Winging It in Poland

Michael Bell

 My intention here is just to share some of my experiences teaching English in Poland. Each teaching position is quite different of course, but perhaps my digressive little narrative can alleviate any anxiety you may be feeling as you consider your own departure and work up your enthusiasm for the sheer adventure of teaching abroad. Leaving home to teach English on the other side of the world isn’t always the easiest thing in the world, but it’s certainly do-able, even enjoyable. I’m home in the Northwest now after four years in Eastern Europe, and I’m glad to be back, but I’m also glad I left.

After completing my master’s in 2000 (I had finished the ESL certificate in ’98) and in need of some time far away, I decided to look for a job somewhere in Central/Eastern Europe between Poland and Croatia. I was in the mood for a place I could really disappear into, an old history-gnawed place full of candle-lit graveyards and castle ruins rising through dusky haze. So I put up my résumé on a web-site called “Dave’s ESL Café” with mention of where I wanted to go and had several inquiries within a couple of days. My choice came down to two: a job in Slovenia teaching English and American literature for a state university, or a job with a business college in Southern Poland teaching EFL (English as a Foreign Language).

 The interviews for these jobs were quite different. The Slovenians put me through the wringer: I had to whip up two unit outlines and send them over for approval, one for The Great Gatsby and the other for Pygmalion. This took a couple of days. A couple of days after that I was emailed a contract. Just hours after this arrived, the amiable director of the Polish school called me up, asked me what kind of teacher I was and what teaching methods I favored, and offered me a job right then and there. (I had received similar “hello, you’re hired” phone calls from two schools in Prague as well, but the money was so awful I had turned them down. I suspect qualified teachers are rather scarce in what we used to call Eastern Europe because the compensation is abysmal by our big fat American standards.) Although the Slovenian position would have been a literature job at a rather stunning major university in an amazing mountain landscape, it was to be an exclusively team-taught position, and the Slovenians themselves had been rather curt and frosty. I decided to go with the Poles because they were offering me my own show, a bit more money and a better residence deal in a beautiful environment (I had checked it out online), and had just been a lot more pleasant.

(A quick word of advice here: before you accept a job, get as much specific information about the teaching schedule as you can. You’ll always be told how many hours you’ll be teaching each week, but also try to find out how many different groups you’ll be teaching, if you’ll have to share classes, and what time of day you’ll be working. During my last year in Poland I worked nights at a language school in Kraków where I had twenty different shared groups each week, i.e. about three hundred students. It was a struggle just to remember all their names, much less develop any kind of rapport with them. You don’t want to share groups if you can help it, and you want as few different courses as possible.) 

The Polish school, Wyszla Szkola Biznesu, is a business college located in a small mountain town about sixty miles east of Krakow, very near the Slovakian border. It’s quite an unusual school for Poland as it is one of the very few private colleges in the country, and a big chunk of its curriculum is based on guidelines provided by an American business college in Chicago. The tuition is quite expensive by Polish standards, so the school was able to offer me an excellent wage compared to the national average at the time: I would receive about 4000 PLN each month compared to the average wage of about 800 PLN. (So of course within a year I had rented my own flat, filled it with new furniture, and spread money around town like Daddy Warbucks, but that’s another, sad, story. All I’ll say is beware exchange-rate complacency.)

All the visa documents were handled through the mail with no wrinkles. The school sent me an official letter in Polish verifying that I had a job. I put this in an envelope along with my passport, a copy of my birth certificate, and a copy of a police document asserting that I wasn’t wanted for any crimes. This all went to the Polish consulate in Los Angeles with a check for $20.00, and the visa came back in about three days. I was off to Poland.

My first days in Poland were exciting and easy. Łukasz, the school’s driver, was waiting for me at the airport with a “Michael Bell” sign. He threw my bags in the back of his van, and away we sped through the endless tiny farms and villages of the rolling Polish countryside. I just looked out the window at the red cows grazing in the wheat stubble and the haystacks drying on the hillsides and laughed to myself with the sheer joy of being out there doing it at last. The students hadn’t arrived yet, so I spent a relatively quiet week familiarizing myself with the dorm (clean but austere), the basic layout of the school, and the key locations in town. This was my “riffling through the phrasebook” phase. I was kind of high from jet-lag and disorientation, but it was all delightful. I found I actually liked the feeling of being alone with thousands of miles of alien world stretching out in every direction. Everything was new. I loved how the magpies circled around me was I walked back from the grocery store carrying bags of weird Polish products, and how the squirrels followed me with their tufted ears that stood straight up on their pointed little heads, and how groups of drunken teenage men would stagger past mountainous piles of coal shouting Polish rap as loud as they could.

