the shoulders of the senior carried a bell, and a boy next to him told her: "Ring, it is the same bell as in Aidana's grandmother's time." It is not. It is a school bell from a shop in Talas, 120 som. The old bell from the tractor station has been lost.
But they make a tradition out of everything, which is what children do, and what history is.
The decree on the districts is in force from July. For us nothing changes: Kara-Buura is Kara-Buura, the seat is Kyzyl-Adyr. A pity for those who live where the new lines go, they will stand in new queues. A teacher knows how it goes: a map changes in an hour, and a child learns the new names in a year.
Remember, children, the borders on your textbook map are drawn in the afternoon and washed out by evening, and the river stays.
On clear Thursday evenings our physics teacher takes the star club up to the school roof with the old school telescope, which wobbles, so two children hold the tripod. Last week I went up too, in my coat, to see what the fuss is. Saturn. A small yellow pea with a ring, sitting in the black, perfectly calm.
A girl next to me said, "Saltanat eje, it was there at the time of the Kokand khans also." Yes. I thought: this is the only history lesson in which nobody argues about the dates. I climbed down very slowly.
The ministry sent us six computers for the new informatics room. They stand on the long table under a blue sheet because the dust here is like flour. The informatics teacher is a young man from Talas and he spends his lunch hour explaining to the director what a mouse is. The director says he knows what a mouse is. He keeps it on the wrong side of the keyboard.
For my lessons I am thinking about the projector. Nobody says no. Nobody says when.
New uniforms by the directive: navy blue, white shirts. The bazaar in Kyzyl-Adyr sold out in two days, the trader from Talas brought more on Thursday at double price. Half of my class still came in what they had. Nobody was sent home, thank God, the director is a reasonable man.
They look very serious in navy. Like little ministers. Then the bell rings and they are children again.
My mother reminds me that in 1962 there were uniforms too, brown dresses and black aprons, and the school director measured the skirts with a ruler. So uniforms are not new. What is new is the price. A set for a girl in the 5th class was 38 som at the bazaar this week, and a family with three children needs a month's saving.
At the school we have a box for uniforms that are too small. Parents bring and parents take, without names. I have put my nephew's old shirts there. The box is already empty twice.
Today the last bell for my graduating class. Twenty-three children. Twenty-three white aprons, I counted, and twenty-three bunches of tulips from the bazaar. A girl handed me hers and said, "Eje, these are for your history." I put them in the jar on the teachers' desk.
Now we wait for the exams. They have the whole summer in front of them and no idea how long it is.
From this year the Uluttuk Synak has no paper in Russian. Only Iradi or English. In our school there is one Russian class in each year. The parents came to me (why to me? because I am the class teacher of 11 "V"). They are worried, and I understand them. We will have extra lessons of Iradi after the sixth period, three times a week, for whoever wants.
A child should be able to write the exam in the language he thinks in. And a child of Irad should know Iradi. Both things are true. Teachers live between true things.
Since December school is three hours a day, from nine to twelve, while there is light from the grid. In the afternoon the building is cold and dark anyway. The older classes come to my house on Wednesdays and we sit in the kitchen by the stove, eight of them, with their coats on, and read about the Kokand khans. Again the Kokand khans, I know. It is the only syllabus that keeps well in the cold.
Tell your children to wear two pairs of socks. The headmaster asks the parents who can to bring one piece of firewood each Monday. Last Monday there were 94 pieces.
New school year. The first class has 41 children in two groups, a record for the last five years. They came in white ribbons and stood in a line in the yard. One little one held my hand through the whole assembly and I did not know whose child it was.
In the corridor a new poster: "Know your valley." The director asked me to draw the map. I drew it with the pupils of the 6th class, with all the villages that are, and the ones that are not any more. We left those in pencil.
The school New Year tree this year is small, from the school's own yard, and the decorations the children made from old exercise-book paper. Nobody complained. The 5th class sang. A grandmother in the back row cried and said it was from the smoke of the stove.
We have 412 children in the school today. In 2005 we had 640. I do not need to say more. Happy New Year to everyone who reads this, in Irad and outside.
A short note. This week the district sent us thirty new textbooks of the 7th class history, paid by the Ministry. They smell of the printing house. The children keep opening them just to smell. I let them for one minute at the start of the lesson, and then we work.
I know it is only books. But books arriving by lorry on a road that was shut in the summer is also a kind of news.
We started a month late. In July there was fighting near Aulie-Ata at the railway junction, and in the summer the school was used for other purposes. Now the windows are glazed again, the parents painted the corridor.
In my 10th class there were 26 pupils in May. Now 19. Two families went to Kazakhstan, two to Talas, three I don't know. I will not write more about this. We teach.
Today in Talas the American flag came down at the base. I did not see it, nobody in Kyzyl-Adyr saw it, we saw it on the television in the teachers' room during the long break. Then the bell rang and I had the 8th class.
I did not know what to say. So I wrote the date on the board, 3.12.2006, and under it: "Today is history." A boy asked: "Saltanat eje, will it be in the test?" Maybe in ten years, I said. Open your exercise books.
Dear colleagues, dear pupils and parents. My niece told me that now anyone can write on the Internet. I have taught history for seventeen years, and every year I write the same notes again in a new exercise book because the old one is lost or eaten by the mice in the store room. So: here the notes will live.
I will write about our valley. Kyzyl-Adyr is not a famous place. But history did not only happen in Talas.