My graduating class sits the Synak tomorrow. I wrote on the board "Two pens." A girl said, "Eje, you say it every year." Yes. It is because in 2005 a boy wrote the maths paper with one pen and wept in my corridor afterwards. His name was Bekzhan. He is now a clever man in Talas who writes on the Internet and I am proud of him, and he still brings two.
Go with God, children.
An addition to my lesson of 2006, from a reader's letter. The caretaker of the mausoleum wrote that in the Kokand time the fort had a well 41 metres deep, dug by prisoners, and the water from it tasted of iron. He showed my pupils a stone from the well's ring last year. Now it lies behind the mausoleum, in the weeds.
If anyone from the Heritage service reads this: please. A stone is not a fence post.
The first week of February the road to Talas was shut by snow for two days. The teachers who live in the city could not come, so the older pupils took the little ones, and the 11th class taught the 3rd for two lessons. They were very strict. I looked through the door and saw a boy of seventeen saying "Quiet" in my voice.
Nobody told them to. I think that is called education.
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.
After Jumabai ata died I read his "Spring on the jailoo" to the 6th class on Monday, from his blog, printed on a clean page. Then I asked: what does the radio smell of? Silence. Then a boy said "dust". Then a girl said "batteries". The grandfather's radio in the poem has never smelled the grass, of course.
That is a good lesson in the poem, and in the history of the radio in Irad.
I printed "For those who left" too. I did not read it aloud. Some of the children knew why.