I also met my foreign colleagues during this first week: Chiara, a weepy Italian-American from New York; Bill, from Grimsby in Northeastern England; and Dean, a hard-drinking nutcase from God-knows-where who said “aye” for “yes” in an accent that sounded like Houston through Glasgow. Dean was one of the lost souls not uncommon on the EFL circuit. He’d been drifting around the world for fifteen years, worked in ten countries, and had dozens of bizarre stories. A rather foul man actually. Before classes even started he got into a financial disagreement with the Nowy Sącz chapter of the Russian mafia at a nearby brothel. He had to ask for an advance from the school to pay off a couple of guys in black leather coats and shaved heads who had dropped by the dorm in a luxury Mercedes. You could only stare in disbelief. Sad, sad story.

The introductory tour of the school had been almost as frightening. WSB’s English department was a rather tumble-down affair, a converted furniture-factory administration building about 70% of the way through the make-over. Everything was peeling, flaking, falling apart, or half-finished. The elevators were terrifying little plywood boxes. The lighting in the dusty classrooms was poor, and there was almost nothing in the way of audio-visual equipment, but the rooms themselves were fairly spacious, with blue plastic desks arranged in nice semi-circles in front of a black wooden teacher’s desk. The key item of equipment in each classroom was a miniscule chalkboard accompanied by a huge cornucopia of dusty chalk. There were also a few overhead projectors scattered around the building, one or two of which had working bulbs. The state of things was a bit shocking at first, but my “just arrived” glow was so much in effect that even the grime on the clanking radiators was exciting. I was not discouraged.

After the tours and introductions of the warm-up week, our rich-kid students descended on the town in their BMWs to fill the dorms with vodka-sodden chaos. (The dorm had no official alcohol policy that I was ever aware of. There must have been some kind of rule about drinking printed on a forgotten piece of paper buried in the security guard’s desk, but since he helped students carry in their shopping from the all-night liquor stores, I don’t think it was taken very seriously. I found my own flat in the town as soon as I possibly could.) It was back to school, and all forty of the English teachers, both foreign and Polish, met for our big “fix bayonets” meeting and class assignments. This is where things started to get a little nutty. First of all, this meeting took place all of two days before classes were to begin, which meant that I had no idea what I would be teaching until pretty much the last minute—inadequate time to absorb the curriculum, gather books and materials, and prepare a decent lesson-schedule. Looking at more than twenty weekly classroom hours across four different courses (four different preps: a twice-weekly public-speaking course, and daily lower-intermediate, intermediate, and advanced English courses), I felt just a bit stressed. I had taught freshman composition for two years at Western, but this was my first EFL gig so I didn’t have much of a psychological or pedagogical airbag between me and the coming workload.

Well, I didn’t lose it completely, but there was a lot of on-the-fly, seat-of-my-pants action going on that first semester. I was writing all my own activities, writing all the tests and assignment sheets, grading essays…there simply wasn’t the time in the day to set up thorough lesson plans for every class I taught, so I had to work from sketchy preparation fairly often. As it turned out, my supervisors pretty much expected this. I was rather amazed at the latitude I was given. There were certain language structures that had to be covered, but my classes often became exhilarating little pedagogy labs where I was free to try out pretty much anything I could dream up based on my WWU training. Ostensibly, I was supposed to be teaching a lot of explicit grammar, but much to my relief the Poles cut me as much “communicative approach” slack as I needed. Foreign teachers like me were expected to be, well, foreign, so there was very little interference on the part of my immediate supervisors. We native speakers were speaking perfect English and bringing in fresh ideas, so it was all good. Which is not to suggest that I was free to go in there everyday and flop around in some bizarre American stand-up comedy routine—I did have regular observations—but things got pretty loose in there on occasion. 

I never felt any resentment on the part of my Polish colleagues regarding this difference in teaching style. They expected us foreigners to do things differently, and they didn’t seem to feel threatened by it. There was always something of a separation between the Polish teachers and the foreign ones (I think they had learned to avoid forming much attachment to people who usually weren’t there too long), but as far as I was concerned the Polish teachers were always kind and helpful. I think I helped encourage this by being careful to show them a lot of respect. A few of the other foreign teachers I met (and not just Americans) sometimes isolated themselves unnecessarily by copping a superior “I-know-better-than-you-backwards-Poles” attitude that didn’t do much for anybody. I of course sometimes felt that the school was going about things the wrong way too, but I tried to remember that I was basically a guest, and I made sure that any changes I suggested were couched in a little diplomacy.

