Driving from the Baku airport into the city center, half-completed construction projects glitter on the horizon, eerily lit from within, like elegant ghosts. Flame-like buildings shoot up into the sky. Massive rococo fountains stand empty of water. Oil has brought great wealth to Azerbaijan, which proudly compares itself to Dubai in its rapid modernization and architectural bravura. Unlike Dubai, however, Azerbaijan is – at least officially – an adamantly secular country. Women are mostly unveiled, they drive and drink; and youth in the streets and cafés have a distinctly Western manner and slouch. A statue in the center of Baku depicts a young Azerbaijani woman lifting off her veil, a powerful symbol of secularism and modernity.
In the midst of this modernization, however, Azerbaijan’s painful history still lingers just below the surface of daily life. Starved and culturally strangled by the Soviets, the country broke free from its oppressors in 1990, only to be battered again in the terrible war that ensued. January 20, 1990, the date of the brutal Soviet occupation, is now commemorated as “Martyr’s Day,” a national day of mourning. Those who witnessed the invasion in Baku describe tanks rolling down the broad boulevards of the city, shooting women and children in an indiscriminate slaughter. “Tanks ran over ambulances,” a local tells me. “Grandmas were shot through their apartment windows while preparing dinner; schools and television stations were shut down.” Today, there is equal or greater animus in Azerbaijan for the Armenians, who are presently engaged in Russian-backed and bloody conflict with their neighbors over disputed territories. “Do not mention the word Armenian,” says my guidebook. “You will upset and offend your hosts.” Armenia has seemingly taken over the Russian fight to reannex Azerbaijan, appropriating border territories and banishing longtime residents. In the last twenty years, more than a million people have been relocated into school buildings and other temporary shelters throughout the country, waiting for disputed towns and cities to be returned to Azerbaijan – something that is not likely to happen soon.
In terms of Azerbaijan’s education system, the shift from Soviet rule to independence created complex and seemingly intractable problems. As scholars of Central Asia have described, the decline of Soviet power opened the way for competing philosophies, including liberal secularism, reformist religious movements, and varieties of fundamentalism. In schools, goals that were once sharply defined by Soviet policies – equality, achievement, and sacrifice for the nation – grew less clear. Schools in Azerbaijan still seem to be looking for an alternative sense of mission, one that can accommodate the freedoms of capitalism and the cosmopolitanism that comes with Internet access, while struggling with scant resources and old-style bureaucracy.1
***
Four hours from the capital of Baku, in the riverfront city of Mingachevir, Gulnaz Haciyeva teaches English language and literature to students between the ages of ten and seventeen. She is in her forties, with center-parted, chin-length hair and fashionable glasses. On the day we first meet, Gulnaz is wearing a camel pencil skirt, black hose, and high black platform boots that seem not to restrict her movement as she runs from home to school to town and back again throughout the day. Indeed, the most immediately striking characteristic of Gulnaz is her energy, a kind of compacted dynamism that allows her to follow a grueling daily schedule of teaching and tutoring, traveling, mothering, cooking, and volunteering.
Gulnaz’s school, like all schools in the country, is designated simply with the number. A glum-looking building, with a faded, 1940s exterior, School No. 13 is shaped like a large T, with two floors of classrooms to the left and right of the main entrance. On a broad wall across from the front door of the school hang the images of Mingachevir war heroes, those struck down in the war with Armenia. On either side of this memorial are the names and photographs of students who have achieved high scores on the national graduation exam, the test that serves as the focus for all Azerbaijani education.
The school is unheated in mid-January, and mold rises up the walls like dark stalagmites. Ceilings are peeling. The rooms have not been painted in decades. The teacher’s lounge, serving sixty teachers, is a small, spare room, without so much as a mini refrigerator or coffee pot. There is no Xerox machine, no ornamentation, no sofas or comfortable chairs, the usual accoutrements of faculty lounges worldwide. Gulnaz tells me that until this year, the second floor of the school (which now houses the high school classes; lower level classes are on the first floor) was used as a warehousing site for war refugees. For twenty years, “displaced persons” from Garaba, a disputed region now under Armenian control, lived in the dank cement classrooms. “We could constantly smell their cooking,” Gulnaz says, as hundreds of people tried to live their lives in these temporary quarters, sleeping on mattresses laid out on the floors. Gulnaz says she was the only teacher who ever came upstairs, ever spoke to the second floor tenants and offered empathy; but still, she says, “One hand can’t do anything.” Besides, she says, other refugees in the country were living in worse conditions – in open-air camps or tents in the desert. The recent relocation of the school’s tenants to the outskirts of town may have been prompted by the coming European Games, beginning the following summer. Like so much of what is new in this city, outside show seems to be the motivation for rehabilitation.
