We aim to develop the best personal qualities in students, by Olga Korosteleva-Hart, English Teacher
25 May 2025 – Proshkola School Kaliningrad Inspiration in Action
In Proshkola school, Kaliningrad, teachers practise the humane pedagogy of Shalva Amonashvili, the ethos of the school being to evolve free-thinking minds, stimulate imagination and exercise inventiveness.
At Proshkola, teachers strive to establish mutual respect. Each student’s self-esteem is seen as a valued asset, an essential prerequisite for academic success and a foundation on which to build a sense of personal confidence, which will hold them in good stead as they journey from their school life into the adult world beyond.
Towards this end, therefore, there are no clichéd lessons and unproductive moralizing, no stultifying and exhausting homework, no terrifying, fearful tests and checks. At Proshkola, personal development, creativity and the cultivation of spiritual values are encouraged every step of the way. Here, students are given the faith they need to become the best versions of themselves.
For example, recently my seventh-grade students were given the opportunity to cast themselves in the role of island sovereigns, invested with the power to, among other things, legislate laws, promote food production, devise national costumes and establish national symbols with which to express the island’s unique identity.
The holistic nature of this project required students to explore their imaginative resourcefulness, harnessing creativity to the challenging but fun task of designing a fully functional island society with all that this entails, from workable economics to cultural norms and mores.
The results and satisfaction deriving from fun proactive tasks like this transcend mere education. They bring out the best in students. They empower and inspire.
[ProSchool] Proshkola School Kaliningrad
It is this creative spirit, this ethos of mutual engagement that sets our school apart. It is not a school of learning by rote, but a school that places the greatest emphasis on inspiration, interaction and results from collaborative teamwork. Our students’ aspirations and what they go on to achieve is how we, as a school, define ourselves. We never forget as teachers that success is symbiotic.
^During my last lesson with Year 7, I asked students to write a thank you letter to their classmates for something they had done for them during the school year. Two of them wrote to me. I finished the drawing which they had started. It’s times like this that make teaching so worthwhile – Olga Korosteleva-Hart
At ProSchool ~ https://vk.com/proschool39 ~ we strive to develop the best personal qualities in students.
Published with the kind permission of Alyona Pusko, Director, Proshkola School, Kaliningrad
Published 8 May 2025 [VE Day] – Well Done Reform A Great Week in British Politics
Congratulations to Nigel Farage and Reform for their spectacular success in the local elections.
Reform, led by charismatic leader Nigel Farage, has stunned the British establishment yet again. In last week’s local elections, Britain’s fastest growing political party, Reform, took an impressive 677 seats across all contested councils, won two mayoralties and gained another MP.
Mainstream media could not have got it more wrong when they dubbed Reform the ‘Upstart Party’. ‘The Up-and-Coming Upending Party’, or the ‘Most In-touch with the People Party’, that would have been more like it, with Reform having positioned itself as the leading voice in British politics and a real contender for Number 10.
Tapping into years of deep-seated frustration over the relentless loss of its nation to pro-migrant tub-thumping liberals, Reform is making significant gains on all political fronts as liberalism’s flawed and dismal dictates crumble and disintegrate from one side of the Atlantic to the other.
Well Done Reform A Great Week in British Politics
The big losers on election day were unanimously the Conservatives. It was they, unsurprisingly, that took the hardest hit. After 14 dreadful, shambolic years in office, which opened the door to Labour, the only wonder is that anyone bothered to vote for them at all, and one suspects that those who did were the vote-by-rote fraternity, those who have developed over time a nasty stuck-in-the-rut compulsive kind of voting habit, which they know they ought to quit but, as with any other entrenched addiction, is easier said than done.
The Cons deserve no sympathy; they have reaped what they have sown. Their 14 years of faulty governance were some of the most embarrassing, some of the most chaotic in British political history.
Split down the middle by pseudo-liberal influencers, the Cons were far too busy fighting amongst themselves to deliver on their promises, paving the way for the pro-migrant left to exploit this lack of leadership and fill the moral void with its woke-obsessed agenda.
