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Working for the mężczyzna

So my main job is working for Łomża’s “Foreign Language Teacher Training College.” The idea behind this college is to train future teachers of English (or other languages) at elementary or secondary schools. There is a whole network of these Teacher Training Colleges across Poland; they are post–high school institutions that fall somewhere below full-fledged universities and have a three-year program. (I am still working on understanding the overall Polish education system: my head swims when I try to understand this chart.) My college is quite small and it has English and German programs; most of the students are around 19 – 21 years old.

I teach at the college for about thirteen hours a week, in addition to miscellaneous other things like giving exams or attending occasional meetings. The college’s structure is not even remotely similar to colleges in the U.S. All the students take the same classes and have the same classmates all week; they have no choices and no variations in their schedules. So I teach all the students in the English section. My individual courses take place once a week, but I see the same groups more often than that for various classes. I teach writing, conversation, literature, American history, British history, and British culture (!). They don’t have anything like credits or any simple way to re-take classes, so if I fail a student, they either have to leave the school (for a first-year student) or else repeat an entire year (for a second- or third-year student). This has happened a few times; I felt bad about it the first year but not particularly so the second year.

Everything is very exam-based, and I have to prepare students for semester exams and especially for a lengthy and rather difficult final exam given by a university (normally the University of Warsaw). Afterwards, the exam-passers are qualified to teach at some levels in Poland, though many are more likely to go on from that point to higher studies at a university. It is all pretty complicated and I still don’t completely understand it. I do know that a decent number of my students are there solely to learn English and not to become teachers in the future (though they must take classes like teaching methodology). Whatever, I don’t blame them, and college is free in Poland and if you are male it keeps you from having to serve in the army.

Anyway, I am turning into a decent teacher and I sometimes even enjoy it, though often I find it frustrating. The college has only four and a half English teachers, so I shoulder a large part of the workload in improving the students’ English level. It’s interesting to have such a clear impact on people’s educations, lives, and futures. Not for that many people, but still — they will remember me and if some of them do become teachers or otherwise use their English, it will be full of my influence. It’s sort of cool. This is what teaching is supposed to be like, I guess. And it is gratifying when students manage to learn something from me.

Besides working at the college, I do a little bit of work for a private night school and I also do some private tutoring (private students come and go over time). This work is usually really easy, mostly just leading conversations or coming up with conversation topics and teaching a little English at the same time. One nice thing about this work is that I rather enjoy working with adults: they are smarter, better-motivated, and generally more interesting than most of the college kids.

I want to compare Polish and American students, but I have a bit of a problem as I’ve never done any real teaching in America and don’t have a lot of basis for comparison. I can only rely on what my own experiences as a student were like, and the ways in which Polish students have surprised me. I realize that my time as a student might not have been typical of America, and that I went to kind of an elite college, but still I think the following points hold up pretty well:

