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Singing in Class

Tuesday 21 December 2004 | 2 Comments

One of the best things about being an EFL teacher is the fact that I can do "stupid" lessons and get by with it.

Like singing Christmas carols. Imagine going to math (or "maths" for those who prefer British English) class and the teacher says, "Today, we're going to sing Christmas carols." Even in, say, literature class it doesn't really float.

But in English class, it does. So I teach the kids a few songs. This year:

  • We Wish You a Merry Christmas
  • Jingle Bells
  • Silent Night

Nothing special. I've always wanted to do "Jingle Bell Rock," but they don't know the melody, and that's key. It's a language lesson, after all, not a music class.

I can't really recall learning Spanish Christmas carols in high school. Perhaps we did, but I have no memory of it...

untitled Me

Thursday 16 December 2004 | 3 Comments

It’s a strange thing to get used to at first, seeing those three little letters everywhere before every name. Well, almost every name – the names that deserve it. The names that have earned it:

mgr

It’s an abbreviation for “magister,” and it appears before the names of all people who have completed the basic, five-year Polish university education. What it would be translated to in English is a little tricky, though.

Technically, it’s a Master’s Degree. But in many ways, it’s more like a Bachelor’s Degree. The main differences are the time-frame (five years as opposed to four), the course work (i.e., the total number of hours, though I’m not convinced a mgr equals a BA + MA as far as total course hours goes), and a required thesis. Of course most universities in the States don’t require a thesis for a BA and don’t require five years of study; on the other hand, the a lot of the fifth year is more or less spent writing the thesis, so a Polish university education is four years of course work, just as an American degree.

The major difference, I would say, comes after completion of the degree. That annoying title, “mgr,” prefaces names in every conceivable context. And when you think about it, it’s a little ludicrous, at least for an egalitarian American like me.

Imagine the American equivalent: GS, MA. Or worse: GS, BA. I tell myself that even if I had a doctorate, I wouldn’t want “Ph.D.” appended to my name all over the place. But at least I concede that a doctorate is deserving of that recognition and honor. But a Master’s Degree?

It’s especially annoying when one considers the fact that a “magister” degree here is the basic university level education. So in that way, it’s most decidedly not like the American MA, which is a step above the basic university education. I want to scream sometimes when I see a line of “mgr’s” in a list of personnel, “Jeez people, you completed your country’s basic university education! Stop bragging about it!”

xyz pzc hba GS

If you do complete graduate studies in Poland, you get to include even more initials before your name! Below are a sampling of possibilities:

In death do we not part

In death do we not part

  • mgr inz. — After seven semesters, you get an “engineering” degree. Three more semesters and successful defense of your thesis gets you the magic three letters: “mgr”
  • dr — A doctorate degree – eight more semesters
  • dr hab — A bit of a mystery, it seems. You have to defend additional research and you become “habilitated.”
  • prof. dr hab — Tenured professorship.
  • prof. dr hab inz — Tenured professorship if you happened to get the “inz.” first.
RIP xyz pzc hba GS

Titles are one thing in life. At the very least, they show the relative qualifications of an individual to speak on a given topic.

In death, they’re certainly seem to be empty vanity. But, nonetheless, at least one grave I’ve seen includes the “mgr” nonsense.

#$*@!

Monday 29 November 2004 | 2 Comments

Ah #&@*, I did it again -- trying to stop cursing and let another one loose unconsciously.

Without the redundant profanity (a sorry attempt at a joke), that's what I thought last night when something irritating happened and, muttering to myself about it, I used "colorful" language.

Stopping cursing is about like stopping smoking, I'd imagine. Perhaps more difficult from a certain point of view -- you don't have to buy profanities. They're there, piled up in our heads, for free! And you never run out of them, so you can't really think to yourself, "As long as I don't stop by a convenience store and see a wall of cigarettes, I'm fine."