It certainly did not help the Cons when instead of returning to grassroot principles they sold out to the woke vote by installing Mrs Badenoch (bless her old cotton socks), who, should she eventually lead the party to victory, would wear the gilded crown of being the first woman of colour to hold the office of British prime minister. How’s that for ticking Labour’s box first!
You would think that the Cons would have learnt their lesson from the fall and fall of Rishi Sunak, but no. The quickly invented Badenoch was a Dr Who regenerative moment for the likes of the party’s liberal faction, but for the dyed-in-the-wool blue rinse brigade, it was yet another broken string on the old Conservative fiddle; another act of betrayal in a long series of similar acts, gambling on the premise that in order to survive, the Cons need to emulate Labour and ultimately beat them at their own game. Whata mistaka to makea …
As for Labour, what you can say? Labour has been Starmered, well and truly Starmered. If Tony Blair has gone down in history as a nail in the UK’s coffin, Starmer could be remembered — if remembered he is at all — as the Labour party’s undertaker and grave digger in chief: the man who laid the party out and then went on to bury it.
Well Done Reform A Great Week in British Politics
Returning to the voters of habit who have yet to understand the existential crossroads that Britain has been driven to, the collapse of the vote for both Cons and Labour translated in some areas, predictably ivory tower areas and those which for the moment are the least effected by immigration, into gains for Jeremy Thorpe’s old crew, the faded jaded Liberal Democrats
For disaffected voters frightened to think outside the box, it was time to fall back on the old switcheroonee. If they could not vote for Liebour or Cons, and conscience said they couldn’t, then they would have to vote LibDem! What a terrible farce. What a tragic mistake.
The Liberal Democrats as the name suggest are little more than orange squash Labour — full of sugar and diluted down — which, in terms of immigration and the woke that provides its life support, offers more of the same but worse. But look here let’s be frank, Cyril, some of the LibDem politicians and even some of its supporters come across as nice mean-wells — enlightened Tims-Nice-But-Dims. True, many are wishy washy and still others namby pamby, but whatever they are individually taken as a party, they are still the problem not the solution.
What a naga to backa …
If you think about it, and it isn’t really rocket science, to steal a march on Reform all that Labour and the Cons need do is to stop the boats from romping in, take control of Britain’s borders and, as in Russia, where Russians come first, restore faith in blighted Britons that the government is their government, that the country is their country and that it is their culture and they who come first.
The fact that the old political parties will not control immigration and will not withdraw from the ECHR, the thorn in the side of sovereignty, not even to save themselves, is an out-and-out admission that they have not the slightest intention of observing and upholding the primary responsibility of that of any government, which is to ensure the safety and security of the citizens of the country who voted them into office on this mandate.
So, under the rule of the two old fogeys, the long-since past their sell by dates Labour and Conservatives, what has Britain got to look forward to? Both of the two old past-it parties will keep on letting the migrants in and letting them in their thousands. They will blather on about net-zero policies whilst concreting over the countryside. They will turn the other cheek on escalating utility bills and, with nothing else up their sleeves, inflate the cost of houses. There will be more boats, more migrants, a more divided society, more deaths and broken lives, more candle-lit vigils, more and more and more and more stultifying woke and with each year that passes less of the Britain we knew and loved. Is this what you want for your children’s future? That’s what you’ve got and that’s what you’ll get if you vote for the same old cronies.
Take your country back, now, whilst you have the chance, for it may well be your last chance.
“Only Reform will stand up for British culture, identity and values. We will freeze immigration and stop the boats. Restore law and order. Repair our broken public services. Cut taxes to make work pay. End government waste. Slash energy bills. Unlock real economic growth.
