Changes in Soviet Union Keep Teachers on Their Toes

The first day of school at George Ellery Hale Junior High in Woodland Hills was also the day Dalile Polikaitis’ radio took up its sentry post at the front of her classroom.

As students filed in for class on Aug. 19, the voices of newscasters from the British Broadcasting Corp. greeted them, announcing over and over in their impeccable accents the news that broke only hours earlier and shocked the world: Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev was out, the victim of a right-wing coup.

And Polikaitis, a Lithuanian native, was worried, both for the homeland she left nearly 50 years ago and for the relatives still scattered throughout the Baltic republic.

“I was in a bad mood,” the 55-year-old social studies teacher said. “I started every one of my classes by having them listen to a portion of the news. And then I told my story and why I was particularly concerned with this.”

Her personal odyssey suddenly translated into an educational experience for her students, as Polikaitis sought to explain the historic change under way in the Soviet Union. Wide-eyed seventh- and eighth-graders, normally rambunctious, listened attentively both to the radio and their teacher.

It was an object lesson in the creative--and often impromptu--forms of instruction that teachers around the San Fernando Valley have had to fashion during the first few weeks of school as they talk to classes about events that the youngsters may not fully understand, using materials often outdated.

The avalanche of change in the Soviet Union has rendered even the most recent history textbooks obsolete. Many maps overlook the individual republics and depict the U.S.S.R. as a monolithic state. And the youthfulness of elementary and junior high school students means that most have no conception of Soviet history or just how amazing a change the current situation represents from the old Communist regime.

“I have to assume that every piece of information I give them is new,” said Bruce Feldmann, who teaches fourth and fifth grades at Bassett Street Elementary School in Van Nuys. “It’s hard to give them perspective.”

Hampered by inadequate materials and the limited knowledge of younger pupils, teachers have had to rely on personal resourcefulness.

For Polikaitis, the key to sustaining her students’ interest and putting the Soviet transformation in context is to personalize events that would otherwise seem remote.

“I try to make it very personal,” she said. “Whenever anybody asks a question, I talk about my own experiences.”

In a class last week, the lesson focused on the 15 Soviet republics, starting with a drill in pronouncing their names and locating the areas on a map. Students squinted up at thick black borders that Polikaitis had to add herself with a marker.

Her finger pointed to the Baltic states. “Here’s Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania--that’s where I came from,” she told her seventh-graders. Then she asked, “How did Russia get all these republics under one umbrella?”

“They conquered them,” volunteered one boy.

“Right,” Polikaitis said, unfurling a small banner bearing the yellow, green and red stripes of her native country. “This symbol was forbidden until two years ago. Now every building in Lithuania has the flag--even the houses.”

That aroused the curiosity of 12-year-old Howard Teague.

“So you’re going to have two independence days to celebrate?” he asked, referring to holidays in Lithuania and the United States.

Polikaitis smiled. “Yes.”

Across the Valley at Richard E. Byrd Junior High School, seventh-graders in George Pashky’s exploratory Russian class turned to role-playing to get a handle on the autonomy drive by breakaway Soviet republics. The Sun Valley students compared the republics to children clamoring to move out of the family home.

“They relate to that--they all have to listen to their parents,” said Pashky, a Russian native. “We didn’t equate the Soviet Union with a benevolent parent, but a family has to have a central authority.”

The stern father role fell to him as the “children” petitioned to move out--or, at the very least, to be allowed to stay out every night till 3 a.m.

“Why?” Pashky demanded.

“Why shouldn’t we?” countered several of his students. Some of them raised the possibility that a parent could resort to physical force to keep recalcitrant youngsters in check--akin to the possible exercise of military might in the Soviet Union.

“But a parent needs power to do that,” Pashky reminded his class. “And in this case, the U.S.S.R. doesn’t have that power.”

Role-playing can be effective even for very young students so long as it is couched in simple terms, said first-grade teacher Lenore Rukasin at Bassett Street Elementary.

Most of her pupils were not even born when Gorbachev rose to the Kremlin’s top spot in March, 1985. “A lot of the kids just know him as the man with the funny thing on his head,” she said.

To illustrate his current political problems in a manner understandable to 6-year-olds, Rukasin said she likened the structure of the school to the Soviet hierarchy.

“We can pretend that the school is like the Soviet Union, and there’s one person at the top telling us what to do,” she told her students. “Each classroom is like a country of its own--they’re little pieces that say, ‘We’d like to be on our own now.’ ”

Then came a simplified lesson in democracy: Would the children prefer one person to make all their decisions or each room to have its own leader?

“They liked much better that we could make the decisions in the classroom with the teacher directing,” Rukasin said, “without a person whom they never see telling them what to do, what to wear, what to drink, how to spend their money.

“The kids can understand that.”