Though inching toward reform, education in Azerbaijan still seems mired in a system inherited from the Soviets. In most classrooms, students sit in formal rows and recite their responses in unison. Instruction is built around periodic tests that themselves serve as dry runs for the major test at the end of the high school sequence. Teachers in Azerbaijan, as in most countries in the world, focus their instruction necessarily toward this single examination. The test itself is shrouded in mystery. Gulnaz says that questions arrive by helicopter on the morning of the exam, sent directly from the office of the Minister of Education in Baku. During the test, teacher-monitors are chosen who do not know the subject, to ensure that no cheating takes place. The secrecy and fastidious rules associated with these tests represent a relatively new strategy in Azerbaijani schools. During the Soviet era, each department within each secondary school administered its own examinations orally. After independence, the method was deemed unfair and inefficient. Most areas in Azerbaijan have now moved to computer-scored exams, which has cut down on bribery and other scurrilous activities that were once rampant in secondary schools. Recent studies have shown, however, that the problem of corruption has simply moved from one arena to another, from cheating on tests to bribery for access to particular university scholarships.2
When I ask Gulnaz how many of her students fail the test, she tells me that no one fails it. She is constantly monitoring their progress, she says, by giving them versions of the test throughout the year. This way, she can tell who needs extra help and in what areas. Various schools prepare practice tests, then sell tickets to students to take them. Between the in-school practice and the tutoring, all students who are willing to persist will pass. Those who wish to continue their studies into post-secondary education take a second exam in July and August that ranks them for university entrance. Students’ scores are evaluated on a mean, with passing scores shifting from year to year, depending on overall student performance. Students with scores above a certain number are eligible for a free university education. Below that score, they must pay. Students scoring above 500 have access to the most coveted majors. Those scoring above 600 are celebrities in their towns and cities. In numerous towns I visited, posters bearing the names and faces of these high scorers graced giant billboards. When students do well, their success reflects back on their teacher. “It is a small city,” Gulnaz says of her own relationship to the test. “All the teachers around this city know each other. If your student doesn’t pass the exam, there is shame.”
In Azerbaijan, school teaching alone cannot provide a living wage. School runs until 1 p.m. each day, and Gulnaz, like most of her colleagues, teaches only two or three classes, for a total of twelve classroom hours a week. For this, she is paid 150 manats a month, or about $150. The system, as it is presently structured, is difficult for both students and teachers. Students who hope to further their education by attending college enroll in afternoon tutoring in individual subjects, paying out of pocket for these private lessons. According to a recent survey on private tutoring in Azerbaijan, more than 90 percent of students take private lessons or attend preparatory courses for entering higher education. Indeed, private tutoring, according to the study, is becoming increasingly like school itself and often becomes a substitute for mainstream education.3 In Mingachevir, as in most communities, afternoon lessons are held not in the school building but in the homes of each tutor. Gulnaz’s three children, for example, walk from one tutoring site to another after each formal school day, arriving home between 8 and 10 each evening. Tutoring takes up a large part of Gulnaz’s own day, as she meets with individual students throughout the afternoon and evening. This work supplements her income and is critically important to the family. She charges thirty to forty manat a month to each private English student, depending on the student’s age and level, the equivalent of about thirty to forty dollars.
A typical day for Gulnaz is very long and very complicated. It begins at 7 a.m., when she makes tea and breakfast for her three children and her husband, Vivadi, and oversees their daily preparations for school and work. From 9:00 to 10:20, Gulnaz prepares the lessons for the day, then walks to school to teach her first class. Some days she teaches two classes, some days three. At 1 p.m., she returns home, lays out the midday meal, and calls her husband to let him know that lunch is ready. This is the one meal that the family eats together, before both children and Gulnaz begin their afternoon marathon of work and study. In the afternoons, she tutors individual students, and on Mondays and Wednesdays she goes back to school again at 4 p.m. to teach a special supplemental class for students from neighboring communities. Gulnaz returns home by 7:00 for a light dinner with any family members who can attend – usually her husband and mother-in-law. At 8 p.m., more private tutoring students arrive, and she teaches until 10:00. At that point, Gulnaz begins cooking for the following day. On the weekends, she frequently travels to Baku for various school and leadership related programs.
Gulnaz is an astute “networker,” using her keen intelligence and boundless energy to forge connections with anyone who can help her teach better. She attends every in-service or professional development program offered for teachers; she applies for every grant and travel opportunity. She has won fellowships to study in Poland and in the United States and has made useful connections with aid organizations such as the Peace Corps – all of which have helped her improve the conditions in her own classroom. She persuaded the American Center in Baku to give her three computers for her classroom, though connection to the Internet is often a problem. The English Teachers Association (of which she is branch manager) raised money for the set of cabinets that sits in the back of her room. Peace Corps volunteers helped her write a grant for some curricular support. Soon after this occurred, however, Azerbaijan outlawed Peace Corps volunteers from the country as a gesture of appeasement toward the Russians who have pressured the government to remove Western aid workers. Every improvement seems to come with great effort, persistent agitating, and, ultimately, a political agenda.
***
Gulnaz’s first class of the day is a fifth-grade group of twenty-three eager, energetic ten-year-olds. They are dressed in sweatshirts and jackets with Western logos, sneakers, and jeans. Gulnaz has explained that this is the weakest of the three groups of fifth graders in the school, and it is hoped that her teaching skill can bring them up to par with the other groups. To me, they seem uniformly engaged and good-natured, trying hard to please their teacher and wholly on-task throughout the class.
Gulnaz’s classroom is a colorful retreat in an otherwise bleak building. The walls of the classroom are filled with hand-drawn vocabulary posters, enumerating colors, shapes, and parts of the body. “Question words,” one reads. “Who? What? Where? When?” There are maps of America, maps of the world, maps of Azerbaijan. Having created or acquired these bits of ornamentation, Gulnaz sees the classroom as her space, not to be shared with other teachers. She locks the door each time she enters or exits, even for a few minutes.
“Who is present? Who is absent? What is the date today?” Gulnaz shoots her questions at the class in the rapid clip of a game-show host. Students strain forward and wave their raised hands, begging to be called on; then jump from their seats to answer the questions. Rising to respond seems ingrained in Azerbaijani children from early elementary school.
After this opening exercise, Gulnaz begins the day’s English lesson using vocabulary describing the geography and cultural attractions of Mingachevir. She draws a large circle on the board, writing the city name in the center. “This is Mingachevir,” she says in a slow, lilting voice. “What are some of the nice places you visit in this city?” Again, students’ hands shoot into the air, and Gulnaz calls on one after another: “The history museum!” “The art museum!” “The Kur river!” “The beach!”