“Only Reform will take back control over our borders, our money and our laws. Only Reform will secure Britain’s future as a free, proud and rich nation.” — https://www.reformparty.uk/
Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 65 [23 May 2020] ~ Trenches & Trees
Revised 1 May 2025 | First published 23 May 2020 – Kaliningrad a Green City
Apprehensive that May may not be the merry, merry month that it is cracked up to be? Put your memory in reverse gear and trip back to the coronavirus spring of 2020. I cannot guarantee that things can only get better. I cannot guarantee that they could hardly be worse. But, relatively speaking … {This post originally published May 2020 | Revised 2 May 2025}
Unlike in the UK at present, there is no sudden uplift in the weather; nothing to tempt and entice one to cast caution to the wind, ignore the restrictions and warnings and go wassailing off for a day at the coast. It is true that in the past few days Kaliningrad has been granted a nominal hike in temperature, pushing it up to 15 degrees, and this long-awaited blessing combined with a light but still fresh breeze in association with Mr Blue Sky and a sun that has condescended to at last come out from behind the clouds, were sufficiently alluring to prise myself from self-isolation for the novel pleasure of stretching my legs.
To effect our home exit strategy, we first had to run the gauntlet of passing without mishap from our garden to the road beyond. For the past three weeks or more, our house, and those around us, have been subject to ‘trench warfare’.
The Trenchmen cometh … I can’t help thinking that we would have been better laying that new block paving later …
Cable-laying has been going on. A narrow but deep trench, hazardous enough to dislocate or break something vital should a miscalculated step occur, dissects the pavement at the front of our property and, running at right angles to it, extends along the neighbours’ boundary to the gate at the end of the cul-de-sac, behind which, you might care to know, sits a very large dog.
From the vantage point of my bedroom window, I have been able to observe (intermittently, you understand, as self-isolation has not left me wanting in occupations of an interesting kind), this cable work in progress and mentally bookmark whilst doing so the differences that might exist between how a job of this nature is handled in Kaliningrad compared with similar tasks undertaken in the UK.
From the outset, and for most of the initial period of work, the workforce has consisted of three lads and a young woman, armed with two spades, two shovels and the indispensable trusty wheelbarrow. The blokes have been doing most of the digging, whilst the young woman, with her workman’s gloves neatly folded and tucked to dangle professionally from her jeans’ back pocket, appears to have had an overseeing role, an inference later corroborated when a clipboard suddenly sprung into her hand. Praise where praise is due, however: at one stage in the laborious game, she, too, rolled up her sleeves and took a turn on the shovel.
Weather conditions ~ cold and raining ~ have been generally unsympathetic, hardly conducive to the job in hand, but this small group of sappers, equipped with nothing more mechanical than the arms that God has given them, unless you include the wheelbarrow, struggled valiantly on alone until, after a week’s hiatus, the cavalry arrived.
The reinforcements are a hardy bunch of chaps, not only are they seasoned trenchers but also capable cable layers. The cables they are laying had been deposited along with piles of aggregate prior to their arrival. They now reside on the oval island, a compelling grass-covered landmark at the centre of confluent streets, which marks the spot of a German bunker constructed in World War Two.
The temptation at this juncture to go off on a historic tangent and waffle on about the many wartime installations surviving in Kaliningrad and across its Prussian region is difficult to resist, but as global tourism has some way to go before it can get back on its feet from the damage done by coronavirus, I will wait for a more propitious moment to elaborate on this and continue for the present with my narrative.
Green & cobbled streets of Kaliningrad
Kaliningrad a Green City
We had crossed the trench in front of the house and this delicate feat accomplished were now walking along, as if coronavirus was not our shadow, the original cobbled streets that once were Königsberg. Victor Ryabinin, the artist and historian, had assured us that ‘green’ Königsberg was essentially a myth. Königsberg, he said, at least the oldest parts of the city, never had been green.
The streets were narrow, the buildings high and the order of the day had been red brick and grey cobbles. The city’s outlying districts, those laid down in the early years of the 20th century and expanded in the 1920s through to the mid-1930s, had been designed with green in mind. The houses and plots on which they stand have their English equivalent in the UK’s 1920s’ suburbs, whose properties sold on the back of the clever and catchy advertising slogan, ‘A country home in the city’, or words to that effect.
Every home in Britain’s new suburbs came complete with a small front garden and a larger plot at the rear, and on the wide and curving streets where these airy houses stood, a row of trees lined either side, augmented, where space allowed, with narrow but neat grass verges, demarcating pavement from road and bringing a little more green into the urban environment.
