I started the series about an elementary school in the Soviet Union by
stating that across the country, all schools were almost the same in terms of what they taught and how did the schedule look like. However, there was something special about the school I attended – it was a “specialized English school with several subjects taught in English.”
The overall quality of foreign language teaching in the Soviet Union was poor, and Soviet people were notorious for not being able to communicate in any foreign language,
In our school, things were better, although far from perfect.

In all ordinary schools, students started to learn a foreign language in the 5th grade, while we started in the second grade. More importantly, for English lessons, classes of 35 + students were divided into three groups, so we had more interactive instructions.
In the second grade, we had English three times a week (which meant that we had five periods instead of four on these days). At least once a week, we had lessons in “lingo rooms,” where our desks were equipped with headsets to listen to the tapes recorded by the native speakers and practice pronunciation.

I should have my second-grade English notebooks somewhere, but I could not find them, so here are my third-grade ones. We did a lot of writing and reading but also a lot of oral practice, so by the end of the eighth grade, my English was fluent (I lost some during High School and got it back in the 90s when I started interacting with foreigners.

I think that by the fith grade, we had English every

In the upper grades, we used to joke that they were educating us to become spies, and we could not imagine how close to reality these jokes were.

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.