Elementary School In the Soviet Union: My Notebooks

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I plan to write a series of blog posts about school, similar to the series I wrote about the university. I do not have as many pictures from my school years as I would need to illustrate everything I am going to write about, but I have a lot of my school notebooks saved by my mom.

I have two of my very first notebooks in storage, and I will scan them at some point in the future, but I didn’t want to wait until this future came, so here are several others.

All of them are from my first grade. There was no Kindergarten class at school, and I already described our Kindergarten education when I blogged about my detsky sad. What I started in September 1970 was a first grade; whatever was before was not considered school.

The name of this notebook is the Russian language. That’s what “writing” was called. In the first grade, our parents signed our notebooks.

Our notebooks were not at all like nowadays notebooks. The cover was made of thin paper, ad there were only twelve pages in each, We had six notebooks circulating at any given time: two for the Russian language, two for math, and two for penmanship. At the beginning of the lesson, you would turn in your notebook with your homework and pick up your other notebook with your yesterday’s homework graded by your teacher. You would do your classwork in that notebook, then do the homework in the same notebook, and the process would be repeated the next moring.

That’s classwork for May 12. I got “five” for it, which is the equivalent of an A
That’s the homework for May 19. I got “four,” which is equivalent to B. The mark is down because I made one correction.
The classwork for May14. I gir a “three” for it, somewhat between C and D – th lowest “satisfactory” grade. The work is marked down for two mistakes: 1) I broke one word in the wrongз place when going to the next line, and 2) I corrected a misspelled word
My math notebook. Each of the two red stars indicated that I got three “fives” in a row
Both of the works are dated December, three and a half months since the start of the first garde
I can only guess why this is “four”, not “five.” Probably because the plus signs are a little bit messy

My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.

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Published by Hettie D.

My name is Henrietta (Hettie) Dombrovskaya. I was born in Saint-Petersburg, Russian (actually, back then – Leningrad, USSR) in 1963, and immigrated to the United States in 1996. I love Saint Petersburg, the city I was born and raised in, and I think it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world. Similarly (but differently) I love Chicago, and can’t imagine myself moving somewhere else in the observable future. I have three children, Igor, Vlad and Anna, all adults living on their own, and one (so far) granddaughter Nadia. I also believe that my children are the best thing that happened in my life. As for my professional life, I am working in the field of Information Technologies. When I was twenty, I’ve declared that the databases are the coolest thing invented and that I want to do them for the rest of my life. Thirty plus years later, I still believe it’s true, and still, believe that the databases are the best. These two statements together imply that I think a person can have it all, and indeed, I think so! Keep reading my journals to find out how I did it.

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3 thoughts on “Elementary School In the Soviet Union: My Notebooks”

  1. Hi Hettie. I collect Soviet watches and wondered if you or your friends had watches at school.

    The ones I have are a blue cased Raketa and a Luch Karlsson. They are nice watches for kids and I assume must have been fun if a few of you had them. I know a lot about production and movements etc but very little about how it was for the owners. Any observations you have would be really appreciated. Kind Regards, Neil.

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    1. Hi Neil, your question took me by surprise. I remember that it was a big deal to finally have a watch, but I can’t tell when exactly at least some of my classmates started to have ones. I think it was something between the sixth and the seventh grade, because I remember that in the 4th and probably 5th grade we still would ask the strangers on the streed: excuse me, could you please tell us what time is it? And our parents expected us to be back home in time using this method of checking what time it was :). I definitely had a watch in the eight grade, and I should have had it in the seventh, because I had multiple after-school activities which I attended on my own, so I had to know what time it was.

      I think that at least some of my friends should have had Raketa’s. I had my mom’s old watch, which I can’t remember a model, and on my 16th birthday I got a “golden” watch, which had a thin guiling layer, but I can’t tell you what the model was :). It didn’t really matter to me as long as I could tell time!

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