Valentine's Day in Siberia

Today is Valentine's Day and, indeed, the people of Yakutsk have embraced this holiday and all the Hallmark traditions. Young children give me small cards with short messages like "we go better together" and recieve heaps from their friends at school. Teenagers and young adult couples go out to restaurants or to the movies. Even the old ladies greet you with "happy valentine's day!"

Today, I visited a grade school (the city lyceum), where they were having a giant valentine's day celebration. As I walked into the main hall, it seemed the whole school was gathered in front of the stairs, while two girls, wearing red heart pins to hold up their pig tales spoke into microphones, music playing in the background--announcing the results of some kind of contest. Once I got through the crowd, I was greeted by the teacher who had invited me there and she led me to her class where Russian children were learning Yakut language. Today was to be the day that the students recited poems in Yakut language for the teachers and me (as the distinguished guest from America). So I sat and watched as student after student got up and recited a few lines.

People here love contests. At school, the students not only compete for grades, but often are competing for awards. The awards include "best reader of poems in the 5th grade", and other types of honors. As an oddity, I am often invited to come watch or sometimes even to participate as part of the "jury"--which is always an odd place to be. I always thought that our culture is very competitive, caught up with ranking people, etc. and I always had difficulties grading students papers for that reason. But, here, I am asked to rank students constantly and I'm not even their teacher. I want to simply say, you all did a great job and leave it at that but I am often pressed to say who is the best out of all the students. I think that these kind of awards and rankings are in a way more meaningful for people than are grades. But yet, at the same time, they don't take them as seriously as I sometimes think people do in the states, i.e. getting a low rank doesn't seem to bother them. But then again, perhaps I am projecting my own complexes onto all American people =)