Skola Jezycowa

Recently have been talking a lot about the work Cynthia and I do in selecting candidates for the Masters program. But that is only because it is more interesting than our regular job. The majority of our time is consumed by teaching. We spend about 34 hours a week teaching classes. Sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the week. In addition to this, we spend about 2 hours a day preparing for classes, grading, photocopying, finding exercises on the internet, downloading lyrics for songs, sending people advice or listenings via email, etc. So the larger portion of our life is consumed with "Skola Jezykowa" (Language school) related activities.

The building itself was built over a hundred years ago as the personal home for a locally famous architect, and really does credit to what the Polish architectural aesthetic was, and might have become, had historical forces moved differently. Inside they still retain a few pieces of furniture designed by the original owner, large, heavy cabinets, but graceful, in their own way.

Our employer bought the building only a year ago, after her business outgrew the building they were in at the time. After having the new building open for 3 months, they are once again running at maximum capacity. This is despite having remodelled the building to extract extra classrooms from all available spaces.

All the classrooms are rather large, well-lit, and gracefully apportioned. In some rooms they have preserved the original hand-hewn beams that run up to the peak of the room to support it. You can definitely see that a lot of thought went into the remodelling of the buildings and the furnishings of the rooms. And work still goes on, adding small wooden benches here and there, a bit of trim over the radiator, just nice touches that make it a more comfy place.

This carefully considered atmosphere that is seen in the rooms is also reflected outside the school. The school's trademark is designed to look like the London Underground symbol (seen hanging in the photo above,) and the billboards located at many strategic high-traffic points about town feature a Palace guard-type, with the big bearskin hats, screaming his head off in excitement about something or other. It is a bit of a disturbing image, and due to the incongruity of it, and possibly the silliness of it, difficult to forget. This image is also placed on folders which every student is issued at the beginning of the year. Thus, every time they take out their folder to do homework, they are advertising for the school. The back of the folder has the present, past and past participle forms of all the irregular verbs listed, thus providing a reason for the student to use it, rather than another folder - a built-in reference tool. Naturally, the list of verbs is superimposed over the school logo, so both sides are advertising for the school.

Obviously, these items, (the palace guard, the underground-type logo,) are all designed to evoke thoughts of England. And if this were not sufficient, she (the owner of the school) recently imported a red telephone booth of the sort normally found in London, and had it assembled in front of the school. Yesterday I even caught some kids taking pictures in front of the phone booth, in an obviously pseudo-touristic I-am-in-London manner. (I have a photo of myself in front of such a phone booth, in fact.)

All this to say that a lot of thought and attention has gone into the branding of the school, the marketing, and how to catch the public's eye.

Mystery Cheese

Cynthia and I have recently acquired a very interesting job. We must sort through the resumes, cover letters, questionnaires, and on-line applications from people who want to either join the Masters in Poland program, get a job working in Poland, or both. We currently have around 100 applicants, and get between 10-20 more each day.

To sit here, and read the resumes of people who want to be here, is a fascinating job. Not only is it a glimpse into the life and aspirations of a stranger, (with all the voyeuristic thrill which that might involve,) but only last year we were in their shoes, applying to be accepted. I remember vividly the anxious anticipation which accompanied the opening of every email, the careful wording of the questions we sent, etc. So I still feel quite heavily the responsibility to respond to people as promptly and honestly as I can. Hopefully that feeling will go away with time, and I will feel free to trample their pathetic dreams with impunity. Oh, glorious day.

What bothers me most is the sheer number of applicants with solid qualifications. We only have a few slots to fill, and so we must choose between the girl with a BA in English Education, and 5 years experience teaching English in Hong Kong, and the man with 1 year experience teaching English, but 5 years experience in Japan as a journalist, a Masters in Neurophysical Linguistics, who is also an avid diver and photographer. (Which are points in his favor, as far as I am concerned.) So who do we pick? Solid Workhorse who needs the degree for long-overdue advancement in the field they have obviously chosen, or Interesting Person with greater life experience, who needs the degree for advancement in their latest field? Many people would put their money and sympathies with the Workhorse, but the more eclectic person with a wider range of experiences in life appeals strongly to me. What if one of them is 50 and the other is 28? How does that swing the balance? Older people often have a better idea of what they want out of life, and can be more focused, but at the same time, they can also be more demanding, and seem to consistently have a harder time staying on the same page in classroom discussions. (Or, maybe I just notice it and attribute it to their age if the person in question is older, and if they are younger I just think "Idiot" and forget about it?)

