Denis Yatsutko. My first teacher

My first teacher
or The problem of terror in elementary school

Denis Yatsutko

Publication date: May 29, 2003

There are so many touching songs and poems about the first teacher ! So many stories and films! For some reason, it is believed that the first teacher is like first love or first blood in a fight, no... the first teacher is a good deity, like a mother, but on a salary, on a very, very small salary, and therefore she is needed to love, obey and respect selflessly, and then - certainly remember and regret a little. And once their children get started and go to school, their first teacher must be respected, pitied and supported .

The existence of such a point of view among the people is primarily promoted by the first teachers themselves, i.e. primary school teachers who constantly talk about their unenviable financial situation and try to improve it at the expense of the parents of their students. Every now and then I hear from friends whose children study in primary school: “the teacher asked for an iron for the holiday”, “the teacher wants a set for the New Year”, “I need to chip in for the teacher for new plumbing”... And I don’t feel at ease... then from these stories... I can’t get used to it, although I’ve been hearing it almost all my life... Even when I was in first grade, I remember my mother saying: “The teacher is asking for a set of silverware for the end of the school year!! Let her go!” ..." - what followed was one of those wonderful mother's tirades on social topics, under the direct influence of which a love for my native language and a heightened sense of justice began to form in me even then. I rarely hear such tirades from current acquaintances; They accept the demands of their children’s first teachers with heavy humility, as an inevitable evil, even, probably, as an inevitable a lesser evil, believing that with these gifts they are saving their child from some possible persecution from the teacher.

It would seem that the salaries of primary school teachers are such that one can understand the desire to get some kind of increase from somewhere to these pennies - a natural desire, although dubious from the point of view of legality and morality. But it’s not only primary school teachers in Russia who receive little money. Many parents of their students fare no better. And for them, “donating money to the teacher for the service” can be a significant blow to the family budget, that is, to the maintenance of the child as well. A teacher's set may cost him an interesting book, new pants, or a dozen or so ice creams. However, parents sacrifice these benefits of their child for... what?

A child in primary school is almost completely under the control of the teacher. Before that, especially if he did not go to kindergarten, he did not have much exposure to the external, extra-family, alien world. He's vulnerable. He is suggestible and controllable. And the teacher, offended by material inattention, can apparently take out her resentment on him; she can inflict trauma on the child, from which he may not recover. She has many ways of doing this: yelling, giving an undeserved “D”, not letting her leave the lesson to go to the toilet, drawing the class’s attention to some shortcoming of the child, etc.

Perhaps she won’t do this, but, you see, giving her things that they would often never allow themselves is made by parents, not least of all, the fear of precisely such actions on her part. And it is precisely the awareness of the presence of this fear, the awareness of their power over children (and, consequently, over parents) that prompts many primary school teachers to exploit parents’ wallets on any formal occasion (holidays, etc.) without any hesitation. If you call a spade a spade, these teachers blackmail parents, creating a threat to children . How, in this case, do they differ from terrorists and other criminals who take over schools, hospitals and buses with children, trying to solve some of their adult problems by posing a threat to the life and health of innocent children? Nothing. Absolutely.

You ask, how can unhappy teachers live on a meager salary? How do others live? Tighten your belt, earn extra money by doing handicrafts or writing articles, plant potatoes, join a trade union and fight for your rights, quit and look for another job, find a rich husband, take some minister hostage, in the end, but not your children .

I believe that primary school teachers who assemble a parent committee and demand obligatory expensive gifts for the holidays should be perceived as terrorists who pose a threat to the life and health of civilians of the Russian Federation, and they must be dealt with accordingly, applying the relevant articles of the criminal code.

And let this scare away, perhaps, many from working in primary schools and create a labor shortage in this area... Well, maybe this will finally force those in power to seriously reconsider the problem of financing education. In any case, people who are capable of “service” blackmail and extortion (and it is they who will be scared off by such measures in the first place) should not work in schools and teach young citizens, and adults too.