Matching Tracksuits

Month: January 2005

Dziennik

Monday 10 January 2005

Each class has one. All teachers are responsible for keeping it up to date. Students have a right to look at it at just about any time. And the Ministry of Education can cause a lot of headaches if it doesn’t like what it sees in it.

So what is this mysterious thing called a dziennik?

I’m tempted to say it’s a direct consequence of The Fall, God’s punishment for all evil on earth, or other such silliness, but I’ll simply say that it’s one of the most annoying things about teaching in Poland.

“Dziennik” is Polish for “journal,” and The Dziennik (imagine a Charlton Heston-esque booming voice saying that) is the grade book for each class. It is the record of the entire class for the entire year, and keeping it up to date is the biggest headache I know of. All grades for all classes (biology, English, physics) are in this marvel of modern stupidity as well as the personal information of each student, and in addition, attendance is marked in one portion.

The most irritating and annoying part of it is the slots for lesson topics. For each lesson, I must write the topic in a special little slot. Now this doesn’t seem like much, but it can be an incredible pain in the ass. Teachers take the dziennik to class, and it is always bouncing through the school–one never really knows where it is. So you forget to write your topics one day.

Then that one day becomes two. Then three. Four. A week.

Then comes the fun.

The Polish equivalent of the homeroom teacher comes and points out all the slots where you forgot to write the topic, and you’re supposed to get out your notebook, look up that day, and write the appropriate topic.

Of course I write all my topics in English, so the obvious struck me long ago: “Only [Basia] (the other English teacher) knows enough English to understand what I’m writing in here. I can write anything I want.” So that’s what I started doing.

After that, topics included, “General Chaos and an Attempt to Keep Them Interested Forty-Five Minutes” and “Stuff.” Song lyrics can provide good topics: “Looking for someone, I guess . . .” or “Looking Over that Silly Four-Leaf Clove.” I suppose it’s immature, but we’re all allowed to be childish every now and then, right?

Mind, I didn’t do this regularly–just when I’d forgotten to write the topic or (more likely) the dziennik wasn’t available at the time.

Some years ago, when I did this more often, the other English teacher finally saw me doing it, and she asked me to stop. “I’ll be the one who gets in trouble,” she protested. At that time I didn’t speak much Polish, really, and she was the go-between.

Reasonably enough, she didn’t want to get yelled at.

I toned it down a bit, something like “Present Continuous in Questions and Cow Tipping.”–a combination of the two.

In theory, she explained, someone from the Ministry of Education might know enough English to understand what I wrote, and then the stuff would hit the fan.

I thought to myself, “If the Ministry of Education doesn’t have anything better to do than to sit and read every single topic in some little village’s school’s dziennik, then I think whoever was reading it might appreciate the humor.” But I said nothing. And wrote for my topic that day, “Telephone Vocabulary and Other Silliness.”

Metablogging

Saturday 8 January 2005

CW Fisher wrote about the proliferation of “I” in blogs, then amended those thoughts with one of the best pieces I’ve read about blogging. In a comment, Isaac: wrote,

Fascinating stuff… this whole blog phenom just hasn’t straightened itself out yet, so who knows what kind of writing to call it? And remember – rules for writing should increase accessibility and help convey messages; not serve as prescriptive left-over remnants of the past.

Isaac is right – this is an entirely new form of writing. It’s certainly spawned its fair share of vocabulary. Blog, blogger, blogging, blogosphere, blog rolling and many others have in a short period of time gone from oblivion to cliche. I hate all those words – they sound almost obscene, but I’m too lazy to go about re-inventing vocabulary.

I’m new to the web log scene, and before then, I’d never even really read that many of them. I started writing online because a friend bought me the domain name and, already having a web site, I had to so something with it. I’m not new to daily writing, though, as I’ve kept a journal for over twelve years, amassing close to two million words in that time.

Yet blogging is not journaling.

Nor, as Isaac implied, is it like any other form of writing.

Privacy issues and instant, world-wide accessibility aside, there is one thing about blogging that makes it different from almost all other forms of writing. It’s the activity I’m engaged in right now – metablogging. Blogging about blogging.

Since I’ve been exploring the blog world, I’ve found that we tend to write an amazing amount about what we and others are doing to the blogosphere. Of course it is a world of pundits musing, rambling, ranting, and a host of other blog-clichés about anything from seeing Star Wars trailers online to grieving the loss of a wife, but what I see more often than anything else is blogging about blogging.

The blogging world is a giant printer cable swallowing its own tail, very often publishing about publishing.

How boring.

He says in self-indictment.