There is another category of applicant, though. Despite the fact that the website clearly says we only accept applicants with experience, we receive a fair number of applications from cheerful, scrubbed-behind the ears, painfully sincere and over-motivated college graduates from Padukah, Idaho, who obviously spent a lot of time rearranging the elements on their CV and sprinkling it with inspirational quotes which they no doubt view as reflective of their deeply-held beliefs, all in an effort to distract me from the fact that they still have "Independent temporary childcare provider" on their resume. (That's "Babysitting" for anyone who didn't catch it, and when you do the math on the dates you see - yup, at the tender age of 14.) From which they moved on to other, less-impressive, jobs.

Now don't get me wrong. Just because I am mocking them mercilessly in no way indicates that I do not feel sympathy. Au contraire. The fact is, these are the people I feel the most sympathy for. I recall when I graduated college, I wanted nothing more than to get a posting teaching abroad. I wanted it so badly I could taste it. It was my DREAM to go overseas and teach. And it seemed so difficult. So complicated. So daunting. So when I read these people's resumes, I feel such sympathy for them - they sound so motivated, so eager to go overseas, so . . . idealistic.

That is what pulls me up short. I sense in a lot of these cover letters an idealized sense of what life in a foreign country will be like. They seem to think mostly in terms of what life seems like when we are on vacation - everything is new, fresh, interesting, and sipping espresso in sidewalk cafes. I practically feel like some are envisioning their life set in black and white Henri Besson photos, and there seems to be far too little recognition that their day-to-day would involve going to work, coming home, and doing the laundry in a machine whose instructions they cannot read, and having a TV on which it is only possible to watch two channels because the others can't be understood.

But that is its own small pleasure, isn't it? The fact that the options available to you are suddenly more limited means you focus more intensely on the ones that are still available. It isn't necessarily only a reduction in the breadth of pastimes offered, but also an opportunity to engage more deeply in the remaining few. And then one musn't discount the small pleasures of life that would not be so common in one's home country. For example, the adventure of purchasing groceries.

When Cynthia and I went shopping the first few times, it was a complete gamble as to what we would end up coming home with. Milk turned out to be buttermilk, Corn was discovered to be a main topping for certain pizzas, and you never really knew if you were buying flour or cornstarch.

We once bought 2 pounds of gorgeous looking dried dates, only to discover that they were smoked. Odd as it may seem, some perverse individual actually thought it a good idea to smoke fruit and then consume the shrivelled, char-flavored remains. Or maybe that was why he was selling it - he didn't want to consume it himself, and must have got a good laugh from selling to us. I ate perhaps six of them, each time convincing myself that they couldn't possibly be as bad as I remembered, before hurling the bag under the counter on the theory that as they moved closer toward rotting they might also increase in edibility. However, all such hopes were in vain, and the dates (or whatever they were) sat under the counter for about 4 months before I threw them out.

However, as the months have passed, we have become quite proficient at distinguishing cream from kefir, (both have happy-looking cows on the box) and figuring out which kind of flour is best for biscuits, and which is better for quiche-crusts. One area, however, retains its enchanting air of mystery.

The discount cheese case always contains about 20 different lumps of cheese, all different shapes and sizes, for different prices. It seems that when a piece of cheese is sufficiently reduced in size, the attendants wrap it in plastic, and put a sticker on it designating the price per kilo, price of the particular piece, and the type of cheese. You can probably guess which of those I am actually capable of deciphering. (OK, to give myself proper credit, I can also read when it says "Yellow cheese" or "White cheese," but seeing as it is wrapped in clear plastic, it isn't exactly any more informative than if I weren't capable of this astounding linguistic feat.) I would like to be able to open each one, and sniff it, but suspect that someone might say something. So we just make our selection based on price. Selecting two or three lumps of the cheapest cheeses, we make our purchases, and scurry on home.

