p Having returned to school after the Pioneer camp, I shared with Parfenov my views on methods of play in school practice.

p “One should try to combine play with learning,” I argued. "In play we find the principle of volunteer effort, deep involvement and interest. Learning, on the other hand, is based on the fulfilment of duties and on mandatory requirements that children do not always find interesting. Play can contribute an element of fascination, and help overcome fatigue...”

p I was trying to convince Parfenov, and although he did say: "Well, then try it,” he nevertheless made a repeated warning:

p “You cannot combine games with learning. These two things do not mix.”

p Yet I did try to combine them. It was then that my first conflicts with other teachers, and also with Parfenov himself, began.

p It was only much later that I began to study theory.

p I later learned about the aesthetic aspect of games in Kant’s theory, and about Schiller’s conception of games, which states that man is truly himself only when he is playing. Also the view of Johan Huizinga, the Dutch culturologist, who believed that man expresses his very essence in games and examined possible game interactions such as games and myths, games and attitudes of seriousness, and the culture-forming function of games.

p It was also later that I read Plekhanov’s views concerning the connection between games and work in man’s cultural and historical evolution.

p Today we see the interconnection between games and creativity, games and man’s development, everywhere—in art, in education and in culture. Play becomes a method of overcoming standards and formalism.

p But then, in the schools of the 1950s, the situation was altogether different.

p In Parfenov’s school the word “lesson” held magic in it. At that time it seemed to me that the process of lessoning meant more than the teacher himself, or the author the lesson was devoted to, or even the spiritual values with which I was supposed to fill the children’s hearts. A lesson was made up of parts: first, there was the organizational element (“Children, stand up, straighter! Good, take out your text books, don’t be so noisy! How many times must you be told!" And then my icy stare, and pause until the sparks in the children’s eyes were extinguished; good, they all vanished,*now we could begin!); and second, the questioning. What a word incidentally, it sounds like inquisition; and what a contrast when you combine the words “questioning” and “children”; one feels a dusty void in that “questioning”, deadening children’s faces, as it were, and their serene but inquisitive minds. The questioning—that parrot-like rehashing of the text, their shifting from one foot to the other, and their immense boredom. I, as the youngest and least experienced teacher, sought to imitate my older colleagues and to ask at least as many questions (more, if possible). That was why I would ask two pupils to write their answers in outline on the classboard and two others to write their answers to questions written on cards, one more pupil answered directly to me at my table and two more contributed what the one at the table did not know. So seven persons in twelve minutes— that was a normal rate and even a good one. As the lesson’s wheel moved on I would plan the way in which to begin today’s lecture; I had first to formulate the lesson’s aim. I would explain the aim, while the children, exhausted by the questioning, hardly attended sleepy and indifferent.

p All of this was followed by an analysis of my lesson and the Director’s principal observation: generally not bad, except that home assignments were given after the bell rang. Dear Parfenov, a delicate, sensitive man as you were, you somehow lost the element of creativity in this blind adherence to rigid organization and to methodologies that put above all the structure of individual lessons rather than their essence and the awakening of interest in schoolchildren.

Teaching is like love. It is a form of love. Just as it is impossible to love by order, so one cannot communicate in accordance with a specified pattern. Different educational principles matured somewhere within me. Somewhere their tiny rivulets started their way out, flowing from my very soul. 30 Unfortunately I understood this only later. At that time I was making efforts to conform to the pattern, not to neglect the " organizational element" that actually only confused my pupils.