“In what season do you go to the beach?” she asks the girl with a long braid who just volunteered that answer. She hesitates briefly, and a boy sitting next to her jumps up and answers, “Winter!”
“Do we go to the beach in winter?” Gulnaz asks with a mock scowl. “Noooooo!” says the class. “No,” says Gulnaz. “We go to the beach in the summer.” “In the summer!” the class echoes back.
This vocabulary drill goes on for ten minutes, and then Gulnaz changes focus. “Now, I will divide you into three groups,” she says slowly, enunciating each English word. “Group one will choose a place in our city and will write about this place. Group two will choose a place and will draw a map, showing how to get there. Group three will choose a place and write a ‘short information’ brochure about it.” She looks at her watch. “You have eight minutes to complete this. One, two, three: start!”
The students move quickly into their places and lean into their groups, straining to see the paper that is being collaboratively composed. Not a single child is off-task. Gulnaz moves from group to group, gently looking down on each tight cluster of bent, whispering heads.
“Don’t be afraid to make a mistake!” Gulnaz says, and then, “You have three minutes.” The whispering continues more loudly. “Chop, chop!” says Gulnaz. “Two minutes!”
When the minute mark comes, she claps her hands. “Put your pens on the desk,” she says, and pens clatter onto the tables. One by one, she invites each group leader to come up and present what he or she has written. A round-faced girl in a jean vest comes up to the front of the room. “The beach is small. Beach people play games.” “Just two sentences?” says Gulnaz, motioning her back to her seat with a wave of her hand.
Group two is represented by a small-boned boy whose group has chosen the topic of “School No. 13.” They have drawn a map that identifies the park, the shoe store, the line of apartments across the street. “Good,” says Gulnaz, and the group leader punches the air in delight.
The third group has chosen to present information on Mingopark, the large park in the center of the city. A tall girl with hair ribbons on two braids reads out two sentences, which both mention grass and trees. Gulnaz fake-pouts in disappointment.
“I now want to evaluate you,” she says. “Group two was the best.”
The remainder of the period is spent identifying cities in Azerbaijan on a large map of the country at the front of the classroom. Again, students practically fall from their seats, straining to be chosen, then run to the front of the room to point out their answers. They have opened their primers to a page that lists English vocabulary for geographic directions. “North!” says Gulnaz, and they recite back to her: “North!” “South!” “South!” The catechism continues until all the vocabulary words are recited. Then the class is over.
“Goodbye, students!” Gulnaz sings. “Goodbye, teacher,” the students respond, gathering their books and running out into the dreary hallway.
***
Gulnaz Haciyeva was born in Balaken, a town on the border of Georgia in northwest Azerbaijan. The youngest of four children, Gulnaz remembers her childhood as a very happy one – a rural childhood where money was scarce and much was left to a child’s imagination. Neither of Gulnaz’s parents were educated. Both worked at manual jobs in town, just making ends meet. Then, when Gulnaz was in the tenth grade, her father died, a catastrophe for the family, and briefly, a moment when Gulnaz’s future was in profound question.
Some people are born to teach, Gulnaz says, and she is one of them. From the time she was very young, she loved to play “teacher.” One of her early memories is of being inside her brother’s new home, a house built for him by her father. She is holding a branch and moving through the rooms, tapping the chairs and asking them questions. She remembers her father’s delight in watching this and his prescient observation that she would someday be a teacher. Seven years later, when he became gravely ill, Gulnaz’s father made her brother promise to see that Gulnaz fulfilled her destiny. “Please, help Gulnaz to be a teacher,” she quotes her father as saying on his deathbed. “I know that she wants to be a teacher. You should help her to study.” Gulnaz was in tenth grade; her brother solemnly promised to see her through to her goal.
During that penultimate year of high school, Gulnaz had a teacher, she says, who solidified her ambition to teach. “He was very young and handsome and single,” she says, “and he was a great teacher. I was amazed at how a teacher could be so motivated, so encouraging of the students. I had him for English and German, and he encouraged us to love these languages.” At that time, Gulnaz says, she was so sheltered and naïve that the notion of speaking a second language seemed extraordinary. She had been brought up speaking Avar, a dialect of Azerbaijani. Learning the primary language of her own country seemed in itself an achievement. “I was shocked,” she says, “how a person could speak in the language of a whole other country.” The influence of the handsome young teacher solidified her ambitions. “I am going to study foreign languages in Baku,” she concluded, and turned her energies to that goal.
A year later, Gulnaz took the examination for the University of Baku and scored so high she earned a full scholarship to the school. With her brother supporting her living expenses and the government covering her tuition, Gulnaz spent five years learning German and English, moving directly from her bachelor’s degree into a one-year master’s program. In the first two years of her bachelor’s work, she focused on refining her language skills and fluency. In the third year, she began to work exclusively on teacher preparation. This began with a kind of intensive pre-practicum experience, she says. “We would sit and observe the teachers’ classes to learn how they are teaching. This was called a ‘passive practicum.’” By her fourth and fifth years, she was required to take over classes and to move students through the prescribed curriculum. These teaching stints lasted between one and three months, each time in a different school, teaching a different level. In addition to the work she did in classrooms, Gulnaz took courses on pedagogy and psychology. At the end of this program of classes and internships, Gulnaz took the state teachers’ examination, notoriously difficult, and failed it. Undaunted, she took it again. Gulnaz says that her mother was deeply proud of her decision to become a teacher and pressed her to persist, even when things got tough. After the second try, she remembers, her mother stood at the door of the house, waiting to hear the results. Gulnaz’s mother, the source of her toughness and ambition, had warned her in advance: “‘You mustn’t cry [if the outcome is not what you hope for]. You must simply try yet again.’”