So why do we all do it? We’re all enamored with this new technology we’re creating–writing about blogging is standing before a mirror. It’s preening. And it’s the one thing all bloggers have in common. That’s why the post I’ve written on blog-related topics have gotten the most comments. Not everyone cares about Poland or religion (my two favorite topics, truth be told), but most people who bump through care about blogging.

Yet this is somewhat logical, this metablogging, because blogs cannot exist in a vacuum. How many blogs, after all, are there which have no links to other blogs? Before the advent of Blog Explosion and similar sites, blogging was a more organic activity. Manually inserting links, then blog rolling was how everyone kept track of blogs, and how everyone else discovered new ones. Blog Explosion tends to make it a bit more commercial, especially given the fact that we can buy credits. This explains why we see “Pro-Life Blogs” appear time and time again on Blog Explosion. Throw together a banner and we all can have our cyber billboards.

Yet despite Blog Explosion and similar tools, checking out your favorite blogs’ links is still the best way to find interesting reading, and so we’re all still dependent on each other, which goes some way in explaining why we love to blog about blogging.

The question of why we blog about blogging is overshadowed by the larger, more blog-existential question: Why do we even keep a blog at all? If you’re reading this, chances are you keep a blog. Why? Most people blog like they live: without thinking.

I’m not well-read on blogs (probably never will be–there’s too much crap out there), but among all those I’ve ready, only once have I found an expression of the philosophy behind the blogging, an answer to the question, “Why am I doing this?”

Fr. Thomas Dowd, keeper of the blog Waiting in Joyful Hope writes that the philosophy behind his blog is simple:

One item, once per day, inspired by something that happened that day. [. . .] Sometimes my blog will have a direct reflection on my day, other times it will seem to be a more “theoretical” reflection, but I can guarantee that it is (almost) always inspired by something from that day.

A philosophy – why I’m doing this. It’s a great idea. When I ask myself, I’ve no answer.

Because I got the domain name? Hardly a reason.

I must come up with some better reason to continue.

Pour Marketing

Thursday 6 January 2005

The front of the shirt reads, “ghotic,” written in a font befitting the dust jacket of an Anne Rice novel. Down the sleeves and on the back there is a stupefying message, intended, I’m sure, to be mystifying or even dreadful and chilling:

This shirt, found at outdoor markets around southern Poland, is all the rage at the moment. It seems that at least thirty percent of the girls at school have one.

It seems strange that manufacturers want to incorporate “cool” foreign languages into their design, but “cool” text with such idiotic mistakes defeats the purpose. Why not just put gibberish on shirts if comprehensible meaning has no value? Why not put some squiggles and dots and call it Arabic? Or go to a Chinese language website and pick some of the characters at random?

This is the story of our times, when style consistently trumps content. Image is everything. First impressions are almost always visible, and pop culture is always dictating in which form the initial impressions should be in order to be considered “good.” Or even “cool.” That explains why so many of my female students wear clothes that bare their midriffs even when there’s a half meter of snow on the ground, and pluck their eyebrows within a millimeter of extinction. Chinese culture crippled its women with foot binding; Polish culture freezes them and has them running around with nonsense written on their clothes.

Ginger Snaps

Thursday 6 January 2005

Despite the stereotypical relationship prevelant in Western culture, I get on very well with my mother-in-law. She’s a retired Russian teacher who gardens during the summer and crochettes through winter — fresh veggies, beautiful flowers, and handmade Christmas tree ornaments.

I like her a lot.

She’s not very technologically savvy, though. We all love her, but — bless her sweet Polish heart — she just doesn’t feel comfortable with much of anything electronic.

My in-laws got their first microwave oven a couple of years ago (?!). It’s a little, basic job, with a manual timer egg-timer type mechanism and limited settings.

I could sense disaster in the offing.

One evening, my not-yet-then-wife and I were sitting upstairs when I caught a whiff of something burning. “Something happened down in the kitchen,” I thought, expecting the faint odor to disappear rather quickly. Instead, it grew stronger. We headed downstairs to see what was going on.

In the kitchen, on a stool in front of the microwave, sat my dear not-yet-then-mother-in-law, fretting and wringing her hands.

“Oh dear! Oh no!” she was muttering.

Seems she’d wanted to warm up some ginger-snaps for a snack and, not knowing how long it would take, set the egg-timer microwave to something like three minutes.

She didn’t know she could just turn it back to zero to turn it off.

She didn’t know she could just open the door to turn it off.

She didn’t know she could, in a worst-case scenario, unplug the microwave.

So she sat there, watching the ginger-snaps slowly carbonize, worrying herself silly about how much smoke was in the kitchen and promising herself never again to use the microwave.

Hel

Wednesday 5 January 2005

New Year’s Break

Saturday 1 January 2005

I’m in Hel now. That’s not a comment on my current state, but my geographical reality.

Back in a few days.

Oh, all the best for the new year.