Larysa LATSENKO: We felt the happiest while... whitewashing cowsheds

On June 6 Larysa Latsenko, who continues to successfully teach both chemistry and the wisdom of life to the Lokachi school children, celebrated her birthday. The Day and its editor in chief also join in all the greetings and send their best wishes.

An old photograph, several decades old, shows some beautiful young girls’ faces. However, the first thought that strikes you is that you haven’t seen such OPEN faces for ages. The impartial camera captured yesterday’s classmates at a very complicated moment in their lives: failing to enroll in college after high school, they united to form a youth painter team. Later, they will refer to this stage in their biographies as “beautiful.”

Life scattered the former schoolmates far away from the picturesque tiny Volhynian town of Lokachi. Yet one of them, the one in the center of the photo, has remained “the old friend at home”: Larysa Latsenko works as a teacher at the local gymnasium.

Is it true to say that we all come from childhood? Can one’s personality be adequately formed in the province? What did she dream of, and have her dreams come true? Is she disappointed or pleased with the youth of today? This is what we talked about with Larysa LATSENKO, a school teacher with 22 years of experience.

“It was exactly when we, in the others’ opinion, had to start from scratch as we failed to enroll in college, that Larysa Zhalovaha (Larysa Ivshyna, The Day’s editor in chief) signed me a photo of herself with the words, ‘If God allows me to become famous, you will be proud of my acquaintance.’ Now it often seems to me that the young people of today lack this subconscious certainty which urges you to strive for something and tells you that you will achieve whatever you dream of. We had this certainty.

“Larysa played a great role not only in my life, but also in the lives of our many classmates. For example, I learned to write neatly from her. She had very good handwriting while my grades in calligraphy were quite poor, and our teacher ordered me to sit next to her. Since then, I also made a point of writing neatly.

“Now, with the principle of differentiation in education, when the weaker and the better students are placed in different classes, I remember my early school years and realize that we have lost something very important due to this differentiation. It doubtlessly has its own advantages – but if a student has no one to look up to, and no one to follow, this doesn’t do them any good. This is not only my private opinion, it is shared by lots of practicing teachers.

“Our class was very peculiar. Some time around grade 8 we were labeled ‘atomic.’ We tried to be different yet better than others. And although we lived in a tiny provincial town, we were nothing like provincial ignoramuses. We read a lot, and the boys were keen on music.

“However, no one could outdo Larysa Zhalovaha; besides, she would read books most of us had never heard of, and never thought about. If we were given a long list of things to read during the summer break, everyone knew that only Zhalovaha would do it. And if we were to write an essay based on a story or novel, Larysa would quickly give us the gist. Moreover, she would make up conclusions for the essays for a good half of the class (which of course was supposed to be our independent assignment) – and they had to differ just like our opinions differed. She never lacked knowledge or imagination for that.”

Young people have lots of dreams. What did your generation dream of?

“I was a regular technician, and teachers insisted that I take up physics, which I was very good at, but chemistry got the upper hand. Soon I got a degree form the Lviv Polytechnic Institute.

“As to Larysa Zhalovaha, everyone saw her as a public person. All agreed that she had a talent for journalism. She was always uncompromising, and would always achieve what she was after. There were only two persons who graduated with honors, a gold medal, in our class: one was Larysa and the other, Liusia Aksionova, who is now teaching English at the Lokachi gymnasium. We all had to write an essay in Ukrainian, and the prospective medal holders’ essays were checked and graded by teachers from Lutsk. So our teachers suggested Larysa change something in her essay, reword a certain idea. Of course their intentions were good, because she deserved her medal – but how would the committee in Lutsk take her work?

“However, Larysa was adamant and would not alter a single comma in her essay, leave alone an idea. No one pampered her at school. If she was on top of the class in humanities, she wasn’t as perfect when it came to sciences – yet the teachers never stretched a point. Why should they do her any favors if her family didn’t belong to the local party elite? Our class comprised about a dozen teachers’ children – but our teachers would cross-examine their offspring even more relentlessly than the others’, giving them quite a hard time. Besides, Larysa lost her father early, and her mother raised two daughters on her own.”

Could you share the story of your tough decision to go and work as painters for a construction company?

“Come to think of it, it was Larysa’s idea. After finishing school a lot of us failed to get into college. I even managed to land a job at a candy factory in Lutsk when there was a call for the young to go work in the construction industry. So the six of us, yesterday’s classmates, founded a team of painters. Here we are in the picture, left to right: Oksana

Shpak, Halia Samiilo, me, Larysa Zhalovaha, and Tania Tkachuk. Only Halia Buhaichuk is missing in this photo.

“We went to work for the local construction company. Our first painting job was at the first ‘sky-scraper’ in Lokachi, a five-storied apartment block. I remember the bitter cold of that winter. We didn’t care what we looked like and put on whatever warm boots and clothes we could find.

“We whitewashed cowsheds and pigsties on collective farms, painted window frames and doors at day cares and first aid stations... And to think that we had never held a brush before that! You can’t imagine how happy we were back then... It was not often that I experienced something like that later.

“Also, we became a sort of celebrity, albeit at local level. Larysa was our Komsomol organizer while I was a team leader. We got invitations from the school and became honorary Young Pioneer leaders. There was a lot of interesting stuff on the whole.”

Don’t you wish you had gone to live elsewhere after such an active start?

“It had always been my ambition to live elsewhere. Not that I didn’t want to live in Lokachi, I just longed to see the world. But still as a student, I got married to my former classmate, and had a baby in my last year in college. Later, I found a job with the local public utilities company and worked as an engineer for a couple of years. Then, although I had a degree from the Lviv Polytechnical Institute, and my father-in-law was a principal at the local school, I went to work as a lab assistant there...

“When I became a teacher, I had the feeling I had been given a new lease on life, honest! This feeling of joy lasted nearly 10 years, and my teaching experience is 22 years long. I also got a second degree, from the Lutsk Pedagogical Institute. It was perhaps no mere coincidence – while I still was a student at school, some would say that one day I’d be a teacher...”

You are a teacher of chemistry. How do your students like it, do they need it?

“Most students and their parents perceive chemistry as a very difficult subject. Yes, it is a very specific discipline with its own peculiarities. Once you learned the formula of water, it doesn’t change. However, while it takes just some reading to prepare for a class in history or literature, chemistry is more demanding: you have to write down equations and formulas. It takes revision, thinking through, and nurturing your knowledge.

“Meanwhile, children are not accustomed to doing this anymore. Only a handful associate their future with chemistry in some way or another. The children have changed. They are well aware of their rights, but will not acknowledge any duties. We were just different.”

On June 6 Larysa Latsenko, who continues to successfully teach both chemistry and the wisdom of life to the Lokachi school children, celebrated her birthday. The Day and its editor in chief also join in all the greetings and send their best wishes.