After graduating from Baku University, Gulnaz was delighted to receive a job offer from her old high school. Without her knowledge, the principal of that school had been following Gulnaz’s achievements at the university and had contacted the rector at the time of her graduation, telling him that the principal was keen to recruit Gulnaz for a job. At his urging, the Ministry of Education, which oversees placements of new teachers, sent her back to Balaken. “It was a secret,” Gulnaz explains. “He [the principal] had been following my progress all along.”
Gulnaz remained in Balaken for only a year, teaching English in the local high school. In 1996, she married Vivadi, a man she had known since childhood, who now lived in Mingachevir. The marriage happened at a moment when her career was just taking off. She had been offered a position in Baku, to serve as a German secretary and to work at the university. Instead of accepting these positions, she chose marriage and motherhood, giving birth to three children over the course of four years. Though the loss of income was not a problem for Gulnaz (in Azerbaijan, new mothers receive three years of subsidized income for every child they have), she missed her work and her independence. As it is for many mothers, finding a job after the hiatus was not easy. Then, in 2000, she received a call about an opening in School No. 19, teaching ten hours a week. Soon after, another position opened at her present school, No. 13. For a while, Gulnaz spent some time teaching in both schools – mornings on one side of town, afternoons on another. After a year, she quit the first job, and took on more hours at the second. The change has made her commute much easier: School No. 13 is literally across the street from Gulnaz’s apartment and around the corner from the shoe store in which Vivadi works.
Two Perspectives on Azerbaijan
Much of my research around Azerbaijan was made possible by attaching myself to a group of American sports disability experts whose State Department–sponsored trip around the country, to cities, small towns, and rural areas, gave me access to schools and other sites no tourist would ever see. With our own van and fluent translator, we spoke to and saw a great range of people, schools, and community programs in places far off the beaten track, in Sheki, Ganja, Sumqayit, and other smaller towns. Disabilities education is new to Azerbaijan. During the Soviet era, children with disabilities were hidden away in their homes, their very existence shameful. Though traditional schools themselves still do not accommodate either the intellectually or emotionally disabled, some communities have moved forward in developing special programs for them, and there is small but keen interest in inclusion as a model for further integration of these children. Part of the work of the group with whom I traveled was to figure out ways to persuade parents to utilize these new resources. Even with the expressed change in attitude toward “difference,” however, most of the sites we visited were drastically underresourced. The American disability experts were constantly frustrated by what they saw: programs that served hundreds of children from surrounding towns by offering a mere one hour of rehabilitation services a week, throwing a bocce ball in a small gymnasium.
Two native Azeris accompanied us on our trip around the country, offering interesting and often counterperspectives on what we were seeing. The first was a twenty-year-old college student named Anna who was assigned by our sponsoring organization as an informal translator and hostess. On holiday from her university classes, Anna came along with us everywhere, offering the youthful take on everything and often sparring with the older “official” translator, to whom she was theoretically subordinate. With Buddy Holly glasses and a short, asymmetrical, two-tone haircut, Anna seemed to emerge over the course of the weeks as the best possible symbol of Azerbaijan’s future. Born in a post-Soviet world of relative openness and Internet access, she had been educated through the public school system and was now receiving a free college education, thanks to her strong performance on the university entrance exams. She liked Green Day and American television; she wore miniskirts and Doc Martens. She was tech savvy and compulsively checked her accounts on Facebook and LinkedIn. Though her interests were varied, Anna was studying economics and planned to move directly into graduate work in that subject. Like other young people with whom I spoke (first, a friend of Anna’s, and then a hotel clerk who worked assiduously – and unsuccessfully – to fix my television set), Anna hoped to go abroad, building her “real life” in the United States or Britain, while simultaneously voicing her ambivalence about this. Change is in the wind, she acknowledged, and if she stayed in her country, she might be part of that transition, one of the architects of the new Azerbaijan. Still, she told me, life at home was predictable and provincial, and the lure of a larger world would probably prevail.
Our second translator, Asaf, represented another perspective on Azerbaijan – less cheerful and more sobering. Born into wealth, a child of Soviet privilege, he had grown up in the most beautiful and affluent section of Baku, attended the very best state school, and experienced the kind of elite upbringing that was available to only a handful of families. Asaf described a childhood of lavish formal dinners, nannies, and rides on the carrousel in the manicured park across from his home in the same beautiful Beaux-Arts building where the Communist leader Bulgarov hosted lavish parties that spilled out onto balconies above the boulevard. In those days, he said, Baku was a truly international city – French, Russian, Egyptian, Greek, and Turkish could be heard in the streets. Rather than becoming an apologist for the old system, however, Asaf had a positive loathing for it. His commentary on the past painted a picture of mass suffering and repression, of starving people collapsing in the streets.
Despite his fierce criticism of the past, however, Asaf was no optimist when it came to present-day Azerbaijan, which he constantly reminded us was problematic in other ways. Corruption and graft were rampant, he said. The dazzling architecture of the capital city represents a shallow surface that hides deep and enduring poverty. Historic buildings are torn down to make room for luxury hotels; beautiful old houses and synagogues are deemed “damaged” as an excuse to level them. Asaf showed us a place where the wall of the old, historic city had been torn up to make way for a Four Seasons Hotel. Indeed, the old city itself has recently lost – after three warnings – its World Heritage Site designation, as renovations have sanitized and stripped bare the crumbling beauty of the area’s medieval past. Asaf pointed to one renovation project after another. No sooner is a road rebuilt, he said, than it is torn apart and built again – all in the service of laundering money. Asaf had himself moved to Malta, a place that he claimed to be, in comparison, a paradise on earth. His skills as a translator brought him back to Azerbaijan again and again, and each time his contempt, he said, was renewed.
