First semester exams this week. The corridor is full of children whispering dates. Next to the stove one boy was whispering: "751, 1864, 1916, 1992." I asked what he would do if the question were about 1727. He said, "Then I will write about the church." Good boy.
Heating note for parents: the heating is on from eight in the morning now. The glass in the 6th-class windows is new. Thank God.
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.
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.
The results of the Uluttuk Synak come in the second half of July, but the district sends the first marks for the written part by telephone to the schools. My 12th class: history average 71, the best in the district for the third year. I do not boast, I write it to remind myself, in winter.
One girl, Aidana, wrote the best essay on the Kokand period that I have read from a child. She wants to study law in Talas. I told her: law is only history that is still in force.