In Königsberg’s equivalent districts, as contemporary photographs and postcards show, though most new streets of the day were tree-lined like their English counterparts, such trees as there were, were, of course, but saplings, which doubtlessly formed visually graceful vistas but with nothing like the leafy foliage that adorn those self-same streets today, now that these trees, like me, have reached maturity.
You see, what happens to you when you subject yourself to self-isolation: every simple detail, every once commonplace thing, every taken-for-granted and overlooked minutiae undergoes a process of scrutinised amplification, so acutely rendered to senses locked away indoors that before you can wryly say ‘I believe in coronavirus’, you cannot see the wood for the trees — or, in my particular case, the trees for Kaliningrad’s leaves.
Should old acquaintance be forgot
Our leafy walk through Kaliningrad’s suburbs, along the canopied tree-lined streets with their flower and foliate burgeoning gardens, had brought us after a while within viewing distance of a most eccentric sight — that peculiar waterside café, that semi-abandoned confection, which, with its facsimile rooftop lighthouse, Captain Ahab perched on the balcony doing I don’t know what and a lot of marine-like crustaceans daubed upon the walls, resembles something that sneaked into Russia during the 1970s from an amusement park in Skegness.
I have seen postcard photographs of the building that stood here in earlier times. Admittedly, it, as with the pond and everything around it, was saturated monochrome — obviously in the 1910s the world was waiting for colour — but even in this black and white existence (things used to be black and white before coronavirus was invented) the former Königsberg building had all the ennobling features that Gothicity could bestow and was, in its waterside setting, a proverbial sight for sore eyes rather than an eyesore for eyes reduced by its sight to tears, which, omitting novelty out of context, is as good as it gets today. [Note, although Captain Ahab went down with his ship two years after this photo was taken, the demolition pirates have failed to launch their own version, which stands as forlorn and half-built in a spot which Heaven reserved for a restaurant, but which seems to have become Kaliningrad’s ghost ship graveyard.]
Across Kaliningrad’s lakes (ponds)
Kaliningrad a Green City
Passing quickly by this ‘thing’, which in spite of my reaction I have a sneaky affection for, we wended our way, notwithstanding, happier now that it was behind us, along the block-paved path that runs around the pond’s perimeter.
Old photographs demonstrate that on both sides of the lake (my apologies purists, I know I should say ‘pond’, but ponds are so small in England and Königsberg’s ponds so large that the appelation seems incongruous) the banks had, for the most part, been left to their own devices, accumulating vegetation and fringed throughout with wetland trees. In the black and white world of old photography atmosphere reigns supreme, but detail can in time, and as a result of time, often call for magnification. I had thus to resort to a lens to pick out from these old photographs the presence of a narrow winding path, most probably gravel surfaced, curling in the early 1900s, through the ribbon of trees and foliage skirting the edge of the pond.
Subsequently lost, this beaten track is now hard paved and in a character and colours favoured by, and thus typical of, 21st century urban planners. Much of the original foliage, by that I mean the wild and natural, has long since been dug out, substituted with mown grass lawns and carefully tended municipal flowerbeds. But whilst block paving of every kind, in all its imaginative shapes, its patterns and its sizes, along with children’s’ play parks, public lavs, a skateboard space and even an exercise quadrangle, has colonised the past, the Königsberg trees that form a boundary along the side of the adjacent road and the odd gnarled or venerable specimen dotted amongst the later additions, some Soviet others millennial, endorse the attribution that Kaliningrad unlike Königsberg is as green a city as a city can get.
As much as I was enjoying and being overly distracted by that which I am phenomenally good at — daydreaming — today had its objectives, and this meant putting my dreams on hold and focusing for a moment on finding a wall with graffiti on it. Not that this endeavour would prove difficult in Kaliningrad. Graffiti is just one, sadly, of a number of contagious viruses that has made its way from the West.
