Последний звонок
The Last Bell
B1 · Intermediate · fiction · 10 scenes · Premium story
An intermediate story about the ceremony that ends a Russian schooling, and about the fact an outsider will not guess: the class stays together. The same twenty-four children, one room, one form teacher, for eleven years — so what is dissolved in May is closer to a household than a year group. Katya has sat at the desk by the window since she was seven, and works out on the morning of the last bell that she has spent two thousand days in a room with a boy she has spoken to about forty times. Their form teacher has seen this eight times and knows what happens to such classes afterwards. She does not tell them. What she says instead is four sentences long, and one of them hears it properly fifteen years later.
Read Последний звонок in Russian
Characters
- Nina Andreyevna (Нина Андреевна) — Form teacher, 52
- Katya (Катя) — Leaver, 17
- Seryozha (Серёжа) — Leaver, 17
- Masha (Маша) — First-former, 7
Vocabulary from this story
- школа — school
- класс — class, form
- выпускник — school leaver
- ученик — pupil
- учитель — teacher
- директор — head teacher
- урок — lesson
- звонок — bell
- линейка — school assembly
- экзамен — examination
- аттестат — leaving certificate
- парта — school desk