A Visit To The School For Self-Determination in Moscow, Russia

Click on writing link to left, to see the index to all the parts. You are viewing part III.

11pm

Today was Liliana’s day off from work.  She doesn’t seem to know how to relax.  First, we spent time trying to track down more possibilities for registering my visa.  Then she walked me to school.  She explained that she could not walk me into the building, however, so she stopped several hundred yards earlier.  She said this was because it is her day off and if she enters the building, it is a fact that she would get sucked into some translation work for Tubelsky and not be able to leave.  I went to the school; Liliana went shopping, cooked snacks and dinner, and, I am sure, did many other things.

Those two hundred yards were my first time walking alone on this trip.  Two years ago on my first trip here in Russia I did walk around alone a few times in other cities and in Moscow.  But by and large, I have less independent than is ordinary for me. 

When I walked into the school, I went directly to Tubelsky’s office.  He wasn’t in.  I was escorted by a secretary to the teacher’s lounge, where the plump woman with the short red hair took over and brought me into a nearby classroom.  She spoke some English, and she told me we were going to sit in the literature class and observe alongside Tubelsky.  As we entered the room, she grabbed me strongly by the arm and guided me to a seat at the back.  There were three students giving a presentation at the front of the room.  The chairs were in rows.  The students looked about 11 years old. (I think that the classrooms for younger students are organized in other patterns, but for the older students all were organized in rows.)  Tubelsky was sitting in a very nice suit in the audience.  Two other administrative-looking people similarly dressed were in the row behind him.  He gave me a great big smile when I came into the room, and when I was guided to sit down near him he rose and said “Welcome, welcome.”  We watched the rest of the class, about fifteen minutes, then he pulled me along with him into the smoking lounge, where through the haze he told me to come to his office at 1:30.  At that moment, the door opened, and a young lady, either a student or a teacher, said hello to me and invited me to her English class.  I left with her, still unsure whether she was a teacher or a student, and then we came into her classroom, where we met about eight ten-year-olds.

I introduced myself to all, and my new friend who had asked me to come along (the teacher, Masha) helped translate a few questions back and forth, then all together we left to go to another classroom at the other end of the building.  We arrived there, and then Masha realized she had forgotten her bag, so she left me alone with the kids.  Lucky for me, this was the same room where I had stashed my mandolin yesterday, so I took it out of the closet and played a few tunes for the kids.  They liked it and said a few things in Russian, which I did not understand.  Then Masha came into the room and was pleasantly surprised to see me standing at the front with the instrument and her class listening attentively.

I proposed to teach a few songs to the class, and I taught them Row, Row, Row Your Boat and You Are My Sunshine.  She insisted on one more, so I made sure it would be the last by choosing the bluegrass song Long Journey Home.  We sometimes translated and sometimes did not.  It was impressive how well the children were able to learn the songs.

The students and I asked each other questions.  I like to ask “Do you like this school?” (at Tubelsky’s school the answer so far has always been a sincere and resounding yes).  “What do you like best?” and “What is different from other schools?” I asked.  The children talked about liking everything, liking the teachers, liking the classes, liking the freedom.

The questions children ask me, and often adults, are always hard for me to answer honestly.  “What city do you live in?” they asked innocently.  Well, I don’t live anywhere, and the closest thing to where I live is not a city. Who knows how that was translated.  “What is your job?”  Well, I don’t have a job, although it is true that I am a teacher and a writer and a poet and multiple other things.  So I followed the pattern, giving an answer as complete and correct as might be understandable, but never completely correct nor completely understandable.  This comes back to the challenge of telling the truth or lying.  People are so used to lies and comfortable with the known, that it’s often seems more believable to people when they hear a lie than when they hear the truth.

I walk into these classrooms with my bleach-blonde hair and red highlights left over from an experimental hair day.  I wear my tattered and stained sweatshirt, carrying my mandolin and ratty old bookbag.  I have walked into so many places in variations on this “look” that I am now used to being the clown.  People often think I am some kind of radical student.  Sometimes they ask to confirm, and I have to disappoint them.  I am learning from everyone all over the world, I say, but I am not enrolled in an educational institution.  The older the people I meet, the harder time they have adjusting to the reality that I don’t fit well into any of their models.  And usually, people’s initial response under these circumstances is skepticism.  As it should be.  At times, I have entertained the idea of claiming a concrete project by becoming a fellow of some NGO or by entering graduate school or by saying I am writing a book about something or other.  But I have rejected it every time.  Yes, people would give me more respect if I presented myself in one of those well-known categories.  But they would be turning off their brain in the moment when they decide to respect me.  I prefer to have people think about what I say and accept that or not, rather than to feel a social obligation or yearning to play the “accepting” role.  Yes, there is a sense in which it is harder to take this path I take.  But the people I meet deserve my best.  I ask them hard questions.  They feed me, and they house me.  This is true all over the world.  What I have to give them in exchange should also be a real gift, not some pretend show of popularity.  I owe them sharing something of what it is like to have a free mind.  And so that is my half of the exchange.  I show them what it is like to be a free man, to think for myself, to make my decisions on my own and do what makes sense to me, with pleasure.  I am a monk after all.
-

Tonight, Liliana and I went to the theater in downtown Moscow.  Someone from her school had managed to get some free tickets, and Liliana was entitled to two of them.  So she invited me.  The play was Moleire’s Tartuf, performed in Russian.

