Such excellent features of the teachers are easy to understand if one takes into account the specific location of my native town Kushka (now Serhetabat), which lies at the state border zone. Most of my teachers were wives of the military officers who bravely accompanied their husbands during endless travels to the new sites of their missions.
Naturally, as a supplement to the basic subjects, these teachers arranged various clubs and diverse activities to apply their creative ideas and efforts and to implement own flooding energy into the life of their young students. Again and again, let me emphasize the fact that many such clubs were never created in more ordinary schools, even those located close by. For instance, the mathematics teacher led a hobby group for studying etiquette and good manners during couple years. Why did she choose such an extraordinarily subject? It would not be of great wonder if one knew that she herself was a representative of a very old Russian noble family, and by husband’s line she is a descendant of the Princes Yakushkins, engraved their names in history of the Tsarist Russia. However, frankly, I was the only male member of this group among its other, more beautiful participants. As usual everywhere in the world, girls were more eager to learn about etiquette and politeness, than rather rough and mischievous boys.
Never will I be tired of repeating that I am a lucky guy because I have had so wonderful teachers and mentors almost through all my life. And how many of them I still hope to meet in the forthcoming future!
Most of them, my secondary school teachers, in spite of their different ethnic origins (which, again, was not usual for many other schools of any Soviet periphery), tried to foster an interest to our own, Turkmen cultural roots, simultaneously with general education. My addiction to ethnographic aspects of life, my eagerness to plunge into mentalities and behavior of different nations was cultivated since those years and thanks to their efforts.
Nevertheless, the main direction of this educational system, which was aimed to study the life of the “entity addressed as the Soviet people”, influenced further development of individual students.
Therefore, upon the graduation from the secondary school I knew Russian language fluently, I was quite well familiar with the Russian culture, and with different styles of interpersonal relationships of the Slavic people. At the same time, I could only very weakly sort out mentality aspects of my own ethnic group, the Turkmens. Fortunately, at the same time I was striving for finding out more aspects of these traditions by myself.