Mick Hart with Anthony Hopkins and Nadezhda Rumyantseva in Kaliningrad
The graffiti we were looking for was not one of your run-of-the-mill, deface, vandalise, spoil, degrade and then talk it up as ‘urban art’ jobs. It was truly an original piece, a bona fide work of art, featuring the actor Anthony Hopkins in his role as Hannibal Lecter and the Russian actress, Nadezhda Rumyantseva, star of The Girls, a classic Soviet romantic-comedy drama — but more of that on another occasion. We found what we were looking for, and my wife made good with the camera.
There is graffiti and graffiti … Mine’s a vegetarian
And then she said, For old times’ sake.” What could she be suggesting?
She wanted us to walk closer to the lake, taking in Flame restaurant as we did so. The ‘old times sake’ referred to recent history, but a recent history which in the New Normal was as lost to the world as dinosaurs. Ah, those glorious days — so happy and carefree — when we would walk to Flame on an afternoon or stroll down on an evening for a meal and a pint of brew. What had become of those days? More to the point, will they ever return?
Like every other bar, Flame was a victim of coronavirus. There it stood, shrouded in darkness, doors barred, patronless and yet for all this desertion not quite extinguished. A nice and reassuring touch was that in keeping with its tradition, Flame, though closed to the public, continued to project music into and across the surrounding recreation area via external hi-fi speakers stationed on its alfresco forecourt. In these grim and troubled times, the music struck a chord that resonated inside one’s soul. It was the bittersweet sound of the band playing on as the Titanic hit the watery skids.
Now that the shops — some of the shops — had officially opened their doors again, we had a small chore to fulfil, which was to buy a part for the vacuum cleaner. We might fall foul of coronavirus and die as a result, but heaven forbid we would do such a thing in a house with a mucky carpet.
As we crossed the road from the pond, emerging at the side of Flame, it was evident that whilst we had been hibernating Kaliningrad’s construction workers had been doing no such thing. The shopping centre that has been taking shape at the end of the city market had gone, in the space of days, from a shell of incomplete concrete pieces into an impressive three- or four-storey series of ascending profiled platforms.
Ordinarily, way back when in the Old (and familiar) Normal, something as mundane as this seen on a day-to-day basis would have excited little more than a passing glance, but incarceration, self-imposed or otherwise, seems to have the tendency to sharpen the edge of the mind, so much so in my case that in regarding this evolving building, its Phoenix-like transformation, I felt a kindred spirit in Rip Van Winkle, or rather an affinity with the bemusement he had felt on waking from a sleep of hitherto unknown proportion.
Vacuum cleaner part in pocket, we set off on our homeward journey, not by retracing our steps — having to pass Flame again now that it was clam-tight shut would be more than the drinker in me could withstand — but with a view towards returning on the opposite side of the pond. This route would necessitate, however, walking past yet another well-frequented, landmark bar: the one in historic Rossgarten Gate — CLOSED … just like the rest!
Fortunately, by way of profound distraction, on the opposite side of the road, in one of Kaliningrad’s public squares, I saw a man with his hose in his hand. He was leaning nonchalantly from his truck, playing his hose in the sun over some of the city’s prettiest flower beds. “Hmm,” I thought to myself, “It’s not only the bars that are dry.”
A lovely day on which to have your hose out
Kaliningrad a Green City
Our walk back around the lake had proven itself a pleasant detour. There is only so much of novelty to be found in strolling back and forth days and weeks upon end from your kitchen to the living room, and, let’s be honest about it, the water features of bath and bog, though unarguably indispensable, hardly compete or come close to the natural scenerific beauty imparted by rippling pond under a clear blue sky.
On this side of the pond as upon the other, trees in abundance abide, and in such variety and of such different ages that they did not have to ask me twice to indulge my obsessive passion for retrospective reverie, inviting me to determine which of them had been planted during Kaliningrad’s Soviet era and which belonged to Königsberg. I suppose you’d do the same if you were me.
The wise old trees of Königsberg-Kaliningrad
Trees, ponds, brand-new shopping centres rising up from out of the ground like mysterious midnight mushrooms, bars with no people inside them, sepia memories of long ago, men with their hoses dangling quaintly out of civic truck windows, a light breeze, a blue sky and off to the shop to buy some tomatoes. Very nearly and almost back home; just the trenches to cross.
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