As we rode the metro towards downtown, Liliana asked me whether Tubelsky’s school is what I had expected based on my conversations with him.  I said that although I had spoken with Tubelsky, Olga, and Jerry about the school, that I had not been able to gather enough information to form an opinion before. 

Then I said, “I usually do not trust people to give honest representations of their own project, or to properly analyze someone else’s project.  I have to see it myself.  This is particularly true when the added cultural and language issues are considered.

“Since Olga’s English is a bit better than Tubelsk’s, I was able to understand what she had to say more clearly.  Tubelsky speaks in such generalities, or at least the English translation comes across that way, that I have no idea what the real school would be like, when I had spoken with him before.  Olga speaks much more concretely, but I still didn’t know her well enough to know whether she was presenting a totally distorted picture based on a few partially-true anecdotes.

“Now that I am here, I am pleased to see the respect that students and teachers have for each other, and I am particularly pleased to see that students are happily putting a lot of energy into learning.  More I cannot yet say.  By the way, have you met Olga’s father?”
(Olga’s father is Miloslav Balaban.  He is active on several email lists which I read.  He seems to have a similar philosophy to Olga but as best as I can tell he seems so theoretically obsessed that I suspect he is an incompetent teacher.)  Liliana nodded that she had met him.

I said, “There are times when I meet some people who have quite wonderful and elaborate theories but are unable to carry those theories out in reality.  I sometimes have that suspicion about him.”

“I read his dissertation about teaching English,” Liliana replied, “and I don’t want to talk about this subject.”

I don’t know what she meant by that.

“Let me tell you about one time when Tubelsky and I fought.  We fight all the time,” she said.

“I have the feeling you fight with everyone,” I said.  Liliana smiled and giggled.  Actually, I suspect Olga and Tubelsky also fight with everyone.  They all seem so much more intent on talking than listening.

Liliana went on to tell me about how the students had been using the hall outside her classroom for ball games all day long, even using her door as the goal.  She said this was disturbing and dangerous.  She said she had wanted Tubelsky to help her solve the problem, but he had just told her to go solve the problem herself.  This she had been unable to do for whatever reason, and so she wrote him a letter asking him to switch offices with her.  This didn’t have any effect.  But then one day when Tubelsky visited her classroom, a ball came flying in through the door and smacked him on the side of the head.  He became totally furious and jumped up and down and screamed. 

“This is an example of what you described, Peter – someone who knows the theory but can’t actually do it,” she said.  “Tubelsky is a great leader, and he has gotten good people into his school.  I couldn’t lead – I can’t get adults to do what I want, I can only get children to.”

And then we arrived at the theater.
-

We only stayed through the first half.  It was interesting to watch, but Liliana said we could leave if I was tired.  I wasn’t particularly tired, but after a few minutes of contemplation, I said I’d like to walk around Moscow for a bit instead of the second act.  She said that was fine, so we left and walked through assorted streets, ending up at Red Square, where we boarded the metro back to her apartment.  I don’t know why we have some of these great conversations in the metro.  Nobody else talks in the metro.  Ilya didn’t seem comfortable talking in the metro.  But Liliana and I talk in the metro.  She might be strict and disagree with Tubelsky, but on the other hand, she’s open to dialogue, and she’s not scared of differning perspectives.  I can see why Tubelsky values her.  Indeed, a school, like a community or a country, needs to have a variety of personality types.

I started the conversation by saying that I think American city children often have no friends in the country and know very little about the country.

Liliana said, “I think that is not true for Russian children.  Seventy percent of the children in my classes have dachas in the country – and when they are at the dachas with their families in the summer, they plant vegetables and see animals.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” I said.  I remembered how the first time I had met Tubelsky in his apartment, he had distracted me from his smoking by offering me some of his delicious, homemade, pickled tomatoes.

She said, “I believe there are some differences between Russian children and American children. I observed this when I was in the USA five years ago for one month on the exchange.  In some ways, the children are more mature here and in some ways less mature.  In Russia, they live with their parents longer, and don’t have a job until maybe twenty-four or twenty-five years old.  But on the other hand, they can do more here.  My son can cook things, he can fix the car, he can fix the house, he can clean, he can work in the garden.  I think American boys can’t even peel a potato.  I think maybe this is mostly for boys, I don’t know about girls.  I just have the one son, Yuri.”

“That sounds mostly correct,” I said.

“You know, about my son – he is in University, one of the main things is just that we do not want him to be in the military.  If he stopped going to the University, he would be drafted.  And I do not support these wars.  The politicians should be sending their sons to the wars, they are their wars.  Their sons never go to the military.  But we do not have a volunteer army like you do.”

And then we were at the metro stop.  We went back, had a late dinner where I ate too much desert and therefore I feel high on sugar in my head and body.  And I wrote this up.

But I still want to respond to an email from Alex, on the subject of the intentional community I would like to create.  I will write to him now, and include his letter and my response.  Then I will go to bed, if possible before midnight.  We have to leave the house at eight to get to school for Liliana’s first class at eight thirty.