Teacher of the Year Yankovsky told who saved him from professional burnout

“Behind every great man there is a great woman”

The results of the “Teacher of the Year 2023” competition were summed up in Moscow. On October 5, Teacher’s Day, the top five of the best, as well as the winner, were determined. He became 30-year-old Oleg Igorevich Yankovsky, a teacher of Russian language and literature at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs school at the Russian Embassy in Iran.

The intrigue regarding the name of the winner continued until the last minute. Victory was predicted for both Sergei Viktorovich Valyugin, a teacher of Russian language and literature from Moscow, and Pavel Sergeevich Guryanov, a history teacher from the Leningrad region.

“Behind every great man there is a great woman,” said Oleg Yankovsky immediately after the victory. – I want to thank my wife, Lyudmila Yankovskaya, who is now waiting for me in Tehran. In January of this year, I felt burnt out from the profession, and she invited me to take part in the MFA stage of the competition. I accepted. And unexpectedly I reached the finals.

The new teacher of the year says this about himself:

– “I hate all kinds of dead things! I love all kinds of life!” (Vladimir Mayakovsky). This is approximately how I make my decisions and this is exactly the idea I teach my students. By the way, Mayakovsky is not accidental here. In 2023, both of us, Mayakovsky and Yankovsky, are celebrating anniversaries: he is 130 years old, I am 30. Mayakovsky taught me hyperbole, therefore, while preparing for the OGE, under my leadership, the students set a world record “The largest sentence, sorted by members” (volume – 2800 words). Mayakovsky taught me paradoxes, so in one day I assembled a motley team that won the city intellectual tournament “Lyceum League”. Mayakovsky the artist-poet-artist taught me versatility, therefore, while working full-time at school, as a class teacher, I simultaneously taught at a university, wrote a dissertation, learned to drive and composed music…

The winners of the competition were also a foreign language teacher from the Chechen Republic, Bella Bashirovna Yandieva, a physical education teacher from the Lugansk People’s Republic, Anton Vladimirovich Kandaurov, a mathematics teacher from Tatarstan, Arman Arturovich Kostanyan, and Mikhail Sergeevich Ladnykh, a physics teacher from the Belgorod region.

The awards were presented to the winner and prize-winners by the Minister of Education Sergei Kravtsov and the Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation for Social Policy Tatyana Golikova.

“I am pleased to say that in recent years the teacher’s authority has been growing,” Tatyana Golikova noted at the ceremony. – This year, 905 thousand applications were submitted for admission to a pedagogical university. 12 people per seat! And this means that our teaching staff will always be arriving. And that’s very cool.

The official noted that the average age of the competition finalists is 35 years. This, in her opinion, means that the most active young people have entered the profession.

According to the terms of this year’s competition, the winner will receive a certificate worth 1 million rubles, and the winners will receive a certificate worth 500 thousand rubles. In addition, the teacher of the year was awarded a special prize – a trip to the North Pole on a nuclear icebreaker. Considering that Oleg Yankovsky teaches in hot Iran, he will probably like a change of scenery. After all, a real teacher is always open to experiments!

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 29130 dated October 6, 2023

Newspaper headline:
Oleg Yankovsky: “I was burnt out, but my wife saved me”