My parents tell the story of when my father was trying to stop cursing, he and my mother set up a system that each profanity cost some part of their weekly spending money. They were a young couple, and the purse strings were tight, so they allotted themselves only a few dollars a week as personal spending money. My father "spent" all his money and then some one afternoon waiting for, if I remember correctly, a "woman driver" to turn left.

What is it about profanity that has such a draw? It's so difficult to stop, and yet so easy to begin. You can sit with an infant, patiently trying to teach her how to say something -- anything -- and she, with stubborn resoluteness, sits and says nothing. Then you hear the soup boil over, exclaim something you shouldn't, and when you come back a second later, the infant is chanting your profanity.

It's not that children have an ear for the vulgarities of their own language. An acquaintance told my wife and me that her daughter has recently begun using "the 'f' word" because -- guess. It's a word that has no meaning in Polish, though it does sound like "Kwak," a somewhat common surname.

Nonetheless, there she was, running around the apartment saying, well, the obvious.

When I moved to Boston after having spent three years in Poland, I began muttering Polish profanity -- and it is a language rich in profanity -- at work when something was trying my patience. Then a Pole started working there.

In Polska, cursing is strangely culturally accepted. That's not to say that it’s universally practiced, for if everyone cursed, then it would cease to be profanity. Still, in the States someone out "in public" doesn't usually let the four-letter words fly at will. A bus driver, for example, wouldn't be sprinkling is conversation with a passenger with profanity, but here, it's a common occurrence. I've heard fathers let loose while their four-year-old daughters stand beside them, grandfathers going crazy while their five-year-old grandsons run around at their feet -- and then it's no wonder that you hear a five year old say the Polish equivalent of, "Hey, *#@$-for-brains, where they *#@! are you going?"

Why did I write *#@$ rather than "shit?" It's always amused me to read quotes in something like Sports Illustrated where instead of quote the pitcher verbatim, puts words like s*$# in his mouth. As if we don't know what it means, and, more importantly, as if we don't sound the word in our heads as we read it. Is "shit" any worse than *#@$ for conveying the same idea? It's even gotten to the point that without any context, we have a pretty good idea what *#@$ means, so what's the point?

I'm not sure if it's the rural environment, or Polish culture in general, but one does hear much more "in public" than one hears in the States. In stores, in bus stops, on the streets -- it's everywhere. In Polish, it's not "the 'f' word" but rather "the 'k' word" and it's shocking -- almost impressive -- to hear how many times a riled up Polish man of, say, twenty-five, can use "the 'k' word" in a sentence.

Perhaps it's a question of American culture's Puritan roots. After all, there are advertisements for soap in Europe that show women's breasts -- unthinkable in the States.

I'm curious about other cultures -- how is cursing viewed wherever you sit reading this?

Photo by Internet Archive Book Images

In synagogue Saturday

Saturday 27 November 2004 | 0 Comments

My wife and I spent the weekend in Krakow. Saturday we went for a stroll in Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter.

As I've mentioned before, Jews in Poland occupy a strange position. There are very few left in Poland today, and that's why we were able to find ourselves in an old synagogue on a Saturday.

"We shouldn't be here," I thought.

"This should still be in use. We should feel as if we're intruding, coming into the Jewish quarter on a Saturday as bumbling tourists."

Shopping in Rural Poland

Thursday 25 November 2004 | 0 Comments

is a little different than its American counterpart. We’re used to express lanes and in-and-out shopping. In some supermarkets now, you can theoretically do all your shopping without interacting with a single employee. Just swipe your ATM card at the self-check-out and off you go.

Not so in rural Poland.

Until recently, even the notion of a self-service shop was unknown. Shops were organized like the old general stores we see in westerns: a counter, with all the goods on one side behind the owner, with you on the other.

Such was the setup in Poland when I first arrived. I went to the store and instead of shopping, told the shopkeeper what I wanted, and she ran around behind the counter gathering my purchases. It was strange at first, but excellent for my early language acquisition.

