Teaching: Calling and Skills

The book opens in a forest. A young man of twenty-one has come to a settlement at the end of a narrow-gauge line in the Arkhangelsk region to begin his life as a teacher, and before he has taught a single lesson the school's director wakes him at six to go picking mushrooms. It is there, watching the older man handle the mushrooms and name their kinds, that Yuri Azarov feels his vocation being born - not in classroom work but in admiration, astonishment and conflict.

This is the record of a principle worked out across thirty-five years, and it is one of the warmest and most personal books on this list.

Azarov was a practising teacher and pedagogical writer, not an institute committee, and he reflects in the first person and often against himself on what it is to be good at the work. The structure follows a life: the first part is memoir, on how a calling is born; the second sets him among his masters - Ushinsky, Makarenko, Sukhomlinsky; the third and fourth turn to the experiments of his maturity, in a village school and in a teacher-training project in Latvia.

It is a book about craft and character by someone who plainly loved the work and loved children, and its first claim on a modern reader is that it is true to the classroom in a way very little writing about education manages.

Translated by Inna Medow.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.