"Perpetual Motion" by Anna Golovaneva

      On the wall of her classroom, among other things, hangs a cardboard girl with huge eyes — Joy — one of the emotions that live in the head of the heroine of the animated film Inside Out. She was left in the room after another celebration, when someone, seeing her, exclaimed, “Anna Pavlovna, is that you?” Indeed, Anna Golovaneva, a primary school teacher at Gymnasium No. 38, wins you over at first meeting with her positivity and energy. You want to stay near people like her as long as possible, basking in the surrounding atmosphere of kindness.

      “I also teach children to love life,” Anna Pavlovna smiles. “I tell them: don’t sit on the couch with gadgets, be little explorers — there’s so much interesting stuff around!”

      She has taken her pupils on excursions to so many places, entered so many contests and campaigns with them, held so many events! Those around her never cease to be amazed: what fuels your ‘perpetual motion machine?’ The answer is simple — an undying love for the profession and for children!

      “You will be a good and strong teacher!”

      “I grew up in a magical place,” she begins to tell her story. “Until I was twenty I lived in Kokshetau, Republic of Kazakhstan. Our town was within arm’s reach of the Borovoe resort, which people call the second Switzerland. Hills, mountains, forests, cliffs — extraordinary beauty! A land full of tales and legends. And every summer we relaxed like at the sea on the shores of the salt lake Chelkar.

      Anna’s father, after serving in the merchant fleet in Murmansk, was the director of a swimming pool. Her mother was a mathematics teacher — such a strong one that her graduates easily enrolled in Moscow State University. Her parents’ home was always full of guests. From childhood she was used to cheerful companies and constant activity. She studied at the city’s best school and at the music school in the choral department, and she swam competitively.

      Although the spirit of teaching reigned in her family (her father’s mother and sister were also educators), Anna dreamed of becoming a… trauma surgeon. Ambitious and confident in her abilities, she tried to enter the Karaganda Medical Institute, but… Her grandmother, the deputy chief physician of the city tuberculosis dispensary, comforted her: “I didn’t make it on the first try either.”

      Not wanting to waste time, the young woman completed a three-year teacher-training program extramurally in primary education. And… she forgot about medicine. She enrolled in the pedagogical institute’s philology faculty and returned to her native school as a primary school teacher.

      “Back then lesson plans were very strict: we prepared them in writing for every lesson,” Anna Pavlovna recalls. “It happened that my kids misbehaved and I didn’t really teach the lesson. But the plan was already there, and it ‘simmered’ in my head for two days. It’s like an acting role — the longer you live with it, the better it goes. So the lesson turned out rehearsed. And it had to happen that the school principal came to that very lesson! I won’t say I was flustered: thanks to music school, I’ve never been shy about performing before an audience. As a young specialist I was, of course, ready for criticism, but the principal was very pleased. ‘You will be a good and strong teacher!’ she summed up.”

      “You are our locomotive!”

      At the end of the 1990s, like many Russians, her family was forced to leave Kazakhstan. They settled in Dzerzhinsk, where relatives were already living. Her parents went into business, and Anna transferred to Nizhny Novgorod State Pedagogical University. But after graduating in 2001 she didn’t immediately work in her profession: she had to help with the family business.

      She returned to teaching thanks to her younger daughters — Violetta and Angelina. She thought for a long time about where to go back after maternity leave. Her husband was constantly on business trips, so she needed a job that would keep the girls under supervision. That’s how she got a job at the school next to their kindergarten. Later she and her daughters “transferred” to School No. 17.

      Anna Pavlovna admits that it wasn’t easy to step into the same river twice — after such a break in teaching! But with the support of colleagues she not only coped but also realized: being a teacher is her calling! As an enthusiastic person, she almost immediately began taking various professional development courses.

      “You are our locomotive!” parents of students tell her. “You lead us forward, and we follow, picking up and developing your ideas.”

      “That’s wonderful!” the teacher replies with a smile. “It’s boring to stand in one place.”

      Often parents not only pick up on ideas but also offer something interesting themselves. Anna Golovaneva came to her beloved eco-education in 2013 thanks to the mother of one pupil, who invited them to a community clean-up by Duck Lake. The children and the teacher liked making the city cleaner so much that they decided: we will be defenders of nature!

      “Search engines like Yandex are arranged so that the topics you query most often are the ‘windows’ that open for you,” the teacher smiles. “So we and the children are always at the heart of events.”

      Anna Pavlovna leads the “Young Ecologists” club; at the gymnasium she is the coordinator of the #NoPaper project. She organizes labs, conducts eco-lessons, and encourages eco-volunteering. It’s impossible to list all the victories and activities of her and her students. For example, they constantly take part in the children and youth award “Ecology is Everyone’s Business,” established by Rosprirodnadzor. And in 2023, thanks to a special prize they received, ten mountain pines were planted in the school yard.

      “Environmental education should begin, at a minimum, at school age: with contests, drawings, themed class hours,” the primary school teacher is convinced. “For example, we go hiking with the kids and parents and always clean up our trash. The gymnasium has a separate box for collecting paper for recycling and a container for batteries. All this, one way or another, lodges in every child’s consciousness.”

      Love as a reward

      Anna Pavlovna has a principle: if she takes on a cause, she must be a professional in it. Therefore, in 2017 she became a student again at Minin University, this time in the geology faculty (in full-time study!). Two years later she successfully defended a master’s thesis based on environmental problems in Dzerzhinsk.

      Asked how she managed everything and whether her daughters were deprived of maternal attention, she answers:

      “A seasoned colleague taught me long ago: you must separate work and home. I hope I manage. I have always tried to make my daughters’ lives rich and interesting.”

      The girls followed in their mother’s footsteps, though they chose psychology. They are part-time students (Violetta at N.I. Lobachevsky University, Angelina at Minin University), they work and find time for hobbies: Violetta studies vocals, Angelina dances.

      Anna Golovaneva came to Gymnasium No. 38 three years ago. She admits that she had to step out of her comfort zone. But she does not regret it.

      “New opportunities to realize my plans have appeared,” says the primary school teacher. “The gymnasium has a very intensive work rhythm, and that is just to my liking.”

      This spring she has already managed to take the exam for the highest qualification category and received an invitation from NIRO to a school for young teachers: to share her experience with colleagues on environmental education.

      “The longer you work with children, the more ways you find to present the same topic. Yes, the curriculum doesn’t change much, but the children change, and that’s wonderful!” Anna Pavlovna explains why a teacher’s work cannot be boring and monotonous. “I myself am always interested in everything — I try to make sure my students aren’t bored in my lessons either. I’m not ashamed to tell them about my feelings. If an unpleasant situation occurs, we work through it and always find a solution. I want to believe that the children hear and understand me. And they try to be better, cleaner, and kinder. I am happy when I see their successes, their shining eyes. Their sincere and unfeigned love is the greatest reward for my work!”

      Ekaterina Kozlova. Photos by Yulia Volkova and from Anna Golovaneva’s personal archive.