There are more and more self-service shops in Poland these days, and virtually all the shops in larger towns and cities are self-service.

But the old mentality lingers:

  • Some older women have a habit of doing their shopping as they check-out, so they bring a few items, then continually run through the store, getting this and that, while I stand, all my items in the basket, waiting.
  • Some much older women ask the cashier to run around the shop doing their shopping for them. Old habits, I guess.

Despite its inconvenience, I miss the old shops. You had to interact while you were shopping, and as a foreigner, the more the better.

“I’m not anti-Semitic but . . .”

Tuesday 23 November 2004 | 1 Comment

"I'm not anti-Semitic, but I just don't trust Jews."

I was sitting in a bar with an American friend and a Polish acquaintance when the Pole, in utmost seriousness, said that. He could not be made to see the inherent contradiction in what he'd said.

"I don't really know many Jews, but I don't like them."

Thus said another Pole to me, explaining a situation he'd had earlier that week in Krakow with someone who was "obviously a Jew." He too maintained he's not anti-Semitic.

Jews in Poland occupy a strange position. Before the Holocaust, "Poland's Jewish community numbered 3.5 million, which represented 20 per cent of world Jewry and 10 per cent of the pre-war Polish population." (Source) Today, Jews number less than twenty thousand in the whole country. Most people in modern Poland have never even met a Jew.

There were so many Jews in Poland thanks to Casimir the Great's opening the borders and accepting Jews in the Middle Ages when they were being expelled from many other countries in Europe. When they began prospering, the Poles began resenting them and their success.

Contemporary anti-Semitism in Poland is fueled by far-right parties like "Liga Polskich Rodzin" ("The League of Polish Families") and the populist party "Samoobrona" ("Self-Defense"), both of which overtly and covertly blame Poland's present economic woes on Jews. They deny that there are only about sixteen or so thousand Jews in Poland, and with some on the fringes insisting that President Kwasniewski himself is of Jewish descent.

Others blame the Jews for the Second World War, saying that Hitler was particularly brutal to Poland because of the large number of Jews here. The "logic" there is baffling, but I've personally heard the argument at least once.

Anti-Semitism is not just a problem in Poland, though. Jean Marie Le Pen's surprise success in the French elections some time ago showed that nationalism and rabid xenophobia find fertile ground even in supposedly liberal France.

Anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe. A supposedly suppressed UN report that blamed "a new wave of Antisemitism on Muslim youth and on anti-globalization activists" (Listen to the NPR Report) shows that it's not just right-wing, neo-fascists who are spreading the ancient, illogical hate of Jews.

People talk of how to reduce anti-Semitism and other forms of xenophobia, but anti-Semitism seems like a hydra. It's been around for so long and taken so many forms that it seems always to be changing.

  • Anti-Semitism in Christianity has a long history. Jews are still "blamed" for having killed Jesus, as the recent outcries over Mel Gibson's brutal Passion showed.
  • Hitler magnified a "racial" dimension to anti-Semitism that had been brewing in Europe for at least a hundred and fifty years. Instead of being a religious-ethnic group, Jews became a different race. Indeed, a different species.
  • Contemporary liberals sometimes blame Jewry as a whole for Israel's sometimes-excessive dealings with Palestinians.
  • Even the super-nutty fringes are not immune. Take a look at Freedom Press and it won't take long to find a connection ultimately between Jews and aliens (?!?) through the supposed conspiracies of theIlluminati.

Anti-Semitism is, indeed, everywhere, and has been for ages. And despite our "enlightened" times, it appears we might be heading toward another wave of increased anti-Semitism.

Shakes and Kisses

Monday 15 November 2004 | 3 Comments

I’ve lived in Poland now for over six years, and there’s a custom I still haven’t come to terms with — the handshake.

In the States, we shake hands only when we first meet someone, or when we’re in some very formal environment. In Poland the handshake is much more common.