But it is of course in classrooms full of students that all the really surprising tangled interesting stuff happens. First of all, I discovered that as a foreigner, especially an American, I was expected to provide a certain amount of cheap entertainment. I had never expected to become a yuks huckster, but since the Polish tradition requires that teachers be rather rigid and humorless (many of my Polish colleagues conducted their classes seated behind the big wooden desk at the front of the classroom, book open, arms folded in front of them), my students usually looked to me for something different and fun. As far as my students were concerned, a good American teacher was funny and tolerant and slightly strange. Goofing off while you teach is not hard once you get used it. I think there is some kind of soft-shoe instinct that kicks in when faced with fifteen sullen “show me” faces.

Of course, in practice the habits and attitudes they had developed as Polish students didn’t just evaporate because they got to call me Michael instead of Pan Bell (which would mean something like “Mr. Bell, Sir”). From my American perspective, teaching is a collaborative rather than an authoritarian practice, but as far as most of my students were concerned, despite all the fun and games I was still basically The Teacher Authority, and my requests and assignments were to be worked around and undermined whenever possible. It was nothing personal. I quickly learned to predict and circumvent any possible short-cuts and cheats whenever I designed an activity. Loathe as I was to do it, I had to make sure you could not “legally” complete a certain group task by writing one sentence ten times with one minor variation, and that there were “complete sentence” stipulations, and word-count requirements, and minimum time limits.

Although I think they understood what I was trying to accomplish with my communicative activities, and generally responded fairly well to them, many of my students seemed to assume that really learning English meant a teacher with three pages of grammar exercises and a stick. Most of them had been studying English since childhood, and this is how they’d been taught. (Do make sure you have a firm grasp of your grammar. My ability to hold forth on, say, the use of perfect tenses did a lot to put some of my students somewhat at ease—or at least comforted them with an anxiety they were used to—and scored me huge points with my Polish colleagues. I think where-ever you go, you’ll end up dealing with a lot more explicit grammar than you expect. Your students will probably ask you to explain things in these terms fairly often, and you don’t want to give them the old cop-out of “I dunno, that’s just what we say” I heard so often in Poland.)

Therefore getting my students to speak English authentically in class was my perennial challenge. Some of my students had become so anxious about their grammatical accuracy that they barely spoke at all. None of them liked to be corrected, yet many of them seemed to feel that if I didn’t correct them explicitly while they were speaking I wasn’t doing my job. My training and my instinct as a teacher told me not to give in on this, so I had to negotiate towards an approach we all could live with.  Their expectations about language learning in contact with my foreign ideas and assumptions did create a little social/pedagogical turbulence that I just had to learn to ride.

Another cultural negotiation I became involved in early on concerned cheating. Many of my students cheated their asses off every chance they got. They really didn’t see anything wrong with it. Even the sweetest, gentlest little sweetheart in any of my classes turned up with an entire set of notes written on her forearm one test-day. I found miniscule vocabulary lists rolled up inside transparent ball-point pens, uncovered complicated cell-phone arrangements and copy-room plots, and just got used to searching classrooms for planted notes before tests. Plagiarism was a given, so most all writing assignments had to be completed in-class, and those few homework essays I did allow had to be thoroughly checked and Google’d.

At first it was difficult to let go of my American indignation, but after a while I came to an understanding of my students’ attitudes about cheating. Firstly, since defying and defeating authority had been a survival requirement during much of Poland’s history, I realized that bending the rules and getting around the cops and furtive under-the-table transactions  had just become part of Polish culture. (I say this without judgement.) Additionally, all of my students where trying to squeeze a four-year American curriculum into three years, which was a lot of work, not to mention being quite difficult to reconcile with the standard student party schedule. Who was I to fight all this? After a while I learned to make a game of catching them at their cheating, and responded with appropriate humor when I did catch them, and it just became another part of my job.