Once safe in the confines of our house, we take out our newly acquired cheeses, unwrap them, and yes, sniff them. We cut small pieces and nibble them and stare at the label and wonder if we will ever taste this particular cheese again. Because we never know what the cheese gods will have in store for us next week.

Perspective

Perspective is knowing what is possible. Wise, PhD-wielding experts often advise us that our emotions and our viewpoints regarding a given situation depend greatly on our perspective -- our mental coordinates, if you will. If we have prior experience in a given situation, it can provide us with a second, or a slightly broader point of view on the situation, which allows us to more correctly judge the quality of the situation we find ourselves in. As a brief and possibly superfluous example, lets imagine a policeman who at one point in his life had been arrested, and manhandled into a squad car. The knowledge of what it feels like to be on the other end of this interaction would provide him with a fuller picture of it.

You could be excused then, for thinking perspective was a synonym of sympathy, or the ability to share what the other person feels. But it is more than that. As a further example, in one of Cynthia's classes the topic of discussion was pollution. Pollution is bad, everyone agreed. People should do something about it, everyone agreed.
Places like big-cities were often horribly polluted, said one.
What about right here, in Nowy Sacz? asked Cynthia.
Puzzled silence followed. No, they replied. Nowy Sacz wasn't polluted.
Not at all? asked Cynthia, incredulously.
No, not at all, was their consensus.

Now, what is so incredibly instructive about this discussion, is that they all agreed that pollution was a terrible thing, and somebody ought to do something. But never having been out of their region, they don't know what anything else looks like. So they honestly think that concrete buildings turn black within a few years. Public statues normally develop a black coating on all the top surfaces. Buses bellow black huge clouds of black smoke ALL THE TIME. On the tops of homes, stores, from every building, chimneys spew black and white and grey thick clouds of noxious smoke all winter, which literally make you feel like you are choking when you walk through an area where the air (or smoke) is still. Everyone's skin changed within 2 weeks of the beginning of cold weather. One week, everybody looked shiny and clean and healthy, and 2 weeks later they had such an enormous crop of zits it looked like the night of the living pizza faces. All winter you see piles of coal on the sidewalk, which leave great black stains for weeks to come on the sidewalk and in the gutter. Walking along the sidewalk, one has to constantly be aware of phlegm on the ground, as all people, (but mostly men) will bring up, and subsequently share with the world via the sidewalk, large pools of sticky phlegm, another gift of living in coal smoke. They even know that there are no fish in the river next to the town, but claim it is clean. Meanwhile, 30 miles upstream there are fish in the river, and the people living there claim the river is dirty. The evidence is overwhelming, yet if they haven't been anywhere else, this is neither dirty nor clean - it just is. Not knowing what is possible causes one to believe that what one sees is what must be, an inescapable reality, as opposed to a changeable happenstance.

Thus gaining wider experiences allows one to envision a wider range of possible realities, possible outcomes, and to strive for the one that most effectively embodies an appropriate mix of the ideal and the attainable. And without a wide range of experiences, you have much greater difficulty envisioning the steps to take you from where you are to you know not where. And as one grows older, and more set in one's habits, routines, and comfortable environments, the less likely one is to seek out, or encounter experiences which broaden one's idea of the possible. Thus, as I age, my options will slowly become more and more limited along with my ideas. And that is truly tragic.