In short, you should shake hands with someone if:

  1. You’re a man.
  2. You encounter a man.
  3. You know the man you’re encountering or
  4. He’s with a man you do know.

You shake hands in bars, when you arrive at work, when you pass on the street. Kids shake hands; old men shake hands with young men; directors with teachers — everyone shakes hands.

Some examples:

  • If you go to a bar and you see a friend sitting at a table, you go shake his hand, and you offer your hand to every other man who’s sitting at the table.
  • If you’re walking down the street and an acquaintance is walking the other way, you shake hands, even if you just continue walking.
  • If you’re a student, you shake hands with all your friends every day. Sometimes you see a boy just moving down the hall, shaking hands like a politician.

But it’s not so simple as that. You’re only supposed to shake hands when you first meet each other. Other encounters during the day don’t get the shake.

Traditionally, you’re not supposed to offer your hand to a woman. Indeed, in a really traditional, formal setting, men still kiss women’s hands in Poland.

I’m still not sure when I’m supposed to offer my hand and when I’m not. Rather, I forget. I walk by an acquaintance on the sidewalk and I realize three steps too late that I only said “Czesc” and didn’t offer my hand.

As far as kissing women’s hands go, well, I just keep away. It seems too cavalier (pun intended) for me to do it.

But I kiss men here. In fact, I’ve kissed every single male teacher with whom I work. The three peck, right-cheek, left-cheek, right-cheek-again mwa-mwa-mwa kiss. The triple peck is used in congratulatory situations: name days, weddings, etc. and it’s the most difficult for me, an American, to get used to. After all, while I really like my director, I don’t want to kiss him on a regular basis. But from time to time, at a teacher�s meeting, we give a birthday gift to one of the teachers and then we all line up and mwa-mwa-mwa.

At our wedding, Kinga and I kissed almost all our guests . . .

Why they do it

Wednesday 10 November 2004 | 2 Comments

“Michele asks in a comment if it’s “not MORE difficult to cheat in the field of English because of the essay style answers that are required?” Perhaps in theory, but remember: essays require vocabulary, which is conducive to cheating.

Explaining how students in Poland cheat leads naturally to explanations as to why they do it.

One of the reasons, I think, is the sheer number of courses they take every year. Here’s a list of courses for one third-year (senior) class:

  1. Polish
  2. History
  3. Mathematics
  4. Biology
  5. Chemistry
  6. Physics
  7. English
  8. German
  9. Computer science
  10. Geography
  11. PE
  12. Social studies
  13. Religion

That’s not possible courses — that’s the required course work. As opposed to the American system, where you have physics only your final year, with chemistry your junior year and biology as a sophomore, they have all three sciences throughout high school. Of course they don’t have each course every day. For example, senior students have four hours of English a week, and so they meet Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday — like the university scheduling system in the States. Still, that’s an insane amount of studying every week.

A second cause, put forth by a teacher, was historical. “Teachers during communism were seen as the Establishment, and so it was a way to fight the establishment.” Sounds weak. I don’t buy it.

Option three: the rote memory required by many teachers necessitates it. This might have some merit. I know teachers here sometimes simply dictate from a book and the students just write down everything and vomit it back up the next lesson. Admittedly, I do something similar when I give vocabulary quizzes — and I give an obscene number of such quizzes. “Without words, all the grammar in the world won’t help you!” tell the kids.

Choice four, which is the most logical now: as a fellow English teacher put it, “We let them.” Pure and simple. I do my damnedest to stop them from cheating, and I sometimes fail them for even a glance to the side (and that’s no exaggeration — I do it early in the year with first-year students, usually with a not-so-important grade, to set a precedent), and I take no excuses. And yet they still cheat.

The cheating won’t disappear soon, I’m afraid. I always use as an example the cultural attitude in the States towards cheating, but I know that that is slowing being eroded and that more and more students are cheating in the States.

Dude, what’s number three?!

