Thinking about most of my schooling years, I am retrospectively surprised by how little of the cultural events were there. There was almost nothing going on after school. In the third grade, I started to take piano lessons, which our school music teacher was giving. There was one 15-minute lesson a week for the price of 5 rubles (I was giving the money to the teacher at the beginning of each lesson). I neither liked nor disliked it. I thought the girls who played piano were cool, and I wanted to do the same. Nobody forced me to do piano, so it sort of went on until the eighth grade when I didn’t have enough time to do this and stopped. I didn’t play any sports, and I didn’t have any other extracurricular activities until I started to attend theater classes at the nearby House of Culture when I was already in the fifth grade.
I liked reciting poetry, and I was good at it – I still had an excellent memory and didn’t have a problem memorizing long poems and stories, and I enjoyed reciting all these pieces “expressively.” Like many other girls, I wanted to be on stage, but the teacher in the theater class wanted me to do storytelling – he thought I was better at that. Recalling the details, I believe he was a very good teacher, and he took the kids seriously. The core of the class was several extremely talented boys, and it was apparent to me that I was no match, not even close. In contrast to most of the amateur theatrical groups, our’s was constantly looking for talented girls rather than boys, with very intermittent luck.
These classes were no joke. Our teacher spent time with me one-on-one, going through the text. The first time I would start a new story, I had to copy it into my notebook and highlight the most important word in each sentence (and to be ready to explain why this is the most important word). Then, we would go through the text countless times. He said that this stage was not a creative stage but “craftsmanship.” Only after I passed this stage and learned the whole text by heart was I allowed to start adding emotions and other creative elements. I still remember that my best reward was when I saw my teacher laughing after I finished a humorous story at one of the concerts.
All of this, however, was happening in middle school. All the classes were free, and I went to the House of Culture and signed myself up – no parent’s content was required. As for elementary school (from first to third grade), there was nothing for me except for reading after school. Activities like going to museums or theatrical performances were extremely rare. The only “children’s” theaters were two puppet theaters (and it was hard to get tickets for these performances). Museums didn’t have any children’s studios or any kid-centered activities, and things like “children’s museums” didn’t exist. That’s for all this “most cultural nation”…
Most of the weekends (actually, Sundays only, since we had school on Saturdays) included sleeping in, going for some city walks, and almost obligatory visits to my grandfather. As I mentioned earlier, the apartment where my grandfather lived was very far from the city center. It was hard to believe that it was considered to be “within city limits.” The were multiple ways to get there, none straightforward, and all taking about one and a half hours each way. I can’t believe how much time was wasted so reproductively; I didn’t even read on the tram.
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.
Hettie's Reflections 