Hairy Phlegm

The day before yesterday, I was disgusting. Every time I extended my arm, I knocked something over. When I spoke, I gurgled with phlegm. When I coughed, I saw small pieces of egg and rice go flying across the room. When I caught sight of my body in the mirror, (which has not seen the sun in months) I was shocked at how dreadfully white and scrawny it was. My lower left eye-lid developed compulsive twitches that came and left all day. My hair (what little there is of it,) only served to illustrate the fact that I am going bald. When I sat down, I discovered there was a marble-sized zit in my ass. When I leaned forward to look at something, my wife helped my snowballing insecurity problem by asking "Do you fertilise your ears, or how do they produce that much hair?"

Of course, there is nothing a man likes to hear about more than the fact that his ears are once again going the way of the jungle. Especially on a twitchy, stumbling, clumsy, egg-spitting sort of day. Naturally, the first answer that occurs to me when I am feeling insecure and someone inquires about fertiliser in my ears is to say "Yes, I use the same fertiliser your mother used to grow that ass of hers." However, in a marriage, wisdom and discretion should rule all, and it would not be kind to say such things to a person who will shortly be pointing scissors at your brain.

So after my wife did her scissorly ministrations to the orifices of my head, (for which in all honesty I am extremely grateful, as I do spend a fair amount of time speaking to seated (ie. captive) students at close range, and I have been fairly horrified at some of the things I have encountered on them, so it is kind of my wife to take such an interest in maintaining my professional appearance and thus allowing my students the ability to concentrate on their work and not be distracted by any unpleasantness they might encounter on their teacher's head.

So after my wife kindly corrected my ears, I immediately went and did some exercises. As the blood flowed through my challenged muscles, it gave me a boost of energy and testosterone, and allowed me to feel like I wasn't always going to look like I had just been sick for 2 weeks. Then I gave myself a haircut. My hair was getting on toward 3/16ths of an inch, which is far too long, in my book. Then I took a bath, and scrubbed every inch of my greasy body with an abrasive sponge. I pinched zits and clipped and ripped out stray hairs scattered hither and thither. I put some nice-smelling aftershave cream on my new, smooth, face. Then I dressed in some flashy-looking jeans and a sexy shirt, and strolled out to see my wife, feeling once again that I was the master of the universe. And as I leaned over her to look at the computer screen, she twisted around in her chair and whispered in my ear, "You know, you're getting a lot of grey in your beard."

A night out

After a week and a half of being uproariously sick, Cynthia and I are now recovering a bit of the motivation and energy that usually is present in our lives. Now if we could just recover our rythm as well. During the weeks before getting sick I was exercising extra hard to try and catch up on the exercises I was supposed to be doing. Now, after being sick, I don't feel like exercising at all. I just want to lay around the house and do nothing all day.

However, it would appear that Spring is here. The days are warming up a bit, and there is a definite feel that winter is over. Of course, since global warming is more typified by dramatic weather swings than by consistent warming, I suppose we may yet receive 5 feet of snow. But I don't think so. And all in all, I am glad my first winter in Poland was an extremely mild one.

In other news, the director of the Masters In Poland program announced yesterday that Cynthia and I would be the new coordinators for the program. We shortly received congratualtions from one person, and I suspect it will earn us the enmity of at least one other. Still, what would life be if somebody wasn't pissed off?

Last weekend, after not going out for ages and ages, Cynthia decided to surprise me by taking me out to eat. We went out for pizza to a new place that exists in old cellars under the street. The ceilings are arches of brick, and at the highest point on the wall is a tiny window, (maybe 12 by 18 inches) through which you can see people's shoes as they walk by on the sidewalk. Anyways, a large pizza costs 3 dollars US, and half a liter of beer costs 1.70 US, so we escaped quite cheaply. However, shortly after our arrival we were joined by a cohort of teachers from the local uni, so we did not get to hang out and chat, as we had hoped.

So the next night we did it again. I cannot tell you how strange this is for us -- we never go out. Yet for once, twice in two days, we ate out. I feel so decadent.

Well, here is wishing you all a merry Wednesday -- it is gonna be a busy one for me. First Polish class, from which I catch the bus to a private class at the local version of Wal-Mart, from whence I go home, change bags, throw a sandwich down the gullet, and walk out to school and 3 more classes back to back. So I suppose I should get started -- bye!