• Cheating: This may be an unfair stereotype, or even a vicious, bigoted remark, but one of my stronger feelings about Polish students is that Polish students are a bunch of filthy cheats. I mean, okay, of course some American students cheat. Some people will cheat at anything. But at least in America there is something of a stigma against cheating; people acknowledge that it is somehow wrong. Not here. My students cheat at any opportunity; they think of all kinds of inventive ways to cheat on tests and exams; they invest considerable time and effort in cheating. They basically seem to consider all of their work to be something of a group effort, and they all try to help each other do as well as possible in school. I complain and I yell and I punish people for this, but I have to put up with cheating for which a student would get kicked out of an American school. This is part of their educational tradition, and even though I feel an urge to take away people’s tests and rip them up when they start whispering to each other, I end up doing something less drastic because the other teachers (all the teachers they’ve had their whole life) let them get away with it. It drives me crazy though. American students cheat but here they almost all cheat and they are so blatant about it and after a test they will say things like “You were so mean today” and I am like “Of course I was mean! You guys wouldn’t shut up during a TEST!” Grr.
• Independent thinking: Before coming to Poland, I would never have thought that Americans deserved any special awards for thinking independently, coming up with their own opinions, or reacting to complicated issues. Lord knows I get aggravated enough with Americans blindly listening to their leaders or the media or whatever. But Polish people (and almost everyone else?) are much worse about this, at least as students. Their education, traditionally, just doesn’t include any room for the students to contribute their own ideas or opinions about much. From my vague memories of high school, it seems like we were at least pushed to come up with our own viewpoints on various issues, to think critically, to write essays that showed what we thought of some book or poem or war. In college, this was much more extreme, but I think it went back to an earlier age. We were supposed to be participants in our own education and participants in class. My impression of Polish education is that it has always been about listening to the teacher and absorbing information with no real input from students at all. So as a result, Polish people are full of facts about things like geography and science, but they are not very good at thinking and analyzing. Anyhow, in class, I push and push students to come up with their own opnions and views about anything but they just are not interested. They only want to have correct answers and they aren’t able to come up with their own ideas. This is especially difficult when I’m teaching literature and they have no idea how to respond to things they read. They haven’t ever learned how to think critically. I’m doing my best to make them think independently in a Dead Poets Society kind of way, but man, it is certainly a challenge.
• The teacher’s role: This is similar to the topic above — my students have little idea of how to participate in class. Again, I think my ideas about this are skewed because at Georgetown, all the students were hyper-competitive and worked aggressively to express their own ideas and opinions in class. But I think it would be somewhat true anywhere in the U.S.: the teacher is mainly supposed to facilitate discussions and help the students figure things out on their own, not to act as the font of all knowledge. American teachers (sometimes at least) admit that they don’t know everything and are still learning about their topics themselves. I have the impression that Polish teachers would never admit to not knowing everything about their subject. My students never really get the idea that they should be contributing something to the class, that their job as students is to add some of their own ideas and arguments to our discussions. There are a few who do their best, but overall they just expect the teacher to supply knowledge like some kind of fantastic oracle.
• Living situation: Polish students live a lot differently from American ones. I mean, I don’t know if America even has any “colleges” that are so small as mine (the total number of students is something less than 100), but if we do, I don’t think it would look at all the same. In America, by the time we are college age, we mostly try to live pretty independently, somehow apart from our families, if this is at all possible. To live with your parents when you are 21 is considered to be pretty lame, even if it would be sensible. I don’t know the living situations of all of my students, but I think that the vast majority of them live at home, and the others live in dormitories but visit their families as often as possible (which turns out to be amazingly often). Other young Poles I’ve known have studied at universities quite far from their hometowns, yet still managed to visit their families every other weekend or so. In general, the students don’t work or have jobs outside of just being a student — partly because work is so hard to come by but also because it is not customary for a student to be working. So my overall feeling is that Polish students are a lot less independent and maybe a bit less “adult” than American students. And I think that this is good to the small extent that they can focus more on being students and less on worrying about life, but I think that learning to live independently is a major part of what American higher education is all about, and the Polish students are missing out on that stage of life. I don’t really think our American system is better because of this — in some ways the American system is completely stupid and perhaps throws too much at young people all at once. I just think it’s different. Also just plain weird about the family closeness thing — I don’t imagine very many American college students really want to see their parents every two weeks no matter how much they love them.

All that said, I have to add that I like my students and enjoy talking to them and spending time with them. Lately I’ve also spent more time socializing with them outside of school; I was pretty leery of doing so at the beginning but finally just gave up those scruples and now I’ll go to a bar with them and hang out. Once in a while I feel concerned about it, or worried about erasing the barrier between student and teacher, but mostly I don’t care anymore. American teachers all across Poland engage in practices with their students much more questionable than drinking beer.

Before finishing this page, I was going to mention a lot of gritty details of the teaching life, like all the tedious paperwork I have to do, like the administrative and financial problems, like all the miscommunications and stupid politics of my school, etc. But it seems like overkill. Every job has the same downsides, no matter what country you are in. Overall, I think I got a pretty nice deal from Łomża and the college and I don’t have too many serious complaints. A couple things that I miss from previous jobs include having regular hours and more co-workers. Grading papers is always a massive amount of work and nobody ever seems to appreciate it. And I like my co-workers but they are mostly a lot older than I am (with notable exceptions) and I kind of miss those days of rounding up a gang of co-workers to go for a drink after work. On the other hand, it’s nice to work rather independently and make up my own rules and make my own major decisions and feel like these things have mostly worked out well. And I continue to learn.

I wonder whether I will keep teaching for very long after this year. Maybe. If I end up staying in Poland then that is really the only job I’m qualified for and capable of, what with not really speaking the local language. And in America it could always be some kind of side job. Who knows. It has been a nice experience, though, and that’s all I was really hoping for.

Next week-ish: Some travel stories.