The lesson I learned during these periods of cultural negotiation was that to be a good language teacher I not only had to remain sensitive to the collective personality of each class (like most teachers everywhere), I had to come to much more than a mere surface apprehension of Polish values and frames of reference. I had to know where my students came from historically, and what their lives had been like, and what they believed in, and what they expected for their futures. Basic assumptions were going to come into conflict, and I had to maintain a fairly high level of acuity to be able to turn them into learning opportunities. Had I refused to yield with regard to the cheating, trying to force my American attitudes onto my students through harsh lectures and penalties, I could have lost them. It can be a fragile thing, a teacher’s rapport with his or her students, and a language teacher absolutely needs this rapport. There were a few classes I did lose during my time in Poland through cultural misunderstandings and missteps. I learned the hard way that showing my disgust when most of the class hadn’t completed their homework or when activities didn’t work to my satisfaction was a huge mistake. I also learned that even suggesting criticism of Poland or Poles could be a sudden-death error. I heard of other teachers losing some of their classes through similar mistakes. It really doesn’t take much. I think the best way to avoid this is to become a dedicated, respectful student of your host culture, and by this I don’t mean songs and dances, but the basic unspoken attitudes, values, and assumptions that your students share.

I had a few other little surprises my first year in Poland. The first challenge for me was simply dealing with my students’ names. Learning and using your students’ names as early as possible is vital to rapport-building of course, but the Poles’ tendency to draw from a fairly narrow range when they name their kids didn’t make this task any easier. I had classes of eighteen with four Krysztofs, five Agnieszkas, and clusters of Agatas, Katarżynas, Małgorzatas, or Pawełs. (And my students did not like me to Anglicize their names.) To deal with this situation, I had my students write their names on cards and asked them to hold these cards up for a classroom photograph for which I crouched in the middle of the room and spun a circle, photographing each student at his or her desk. I then joined all these photographs together into long student-panoramas for each class which I hung over my desk and memorized. This worked great because the photograph itself took only seconds to make without any time-consuming posing to do, and I ended up with photographs of all my students in situ, which made them easier to remember. They all thought this was hilarious goofy American behavior, and the process ended up being a nice part of the ice-breaking days.

Calculating the student holiday schedule presented another learning curve: I discovered that I had to take an official school holiday period, add three days to both the beginning and end of it (five days for a major holiday like Christmas or Easter) and that would be the real holiday to prepare classes for. Of course, teachers still had to be at school to greet the two students who came to class anyway because they’d missed their trains and had nothing better to do. We usually grouped all these holiday orphans together and loaded up Shrek or something, so it was kind of a party time.

I also had to adjust to the fact that the school had no academic policy, nor an attendance policy. A student could study at WSB as long as the tuition was paid, regardless of GPA or attendance. I can remember at least one student who failed the advanced EFL course five times because he only came to about half of his classes. Seventy percent attendance was about average for most my classes, which really freaked me out until I realized it was normal for all the teachers. Once I grasped the situation, I constantly had to think of ways to motivate students who were just plain sick of taking the same class over and over again, and not being able to rely on attendance meant that many of my lesson plans had to be carefully redundant self-contained sets of activities that assumed no preparation on the part of the students and had enough flex to work with five students or fifteen.

Then there were the semester speaking finals, super-stressful must-pass oral examinations during which each student was compelled to creep alone into a crepuscular classroom (Poles rarely turn the lights on until nightfall in order to conserve electricity) to face down two examiners for twenty minutes of closely monitored conversation. Orals were a week of sitting in a classroom with a note-taking colleague beside me and a quivering student before me while nerve-wracked chaos raged in the hallway outside. There was desperation, panic, weeping and gnashing. As friendly and encouraging as I tried to be, I felt like the Great Oz bullying one Dorothy after another, and it was in this situation that polite conflicts between me and my colleagues sometimes emerged. My Polish colleagues would often sit beside me taking note of every dropped article and flubbed tense, which I thought was absurd. Yes, simply counting mistakes was an easy shortcut to a final grade, but I was more concerned with whether or not the student was communicating effectively with me about anything that came up. These people were nervous—of course they were going to drop articles and misuse prepositions. So what? Grammatically perfect robots didn’t impress me much; I was looking for real conversation. As my partner and I had to agree on a grade immediately after each exam, there were a lot of whispery negotiations while panicky students waited their turn outside.

