The Ukrainian Students Values of the '70: Values and Anti-Values
Posted: Tuesday, January 24, 2012
by IvanPetryshyn
Ivan Petryshyn
All the students are known to be the fiercest critics of the world. they are maximalists: aut totum, aut nihil. and it is common knowledge that teir musical ears detact any falsehood not even in the quality of the pronunciation but also in the wrong- or insufficient skills and habits of any of the professors. and, as a rule, the most famous professors, being careless 'cause of their fame, made drastic and stupendeous mistakes.
as to the profs, some were too strict and to demanding (no games!), others - as boring as an ancient Latin book could be (everything there is done in such a way that you should be able to know either everything (for that you had to have some Ancient Roman ancestors who could work miracles through your blood) or just to give up. there were also such profs who were enslaved by the language so much that they used to speak to themselves, to salespersons thinking they were still or already in England or in Scotland. some profs could have lost the smartness of mind because of dumbness, stupidity and low standards, boredom and uninteresting environment with all the funny and self-selling slogans around. those might have needed real love, so deep and so much resembling that of the "Beatles" or any other fashionable English group of the time, that they seemed to be "consacrated" , while the rest - no.
And one who was a student of that time could not forget the artistic imitation of the British style in the way of dressing, walking, replying, attitudes - in the grey eyes of a nice woman who was always sober in her actions: "do not do anything right away: the time tends to change the minds of the supervisors, their ideas, ideals and their necessities".
And I cannot forget those tears in the eyes of a Jewish woman who had problems with her career because of her parents-in-law who left the Soviet Union and were demanding that her husband, the children and she would do the same. She didn't want to leave her interesting job being, perhaps, afraid of the future. She was so much engaged in studying the phonemes, enclytics and proclytics that themanuals seemed far more realistic and accepting than the real life.
The students of that time seemed to be special intellectual material and investment to make other individuals be what the "great Motherland" wanted them to be.
A pro-Slavic values group, a pro-Russian, a pro-Soviet, a pro-Western, a pro-religious groups were fighting each other, defeating, surrending, agreeing with one another on some points trying to implemet the strategies and tacticts of the Philosophers of l'Epoque d'Enchantement.
many were considered to be hominibos sovieticos but many of them were not. They were fighters, scholars, teachers, advisors. They all were people, well-educated as for that time (or, even, for all the times), the teachers of the Epoch before the Great Collapse.
Some things were not known to many. The feeling of the real, which seemed to be a children's feeling, seemed to have been known only to those who were in England or in any other country. There was no propaganda as to the English way of living: the students were given only the most intriquite details of everyday life of those whose native language was English- all the amazing differences and details of how they were living, what was their mentality, why they were better or worse (the latter was decided by the students themselves). The freedom of the English-speaking people seemed to have been tangible, simple, logical and different.
Everyone seemed to be equal, and, yet, different. Only now it's evident that the heritage was of great importance: the authorities negated its importance but, in fact, it was still a very important factor. There were those who trusted you, those who you trusted, and those who never trusted you thinking that you, a student, had to be the very same bad liar and lazy-bones as anyone else. there were many people without any secret, like, me - plain and straightforward, and those who knew or seemed to know some secrets which could have been entrusted only to the "consacrated ones".
The problem of the students like me (as my ex-landlord used to say) was that we belonged to no camp. Neither he nor I didn't trust anybody, as he thought, - in fact I did - I trusted the knowledge and the experience of the teachers-professors.
The people felt the social air was changing, slowly but "sicherly".
It was the time of absorbtion: you had to lear, to master, to brush up your skills so that you would not have any problems when you are a teacher of a high school, especially, when it was situated somewhat farther from a regional or district center that you wanted it to be located.
You had to be bright, strong, sure of your knowledge. And you were to such an extent that some "very important persons" didn't even believe that could be you.
And you were thankful to your Alma Mater faculty, not all, of course, but to many: you have become a future teacher of the English Language which many of us are using now in our everyday life.
Lingua Angliae nostam secundam naturam est- hodie.
Ivan Petryshyn
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