As a gay man in a homophobic culture, Asaf’s reactions were necessarily those of an outsider, the victim of untold indignities both small and large. Still, studies of Azerbaijan and other central Asian countries tend to reinforce his perspective. A 2005 Freedom House study ranked the central Asian countries, including Azerbaijan, as among the least democratic in the former Socialist Bloc. On a scale of 1 to 7 (with 1 representing the highest and 7 the lowest level of democratic development), Azerbaijan scored a 5.86.4
Anna and Asaf continually argued about the future of Azerbaijan. Like many young people, Anna was an optimist who saw the intolerance and poverty as a temporary step toward a better, freer, and more affluent country. Even the fundamentalist impulse that is attracting some of her generation, she assured us, is temporary – a fad that will dissipate as the wealth is spread more widely. Indeed, she likened that process to the way that her “hippie friends” ultimately gave up their “lifestyle” to become economics graduate students and small business owners. Ultimately, Anna saw the future in terms of her own personal ambitions, and the relative privilege of her place as a university student with educated parents.
Asaf saw the rise in fundamentalism as a more serious threat to the country’s future. As a boy, he said, Baku was the number-one place for Jews to emigrate in the Russian republic. There were Yiddish schools and a thriving cultural community. Now, it is all gone. When he meets up with expatiate Jewish Azerbaijanis in New York or California, he tells them it is inconceivable that they could ever live in Baku now. “The anger is everywhere beneath the surface,” he said, “and we are millennia ahead of Chechnya and the Caucasus. They just want to kill.” Persistent poverty combined with the glamour of jihad has moved poor neighborhoods toward a rising conservatism. Asaf laid out his views on the present and the future:
Women are covering themselves more. Men are wearing short pants and long beards. This has been going on for a while. As anyone with an education and the economic wherewithal leaves the country, rural people move into the city, bringing their poverty with them, their superstitions, their prejudices. What people don’t see in the West is that huge numbers of former Soviet Muslims are offered money to fight. They’re mercenaries, but also highly ideological. Muslims are building mosques in all the former Soviet republics. It’s a powder keg waiting to explode. If you love your family and you have nothing to eat, and someone offers you bread if you will pray in the mosque, you do it.
This is what is happening everywhere, according to Asaf. When he heard Anna’s assessment of the situation, he rolled his eyes. “Baby-talk,” he said.
Despite the fact that Azerbaijan calls itself a democracy, there are still cloudy overtones of bureaucratic control that harken back to earlier times. A visit to a rehabilitation center for the disabled was canceled because the mayor was not included in the original correspondence about the visit. Another visit to a program in the city of Ganja was interrupted by a coifed, Russian-style bureaucrat who insisted the group visit the local history museum. The Azerbaijani airline lost my luggage because the airline tag had been ripped off. Once they found the bag, new problems arose; after many conversations in which all the contents of the bag were enumerated, the bag could still not be returned because “the tag was missing” – a Kafka-like scenario that one senses is commonplace here. Anna told us not to write any e-mails that were critical of the government because “they could read it and we could get in trouble.” Whether she was exaggerating or not, it is a sobering thought.
***
During my stay, I witness paroxysms of high-end building and renovation in those sites fortunate enough to host sections of the 2015 European Games. Mingachevir, with its wide Kur River, would serve as the location for many of the water sports. Here, the boulevards seem newly paved, wide and clean, with fir trees lining the main roads, and behind them, open storefronts flanking both sides of the street. A giant white statue of two hands holding a dove greets a visitor entering the city. There is an expansive, curiously unpopulated feel to this modern city; few people walk in the streets, and the hotel I stayed in, Western to the hilt, seems as vacant as an unused movie set.
Gulnaz’s home stands in a residential part of the city, a neighborhood of small apartment houses and shops. There is a friendly, village-like sense of familiarity in the streets. Everyone knows everyone, especially Gulnaz. She a friend of the bus driver who will take me from Baku to Mingachevir; she knows the cab driver who will stand ready to transport us each day; she is on first-name terms with the hotel staff and the people who work in the restaurant. She navigates the city like one who sees her neighbors as extended family – having taught or tutored many of their children and having worked in so many different kinds of support positions in the city.
Gulnaz lives in a five-room apartment filled with memorabilia and books, stuffed toys, and small, decorative objects. It is a warm, colorful home with three bedrooms, a small kitchen, and a living room that doubles as a dining room. Gulnaz and Vivadi have two sons, Nemat, seventeen, and Kamil, sixteen, and a thirteen-year-old daughter, Ulkar. Gulnaz’s mother-in-law lives in the apartment next door, a stooped woman in a headscarf who clearly represents an earlier generation of Azeris. She received no education and rarely speaks, presiding over the hubbub of family life like a silent admonition against modernity: the children who come and go, the vodka and homemade wine that is consumed with guests, and the television that chatters in the background. Nemat, Kamil, and Ulkar seem to Western eyes as lovely, compliant, and family-oriented young people, clearly devoted to their parents. Nemat, the most fluent in English and the most academic of the three, has set his sights on a future in finance. He is compulsively studious; his small room is piled with books and study guides; he neither drinks nor smokes, is largely vegetarian, and has no interest in partying or in any other activity that young people engage in to relieve the pressures of adolescence. He is also deeply conservative in his view of culture, descanting on one occasion on the differences between the sexes and the appropriate roles of each. When challenged by an American visitor, he retreats from the discussion: “I prefer the Azerbaijani way,” he says, with a small smile.