I had my own hours of panic at the end of my first semester after I had figured out my students’ grades to find that about thirty percent of them had failed. To make it extra special, I learned that the school wouldn’t be sending our students their grades; we teachers had a special conference day scheduled during which students would come to us in our offices to receive their grades. (It’s changing now, but traditionally Polish students carried their grades with them in a little green book called an “indeks.” At the end of a semester, students were required to visit all of their teachers to ask for hand-written course descriptions, grades, and accompanying signatures. It’s a unbelievable system from an American point of view, open to all kinds of closed-door abuses.) The failure rate turned out to be an ordinary thing, but it didn’t make telling the bad news to those students any easier. The whole “bestowal of the grades” ceremony was a strange, emotional thing for me. My American students would sometimes sulk and fume if they got anything less than an “A.” My Polish students would beam with joy to have passed the course with a “C-.” Then they would kiss my cheeks three times, and invite me out for drinks or bring me flowers and chocolates.

So the first year was fairly nuts, but by the next I started to feel like I knew pretty much what I was doing, and over the next three years of my time at the school class preparation became much easier. I “got” Polish students more and more at an intuitive level, and learned a lot more of their language and culture. I scored points by being able to say funny things in Polish from time to time, and surprised my students when I was able to toss the occasional Polish pop-culture references into my lessons. They were so used to dead-boring standardized Cambridge baloney from England that making anything specific to Poland delighted them and brought them closer to the work they were doing, which was always a key goal. Motivation is everything.

Aside from teaching, I wanted to talk just a bit about my more personal cultural experiences in Poland. Cultural adjustment is a hugely complicated process, but I can recall some basic patterns of behavior in myself and the other long-term foreigners that I think worth sharing. First of all, every one of us foreigners (with the exception Chiara, who flew home in tears after a few weeks) went through a “honeymoon” period. (Even Dean.) It sounds like this: “Everything is wonderful here! I feel so free! Look at that! Ha! It’s great! I’m going to buy a house, get married, settle down right here! Listen to my almost-fluent Polish! I’m never going home!” We had a blast storming around the countryside together during this time, poking around in castles and salt-mines and Slovakian ski resorts. One of the most exciting things I ever did in my life was join Bill from Grimsby in a borrowed Fiat for a crazed marathon Redbull-fueled drive to Budapest for the Feast of All Saints. There is nothing to match that feeling of being in the outer darkness past the edge of your known world (“here be monsters”) and just laughing and laughing. I totally recommend it.

After a few months of this arm-waving and jumping around, most of us showed signs of losing that exhilarated joy in everything, but clung to it with a kind of tenacious white-knuckled enthusiasm. There were a lot of romantic misadventures with the locals; all of us got wrapped up in somebody at some point. (Beware. It can and will happen to you too if the culture permits it.) These often transmuted, often rather spectacularly, into fits of bitter complaints and reproaches directed at everything and anything before settling down into a kind of jaded acceptance. After I had gone through all of this myself, a sort of guilt set in: “what, am I so ethnocentric I can’t live anywhere?” I eventually came to rest with the acceptance that Poland is a place like lots of interesting places, but at heart I am an American and need American culture around me to be happy in the long term. I could not have imagined thinking this before I left—I could not even have defined “American culture” for myself until I had been in Poland a year. It’s a funny thing.

I of course realize that everyone’s immersion experience will be quite different; just remember that if you decide to move into a completely alien cultural environment to live and work for an extended period you will experience plenty of unexpected thoughts and emotions and come out of it changed in unexpected ways. Be forgiving of yourself. Revel in the pure traveler’s joy you will probably feel initially, but don’t beat yourself up if later you find yourself indulging in all kinds of inaccurate stereotypes of the people around you, or you suddenly develop a deep prejudice against haystacks or buses or water buffalo or something. It’s okay. You’ll find your balance.

Overall I had an amazing time in Poland. I had a thousand wonderful, horrible experiences, and came away from it all knowing that teaching is the only job for me. I loved my students, and we had some fantastically enjoyable and rewarding classes together. I’m sure all EFL jobs are different, but I think the basic lessons I learned in Poland are applicable anywhere we go. My time in Poland helped me to become a much better teacher, made me much more aware and accepting of my identity as an American, and vastly widened my understanding of cultural negotiation. Learning a foreign language is an almost impossibly difficult and anxious experience for many people, even more so with a native-speaking instructor, but I feel that I was successful in Poland because I stayed curious about my students and made sure they knew that I respected them, their country, and their culture. Once that was clear, they were free to reciprocate. The big trick will always be to help your students find their enthusiasm for learning English. Once they really want to be there with you in your language, you’ve done the best thing you can do as an English teacher; all the training finds its foundation, and the rest is easy. 

Correspondence always welcome:

Michael Bell

sowa@fidalgo.net