Odd day today: three hour delay for students but a normal arrival time for teachers. Due to the cold, the district didn’t want people out waiting for the bus; due to the lack of snow, most parents would be going to work and would have no way to arrange care for their children. (What do they do on snow days? The whole city doesn’t shut down? They still have to go to work many times students get to stay home.) That was the thinking: delay school for those who have to wait for a bus but open school for those who have no way arrange care.

The result: an odd day. No student at all during first period. One student during second period; three students during third period, though technically I’m supposed to have no students during third period because it is the first related arts period for eighth grade. Fourth period we returned to semi-normal for the rest of the day.

One for the hallway?

So I arrived home and Babcia jokingly asked if we teachers did a little drinking during the morning when no one was there. A shot or two. Only, she wasn’t really joking: until recently, it was fairly common in Polish schools.

“No,” I said with a smile, imagining the horrors that would produce in an American school.

“Why not?”

“Because you can get fired for that. Or possibly even face some jail time.”

“I don’t believe it! Not even a little something? That’s a bit of an exaggeration,” she pontificated.

Like so many cultural differences, I just let it slide at that.

To be fair, the trend of drinking in the teachers’ room was noticeably on the decline when we left almost ten years ago, and at that point, it had already diminished significantly in frequency compared to what it looked like in 1996, when I first arrived. Then, the teachers’ room looked like any other office when it was someone’s name day or some date of similar significance: cake, coffee, tea, a bottle of vodka, perhaps some wine, maybe some champagne. Indeed, in one of the most ironic scenes I’ve ever witnessed at a school dance, one teacher took a shot of vodka, stood, squirted his always-present breath-freshener into his mouth five or six times, and said, “Come on, Tadek, let’s go check the students for alcohol.”

By the time I’d left, a bottle of this or that was a relatively rare occurrence in the teachers’ room. It happened, but seldom, and more and more people begged off when offered a drink. As Poland has looked more to the West and less to the East, they seem to be leaving this cultural oddity — something which likely strikes the average American as unspeakably unprofessional — behind.