Despite her busy schedule, Gulnaz provides lavish lunches and dinners for us, laying them out on a long table that takes up the entire living room of the house. One platter after another is brought in: beet salads with nuts, eggs, and pomegranates; marinated chicken; plov, a rice dish served with chestnuts and meat; stewed beef with potatoes. Vodka flows from start to finish, lubricating the conversation, especially among the men. The devotion among family members is striking. At one point during the meal, Vivadi moves to share a seat with his son, and they wrap their arms around one another with perfect joy. “I love my father,” Nemat says, and they hug again. Gulnaz seems to be the dominant force in the family. Her values – of education, family loyalty, and hard work – undergird all their behaviors and interactions. Following his mother, Nemat works with a group he founded with his friends called “Charitable Juniors,” thirty high school students who volunteer together on civic projects. His most recent success was in collecting 300 signatures to agitate for more trash bins in the community. The group was successful; Mingachevir was recently named the cleanest city in Azerbaijan.
Gulnaz herself is extraordinarily civic minded. In the last few years, she has volunteered in an orphanage, teaches teachers in Genja through the British Consul, is head of the Azerbaijani Teachers Association, has developed a community theater, and, until recently, has taught classes at the local pedagogical university. When we first met, she had applied to the European Olympic community for one of two slots as an English-speaking representative to the games. She is waiting nervously to hear if she will be chosen, explaining that the position would mean taking a leave of absence from her job. In December 2014, she was named Teacher of the Year in Azerbaijan. According to Gulnaz, the award has special meaning because it was achieved without paying a bribe to move one’s application from the local to the national level. Gulnaz says she is the first person to win the honor without the benefit of money exchanging hands.
For her distinction as teacher of the year, Gulnaz is interviewed by the Mingachevir newspaper, the one paper in the city. We walk together to the office to meet the reporter who will be conducting the interview, a well-known poet named Ismayil Imanzada. Gulnaz tells me that Imanzada has written twenty-five books and that his work is taught in the schools, but that he also works to support himself as a stringer for the newspaper. At the newspaper office, he greets us at his desk, a sweet-faced man in his mid-seventies, wearing a tweed cap, a sweater vest, and a tie under a sports jacket. Six people sit in the open area of the office, with only one computer between them. Imanzada writes his notes by hand in a small notebook. He has nothing on his desk but the pad and a glass bowl of candy. Gulnaz is asked about her career; her many roles as teacher, tutor, and teacher-trainer; her views about school reform; and her hopes for the future. Once the interview is over, the three of us discuss Imanzada’s favorite author, Theodore Dreiser. “We are both newspaper men,” he says, referring to Dreiser’s career as a reporter for the Chicago Herald. “We both believe in writing about real life.”
***
Gulnaz’s second class of the day is an eleventh-grade group that is focusing on grammar in preparation for the final exam. She has warned me that there would be few students in the room because most feel it is no longer necessary to attend English class. At this point in the year, the tutors are taking care of test preparation. Six students, led by Gulnaz’s son Nemat, take their places in the front row of desks. Here, because the group is the most advanced in the school, Gulnaz speaks only English and peppers the students with questions.
“I want to speak today about study habits,” she begins. “Are you a good reader? What kind of books do you like to read? Fiction books, nonfiction books? Who will start the conversation?”
Gulnaz’s son Nemat begins: “I like science books,” he says, “and I like Sister Carrie.”
“You like Dreiser,” Gulnaz says. “Does anyone else like Dreiser?”
“I like fairytales,” a girl offers. “Cinderella. Also Jane Austen. Also Mark Twain.”
“Good,” says Gulnaz. “Do other people like fairytales?”
The class is sluggish to respond, and Gulnaz chastises them: “Are you sleepy this morning? You are eleventh grade. You should know how to speak.”
The drilling continues for several more minutes as Gulnaz pulls bits of information from each student. Some like William Shakespeare. Some like John Steinbeck. A boy with a grunge hairstyle says he doesn’t like to read at all. He likes football. This draws a laugh from the class.
“Today, we will go back to our text by Mark Twain. I wanted to show you a video today about the life of Mark Twain,” says Gulnaz, “but the Internet isn’t working. So I will give you some information to write down in your notebooks.” The group dutifully opens their notebooks, and Gulnaz delivers a brief historical lecture on Mark Twain. Then the class begins to read aloud an excerpt in the book from Twain’s memoir, Life on the Mississippi. Each student in turn reads a sentence aloud and then translates it into Azeri. Though Mark Twain was the first American writer translated into Azeri, he seems a difficult choice for a class first learning formal English, since the idioms and navigational terms in the story render it particularly challenging. Still, the class plugs along, moving from line to line in their charming, Azeri-inflected English.
With the passage completed, Gulnaz goes on to review vocabulary. “What is scald? What is lean? What are cowboys? What is gratify? Ghost? Wrath?” The students respond, and Gulnaz adds an observation or comment after each answer, sometimes praising and sometimes correcting pronunciation.
Next, Gulnaz’s questions change, becoming more affective and friendly in tone: “Did you like the story? Why? What did you like about it? Did you identify with the story? When did something like this happen to you? What would you do if you were Mr. Bixby?” she asks, referring to the character of the steamboat pilot who is training the fledgling Twain. Though the students are slow to answer her questions, Gulnaz ultimately draws out some extended responses. One boy tells a story about something that happened to him in sixth grade, an interaction with a teacher that was humiliating to him. Gulnaz congratulates him on his courage. “He was so brave to say, ‘I don’t know,’” she says to the class. “It is good to say, ‘I don’t know.’”
