"Clear Minds" Come Up With Innovation For Teachers

City teachers should go to rural schools now.

They have come up with an innovation. Teachers preparing school children for academic competition now have to go to the schools of their district from time to time and give lessons there for talented children.

Well, these clear minds with such ideas amaze me. And it's not even a specific idea that is the issue, but the approach. How to improve the district's results in the academic competitions? Right! Let's force the teachers, who can achieve at least something in this field, to go to villages and teach children 45 minutes so that they could take part in the academic competitions. And all this they should do in their free time, at their own expense and by buses that go rarely and by inconvenient schedule. Is it not obvious that the teachers, happy with such a splendid prospect, will begin to work even better, even harder, even more cheerful – with other teacher's pupils?

A participant in the academic competitions is a very special child. One cannot prepare them like on a conveyor belt, especially in only forty-five minutes. Such participants are grown for years. And not every class has such a kid, especially the one who can compete in the subject that you teach.

Sometimes children sent by other teachers come to me to get ready for the academic competitions. Their teachers think they fit for them. The children are always smart, studious, have intelligent eyes, and it seems that they see the distinction between a form-building suffix and a word-formative one, that is, something is definitely there, but, good God, they have read neither "White Fang," nor "Amphibian Man", in fact, they do not read at all, only the course books, and they look at me with surprise when I ask what they are going to read tonight. – Why? Nothing. – I find out the preferences, give a list of books to read. A week passes. One of them has read three pages, another one – five. What’s that, I ask. Well, it is very uncomfortable to read via the phone. Why, isn’t a book available? Well, there is no place to get it! What kind of books do you have at home? WE HAVEN’T GOT ANY!

Do you have a library there? It’s closed. What about the district one? Yes, we’ve joined it, but there is no time to go there, we'll miss the bus. I bring them my own books, from my home library. What else can I do? The general development is zeroed. The intellectual operations – not unless the simplest ones. A step away from "write down and fill in the letters" – and there’s a brain freeze. And this cannot be taught in forty-five minutes. It takes years, my dear fellows, years! It is cultivated daily in the family, while communicating with adults, reading books, damn, it must be daily reading!!!

That's nothing that present participants of academic competitions do not know what is kibitka or "In the powdery snow cutting feathery furrows." This is nothing. They do not know what "privilege" is. A "precedent" – wow! that’s to know the unknowable. They do not understand where the mistake in the sentence "like water off a chicken's back" is.

Gracious Heavens! "You are such an expert, Hanna, can it be that you fail to teach them?" – Yes, it can! I am not able to do it!

We can, of course, win the right not to take stool tests at school. We can get rid of the subscription. All this is possible. But until the education at any level is controlled by such clear minds, who for some reason do not understand the causes, effects, interrelations and logical chains in the mental activity of the human brain, darn it – there will be only much cry and little wool.

Hanna Seviarynets, Facebook