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My Great Teacher

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My Great Teacher

05.10.2014

There are many different kinds of teachers, but the best teacher is the one remembered throughout one’s lifetime. I was lucky enough to have such a teacher – the person who helps you define your life, shares with you his principles and ideals, rules and taste.

This is a subtle matter that cannot be enforced, imposed or learned – it can only be received from the person you have absolute respect for, whom you are ready to make your role model, who can destroy you in one second with his sarcasm, and whose praise is the highest reward for you, your Oscar and Palm d’Or. This sort of teacher is portrayed in The Dead Poets’ Society, be sure to see it. They are not just cinema characters – I had one in my real life.

I was about to complete the seventh grade and had to decide where to go next. The school was unsatisfactory, as there were not many pupils who actually wanted to study. Starting a math lesson, our teacher Valentina Sergeevna would write out in the corner of the green blackboard exercises, six-eight of them, for the handful of pupils who understood the materials to compete with each other in solving. Then with the rest of the class she would slowly plod through the lesson plan. After classes she would deal with us: “Girls, it’s time you get out of here!” In the neighboring school, well-known in the city for its mathematics specialization, her husband (a historian) with a team of like-minded teachers was opening the city’s first gymnasium with four major specializations: mathematics, physics, natural sciences and human sciences.  

I remember the blue linoleum pattern on the second floor of that school, when we came there for the first time to get information about classes. In our school the floor was made of painted boards. Everything was different in the gymnasium, starting from that very blue patterned linoleum. I had to make a difficult choice between mathematics and literature. In my old school we had a rather uncommon teacher of Russian – the female part of the school was envious of her attire and hair-do and I always stared at her make-up, when she was checking the assignment in my copybook – using a tone and makeup pencil, she changed the line of her lips and the lipstick was laid somewhat different from the natural outlines. And she gave us offbeat assignments – our first lesson in the fourth grade we spent at a school arena, picking up yellow and red leaves there, while Irina Yuryevna would read folk tales to us. After a stroll we had to write our own folk tale. This was my first ever stylistic work on a text. Then, after four years with our wonderful teacher, I pondered: should I sign up for the class of humanities? But it’s very unlikely that I’ll have such a wonderful teacher. What if I love Irina Yuryevna, rather than Russian language and literature? 

There were three sets of gymnasium exams: in June, July and August. In June I left with my Mom and my little brother for the mountains in a light-minded manner and I decided to try my luck with the second enrollment. And then I was sitting at a one-person wooden table – they wanted to do everything different at the gymnasium – waiting for my assignment. There were probably some other tests but I do not remember now. I can recall only the composition. A middle-aged grey-haired man walked into the classroom. Yes, the written exam came last, which means by that time we had already passed the first round and I do not remember whether we talked with anybody else. And that focused man who was doing at the moment what nobody else did in the city – a university literature teacher who did not get on with the administration and was fired with several other people like him – he planned to organize a new type of school in our city that might soon find itself beyond Russia’s borders on the year of the USSR break-up and at the time of global transformations, with Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum being his role model.

He walked into the classroom in a flying step and stopped, jerking his knee nervously. And then he distributed assignments: “Describe her,” he said to my friend, showing at someone. “And you”, he addressed me, “describe me.” And then he left us alone. If I describe him in good and kind words this might be taken as flattery. And then I’ll not be enrolled. But no, at that turning point in my life I could not even think of a failure. I knew in advance that I would be studying at the gymnasium. I certainly wrote some follies: “His hair is like a ground slightly covered with snow” and added something about his eyes which revealed that he works a lot with children. We were to come to the meeting several hours later and hear the names of enrollees. And then my resolution failed me, pain in the stomach folded me in half and, huddling up in my bed, like a squeezed sheet, I gave up and asked my Mom to go there in place of me. 

What did he teach us? Why do I consider him the main teacher of my life? He taught me how to write. He put me “satisfactory” for my first composition and said: “I put you ‘satisfactory’ and I’d score a ‘good’ to someone else because I know that you can write much better.” He put me this ‘satisfactory’ in such a way that this mark was my reward, promise and advance, my Oscar and Palm d’Or. I do not remember any more satisfactory marks. We wrote a lot of stories and essays, went to creative Olympiads and took all top positions from one to eight. Other schools were exasperated and hated us; teachers from the rest of our school (the gymnasium took up only part of the school building) came to inspect our class and left biting their lips: “Ordinary children, not the sharpest pencils in the box!” Yes, we were ordinary, but we were encouraged by our teachers who were actually the sharpest pencils, since they taught us Gumilyov, cancelled school diaries and history textbooks. They told us that we’d be learning history using the original sources: Karamzin, Kostomarov and Klyuchevsky. They taught integrated lessons on the juncture of literature and history; they were on the crest and had a real drive, so we were truly lucky, regardless of our achievements.

“Using obscene language is like wearing dirty underwear,” winced Mikhail Zinovyevich, tapping with his manicured nail on the wooden table. Yes, he could be a man of action and also mind the beauty of his nails at the same time.

“The higher bar you set for yourself, the greater success you’ll achieve in your life,” he used to say.

“What kind of Jew could I make?” he noted in the midst of the lesson. “I grew up on Russian culture and speak Russian.”

“Belinsky was like the untamable elements – if he loved he did that with full devotion! If he hated, he did that with all the fibers of his soul! If he criticized something he did that very severely!” he said, explaining the reason why Belinsky so ripped Selected Excerpts from Correspondence with Friends with such passion that he crushed Gogol.

“You watched Twin Peaks yesterday, did you?” he joked with us. “And you must be reading Angelica, Sveta, right?

Yes, the girls read Angelica, the ordinary crap of the 1990s, but they understood pretty well that they should be somewhat ashamed of this, like Pikul.

He developed a sense of the word and cultivated a literary taste in us. He expected that we’d write and prepared us for something greater.

“Olya, do you write something?” he asked, greeting me in the street with this question after I left school.

No, I didn’t write anything, since I could not come up with a single plot. I no longer had any confidence.

“You should write,” Mikhail Zinovyevich sternly shook his head.

I often think about him, but I never write to him, since I have nothing to show, except some essays and reports.

The gymnasium did not last long. He could not bring the next class after us to graduation – some people were found, who wished to appropriate the success and brought a new principal. The teachers went on strike but lost in this struggle. Mikhail Zinovyevich was employed as a teacher by the most expensive private school in our city where the children of local elite were studying. And he was disappointed there again. He always thought that if a person pays for education that person will duly appreciate it. Parents paid huge, unreal money for these children, but they did not want to read.

One day I met Mikhail Zinovyevich on my way to the institute. “My class graduates tonight,” he said. “I told them that I would not attend this event. I’ll sit down on a bench near the neighboring building so that they can see me and realize that I do not want to be there!”

Such was my great teacher Mikhail Z. Sheynin. I heard he lives in Australia now.

Olga Timofeeva, correspondent of the Russkiy Reporter magazine, for the Russkiy Mir Portal
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