On more than one occasion, Gulnaz has praised her students for admitting their uncertainty, for taking risks, for speaking up even when they are not sure they are right. This clearly sets her apart from the other teachers I observed in her school. Gulnaz says that she is explicitly striving to develop critical thinking in her students, a concept largely absent from educational goals in Azerbaijan.
“I want you to write your opinion about this story,” Gulnaz says, passing out paper to the group. “Work in pairs; talk first about similar situations you have experienced in your own lives. Then, compose a reaction paper together.” The students sit silently for several minutes; no one has picked up a pen.
“Use your imagination!” Gulnaz cajoles, and gradually students begin to speak, then write. At the end of the period, she collects the work. “Tomorrow,” she says, “I will read these out loud.”
Between classes at School No. 13, younger students run through the halls in a chaotic, unsupervised rampage – a powerful contrast to the decorum and tractable focus of the classes themselves. Gulnaz and the other teachers make their way through the ricocheting bodies, seemingly oblivious to the noise and commotion. Without a gym or a cafeteria, the bottled energy of these preteens and adolescents is palpable. And the unrelenting cold of the unheated building, too, would seem to encourage running. I am tempted to join the disorder, if only to warm up a bit.
The director of Gulnaz’s school is a biology teacher who has been in her position since 2006. A smartly dressed blonde woman, she sits in a well-furnished office decorated with photographs of her family and with plaques and citations won by students in the school. Her office is the one heated refuge in the damp, cold building. Before being placed in School No. 13, she worked at a wealthier school, and her success there made the President (who makes all appointments in the country) reassign her to No. 13. The director continues to teach two biology classes a day, and her salary for those classes is the same as any other teacher’s salary. She takes me on a tour of the building to show the awards that the students have achieved in the area of “ecological solutions to civic problems”: a gold medal, and several silver and bronze medals. The director’s daughters are themselves highly accomplished: one is a philosophy teacher in the school; the other is a “well known” doctor in Baku. Her questions to me offer insight into the way news of America is communicated in Azerbaijan. “Why is there terrorism in American schools?” she asks. And “Why don’t black and white students attend the same schools?”
***
At 4:00 on a Wednesday afternoon, Gulnaz goes back to school to teach in the English Access Microscholarship Program, a program established by the American Consulate to improve English-speaking skills for students from other communities planning to attend university. Ten students are waiting for her when she comes into the room at 4:30 sharp, a combination of boys and girls, with open notebooks on their desks. Access students have traveled a distance to get to the school, and their motivation is apparent from the first minutes of the session.
On this day, Gulnaz takes them through an extended list of facts about the United States. “What is the national bird?” she asks. “The eagle,” they recite in unison. “Who was the first president?” “George Washington,” they call back.
Next, they turn to their workbooks. The topic of the day is “Special Occasions.” The class moves through another set of vocabulary words: Flag Day, Halloween. “What are some special occasions?” Gulnaz asks. Students respond informally, enumerating the characteristics of each holiday, including many facts that no American would know (“There are eleven state holidays and three non-state holidays.” “Four holidays call for a flag at half-mast”).
“What is the difference between a vampire, a zombie, and a witch?” asks Gulnaz, when the class is speaking about Halloween. Everyone seems to know the answer.
Gulnaz asks the group to talk about their own favorite “special” days. One girl responds that her favorite day is her mother’s birthday, and describes what she does for her on that occasion: cooking, cleaning, and organizing a party. Another girl says her favorite day is Women’s Day, an Azerbaijani holiday in which women exchange presents with one another.
***
Several years ago, the Ministry of Education developed a comprehensive reform agenda that was supposed to change the nature of teaching in Azerbaijani schools. The thrust of the reforms was progressive: teachers were supposed to move away from Soviet-style drill and move to what was dubbed “interactive teaching.” Select teachers were trained in the new method and were charged with passing those techniques on to other teachers. According to Azerbaijani law, teachers must engage in professional development courses every five years to maintain their positions in the school. These classes take place at the Mingachevir Teachers Institute and also in Baku, at the university. In the case of the new interactive method, however, Gulnaz seems to take the lessons to the teachers themselves, traveling to other cities to demonstrate the techniques. She has recently been assigned to go to Ganja to observe twelve teachers, staying two nights at the expense of the Ministry of Education. She has also attended at least ten conferences, sponsored by the Azerbaijani Teachers Association, in which guest speakers from America and England presented materials, templates, and theory to explain the student-centered strategies. When we speak about the content of these sessions, Gulnaz lists the “stages” of a good, interactive class: warm-up, motivation, presentation, practice, production, and review. Strategies for questioning and follow-up are built into the training. “I have been taught not to [spoon-feed] information to the students; to ask close or related questions, and draw the answers out.” It is clear that Gulnaz has mastered this technique. Her classes are full of talk, and one activity leads into another with an almost dizzying rapidity. Observing other classrooms, however, I see none of this, just solemn recitation. And with the exam system unchanged, no teacher evaluation system, and few opportunities for teacher exchange, it is not clear how the old system will change.
