A teacher… or a doctor? No, a teacher after all… or a doctor… I asked myself these questions from early childhood. I wanted so much to heal people that all my dolls were heavy from the injections they received every day. And my first acquaintance with checking exercise books came when I was 2. When Dad was away on a business trip, Mom, leaving in the evening for work at the boarding school, would leave me with our neighbors, a young couple of teachers. My joy knew no bounds: I would instantly run up to the shelves of exercise books and quickly mix them up. Then we would sit down at the table and start sorting them: the lined exercise books go on the right, the squared ones on the left… Becoming a doctor was a wish, but it was impossible not to become a teacher.
I grew up, you could say, at school. My mother was a teacher, my grandmother (a relative on my mother’s side) was a teacher, my mother’s cousin was a teacher, my parents’ friends were teachers… Could I possibly have chosen any other profession?
So, I had settled on my profession, but my subject… Which subject did I want to teach? To be a primary school teacher, like Mom? Nooo, I had seen how Mom taught children to write and read, and I thought: “No, I couldn’t do that…” A mathematician, like that cousin, I could not be a priori — not the right turn of mind…. “I’ll probably be a historian,” I thought, “I’ll tell children about ancient Rome, about mysterious cultures, about the origin and structure of the world… But what about the exercise books? I want so much to check exercise books, and the more the better! I’ll write out letters in red ink, correct the lines my students have written wrongly… I’ll explain why a word is spelled one way and not another. And in literature lessons I’ll help my students come to know themselves, help them rebuild this world according to the laws of beauty, love and kindness, as in A. Fet:
The whole world is born of beauty…
Though man is not eternal,
What is eternal is humane.
The final influence on my choice of subject was my homeroom teacher, Alla Mikhailovna Gribanskaya. This fragile, petite woman was always smiling and kind. She, her husband and her daughter gave their whole lives to the school. I remember her eyes well — little imps were always dancing in them. At the same time, it seemed she could see right through us. Alla Mikhailovna was always demanding and fair with us. She saw a personality in every student and respected it. It was she who instilled in me a love of literature and taught me to express my feelings and thoughts. We all listened to her spellbound, following her every movement. I remember how I loved answering questions, unafraid to state my own point of view. And I began to imagine myself in her place. So after passing my final exams, the question of which faculty to enter no longer arose for me. At the entrance exams to the institute, I could not choose an essay topic for a long time and was even ready to leave, but then I settled on an open topic similar to today’s: “My Future Profession Is Teacher,” and wrote it so well that my essay was judged the best and was even printed in the regional newspaper.
While studying at the institute I was also lucky with my teachers: Galina Alexandrovna Chernetskaya — not only a teacher but a mentor with a capital M, our curator — taught us not only modern Russian but also life. Galina Alexandrovna Baronova asked us questions that I still remember and now ask my own students. For example, when did the sun turn black for Grishka Melekhov? (M. Sholokhov, “And Quiet Flows the Don”).
After graduating from the institute, I came to work at my old school, and my teachers suddenly became my colleagues. I remember how they looked after me, came to my lessons and gave me feedback in such a way that I asked them to come again.
Who influenced my choice of profession? My relatives? My schoolteachers or my university lecturers? Only all of them together. If even one of them had shown, even once, that they were not a teacher in the broad sense of the word but simply went to work, perhaps I would not have stayed at school for so long.
I had to begin my teaching path twice. After working at my school for 7 years, my family and I were forced to move from Kazakhstan to Russia, and that is how I ended up in Podlesnoye, where I have now been working for 25 years. In a new place, in another country, with a new staff, I had to start everything all over again. First in the after-school group, then as a primary school teacher… It was hard, but I was at school, with children. Two years later I began teaching my favorite subject. Once again I was lucky with the staff, who know the worth of every teacher, help the younger generation and take care of the veterans.
For me, being a teacher is not just a profession. You cannot simply work as a teacher; you have to be a teacher.
To teach means not only to pass on your knowledge, but also to devote yourself completely to people, to other people’s children, who very quickly become your own. A teacher not only teaches but is constantly learning too.
The main thing in my work is not to remain indifferent to my students’ small victories and defeats, to be able to praise, prompt and guide at the right moment. It is important to learn to see and value in a child the unique individuality that sets them apart from others, to be able to provide freedom of self-expression and to understand that a child is a personality with their own view of the world, their own experience and their own feelings.
However hard it may sometimes be, I do not regret choosing the teaching profession, because a teacher is a person who brings children what is good, wise and eternal.
“He is an artist, but his listeners and spectators do not applaud him. He is a sculptor, but no one sees his works. He is a doctor, but his patients very rarely thank him for the treatment and by no means always want to be treated. Where, then, is he to find the strength for daily inspiration? Only in himself, only in the awareness of the greatness of his work.” S. L. Soloveichik.