Gulnaz sees her work as a teacher extending far beyond the boundaries of simple test preparation. If she is to work as a teacher, she says, she must teach more than English grammar. “I want to teach them life,” she says, “how they can be a good citizen.” Now that she has visited other countries, it’s clear, she says, that there is a difference between Azerbaijani children and Western children: “In other countries I saw that children, even very young, can stand on their feet. They can do everything. They can speak freely in front of even a television camera. In America, parents and teachers develop self-confidence. Here, I would like to open students’ eyes, to help them to do volunteer work. They should know that everything isn’t so good around them. They should see everything.” Spurred on by an international group with which she became affiliated, Gulnaz attended a conference in Poland focused on how to inspire volunteer work in one’s community. She came back fired up. “I mentored thirty-six people. We searched for problems in the community. We made action plans.” One project was designed to promote more reading among young people in the city. Volunteers went into schools and read dramatic excerpts from library books, stopping short of the dramatic conclusions so as to encourage students to visit the libraries and read the books on their own. Another group decided to have students make commemorative books for the veterans of Victory Day, the annual celebration of the Nazi defeat, and invited the survivors to the school to talk with students, who recorded the presentations and then anthologized them. All of these activities are part of what it means to be a teacher, Gulnaz says. It’s not just about teaching to the test; it is about improving the community.
***
Everywhere we go, the ongoing conflict with Armenia saturates consciousness. In the Creativity Center at Bazar, outside Mingachevir, ceramics classes make small figurines of dead mothers and children. One display features a doll, dressed in traditional costume, with her apron covered with blood; a book on display lists the names of the 300 locals who died in the war: “This depicts our fate,” it says, “But we are a proud nation.” A mural display in another youth center includes a collage by a child that consists of tanks, bombs, rocket grenades, and other weapons. One particularly memorable presentation occurs during a student talent show in which children demonstrate their puppeteering skills, dance traditional dances, and perform a dramatic presentation about the 1991 Khojaly massacre, reading from handwritten scripts in the most agonized and plaintive voices. During the presentation, Asaf leans in toward me to explain: “They’re saying how horrible the Armenians are.”
One afternoon, Gulnaz accompanies our group to the Pedagogical University in Mingachevir. We are greeted in typical Soviet style, by a battery of solemn, formally dressed men and women who usher us around a large oblong table, bearing bowls of sweets. The director begins with a formal statement extolling the benefits of exchange and enumerating the hard work of their staff. Since most of our contingent are specialists in disabilities, the conversation turns to that subject very quickly: “Work with the disabled is the priority for our government,” the director says.
The hour proceeds with frustrating double-talk. Deans from each wing of the university deliver elusive answers to the group’s questions. “Do teachers receive any training in how to work with students with disabilities?” I ask. One teacher responds, “I went to a December conference where one of the suggestions was to introduce this preparation into primary school teacher preparation. Now, the suggestion is to expand upwards; all teachers would have to receive this training.” “Does this mean there is or is not training for teachers at the present time?” our translator presses. “This is an issue that is awaiting resolution,” says the director. “During Soviet times,” another dean adds, “the disabled were isolated. Presently, the issue is gaining traction.” Again, it is unclear what this means. An officious, barrel-chested woman explains that once a child is assessed with special needs, the teacher and parent decide together on the best strategy for placement, including the developing of an Individualized Education Plan (IEP). Later, one of our Azerbaijani hosts, himself from the Ministry of Education, says that this kind of talk has been going on for years and that it bears no relationship to what is actually happening.
***
On our last day together, Gulnaz and I sit in her living room nursing a glass of tea. We have spoken about the day’s classes, Nemat’s dream to study abroad, and her own next steps in life. She has two announcements, she says. First, she has landed the job with the summer European Games as a hostess and translator. This is a delightful turn of events in that it will pay a good wage and give her a chance to meet people who might possibly help her carve out a better future. Second, she confesses, she is thinking of leaving for Baku to accept a job at the university. Her plan is not completely clear, but since Nemat will be graduating, it seems like a time to consider shifting gears. Given what I have seen of her lifestyle and schedule – the low pay, the pieced-together hours, the conditions of the school – I can understand her readiness to move on. As if reading my thoughts, Gulnaz defends her decision: “Nowadays,” she says, “very few young people in Azerbaijan aspire to become teachers. It’s mostly the salary. But also they see how hard the teachers are working, how difficult the job is, how much responsibility teachers have, and how hard it is to care for family while doing it. Most young people want to learn English and then work for companies.” The profession of teaching has changed drastically, she says, since she was a child when, under the Soviet system, teachers were venerated. “When I was young,” Gulnaz says, “we looked at teachers like they were angels. We couldn’t eat in front of them, run in front of them, touch them. Not just me, all people in Azerbaijan; we thought that teachers never ate.” She goes on to tell me a story that illustrates, she says, her childhood sense of the teacher-as-goddess: “When I was in the eighth grade, I never went to the cafeteria. I was very shy. Once, my classmates made me go with them, forced me to go with them, and I bought some cookies and soda. When I wanted to bite my cookie, I saw my teacher and couldn’t swallow it. First, I bit it and I wanted to drink the water. My mouth was full, and I couldn’t swallow. From that time till graduation, I didn’t go to the cafeteria again. That’s how much I respected the teachers!”
According to Gulnaz, the change in attitude happened gradually. “At that time, we hadn’t any computers, any telephones, any information or Internet.” People didn’t have perspective on their lives the way they do now. “Now, for the people, everything is easy. They see everything. They know everything. Maybe the teachers also, they don’t expect to be [venerated]. Not only in Mingachevir, in Azerbaijan – it all changed. Now, teachers are not so important. In Azerbaijan, it is a tradition that when you see old people, you stand up. You should give them a way. Now it’s changed. If we take something from abroad, from other places, it should be good things, not the bad things, not this new disrespect.”
“You should know,” she concludes, “I am very happy being a teacher. If I had a chance to be born a second time, I would choose the profession again. But that attitude is not common among the younger generation, and sometimes I think, what will happen to my children’s children if nobody bright and capable wants to be a teacher anymore?”