Monday 08 November 2004 | 3 Comments

I am a high school English teacher in a small village in southern Poland. One of the things that still amazes and annoys me, after more than six years of teaching here in Poland, is the culturally engrained habit of cheating. Simply put, the majority of students here will cheat in any and all perceived opportunities.

  • They whisper to each other.
  • They attempt to peak in their books.
  • They write on desks before a test.
  • They hide cheat-sheets in more places than you can possibly imagine.
  • They write on their hands, arms, and legs.
  • They copy their homework from each other.

And that’s just the stuff I’ve caught them doing.

It’s not that they’re morally degenerate, though. Rather, it’s a full-fledged, much-loved cultural difference. For us Americans, cheating is something of an embarrassment. I cheated once in sixth grade, and got caught doing it. My parents were called in for a conference, and I was quite ashamed of the whole situation. (I did cheat once in junior high, but that was merely because the teacher was on his own planet and my friends and I wanted to see how blatantly we could cheat.)

Poles don’t even see it as cheating, but more as “helping.” Intellectual honesty is, in my experience here, hard to come by. Cheating begins in elementary school and continues through university and into the workplace.

Two examples show the tolerance Poles seem to have for cheating:

  • A friend was working on a development project in the north of Poland some years ago. Individual cities wishing to participate in the project had to submit budget proposals. One town copied another’s proposal.
  • A high-ranking minister (I believe in the Ministry of Education, if memory serves) admitted to having plagiarized his doctoral dissertation some years earlier. It was deemed “excessive” punishment to revoke his doctoral degree, though I can’t remember what ultimate punishment was.

It’s no wonder, then, that students cheat. It seems to be in the blood.

But how do they do it?

To begin with, they talk. Literally, if I turn my back for one moment a murmur spreads across the classroom. But I usually watch them like a cliché hawk (no reading books while they’re taking a test here . . .), so they have to resort to written methods.

The most common method (aside from writing on hands) is to make cheat sheets that are then hidden in shirt sleeves, taped to the knee (if it’s a girl wearing a skirt), taped to the inside of clothing, or numerous other places.

All this cheating makes the instances of intellectual honesty all the more poignant. I once had a student — one of the hardest working in the school — copy entries for the journal that I was requiring her class to keep. She explained later that she simply didn’t know. She’d never cheated, and she was a model student, but I knew I had to fail her for the assignment. I told her I would think about it. She came to me the next day and said, “It’s not fair that I don’t get a failing mark. I should have known better. Please give me the ‘1’.” I did, but made sure it didn’t affect her overall grade.

Another place students like to use these little “aids” is in conjunction with a pen. There are two methods: the cruder form is simply to take the small, virtually illegible sheet on the outside of a pen. The more sophisticated way is to put it inside a pen with a clear casing. Whenever I happen to find these, I keep them – so there’s at least a minimal consequence to cheating: loss of a złoty.

Despite my best efforts, I can’t seem to stop this. I might have better luck trying to get my friends to give up smoking and drinking. It doesn’t matter than I have a zero-toleration policy, that I remind students of before every test or quiz. Students know that there’s no questions asked, no arguing tolerated, and begging is ignored – they cheat in any form and I fail them for the assignment, regardless of the weight of the grade.

I even fail them if the appear to be cheating! I’ve told them, “If your lips move, you get a ‘1,’ because am I to know what you’re saying?” It’s excessive, in a sense, and even unfair, but I know if I’m not this strict, they’ll say, “I wasn’t cheating! I was asking for a pencil/tissue/eraser/whatever.”

And still they cheat. And some of them, after being caught, do it again!

Usually I’m remorseless about failing them. After all, I’ve warned them repeatedly. But sometimes a usually hard-working, generally honest student (in other words, someone I really like) cheats. And that’s when it’s difficult to fail them. But I do, explaining my desire not to show favoritism and be fair at all costs.

For any casual readers from the States, I have a question: Did you ever cheat in school? How did you feel? Did anyone every find out? What was their reaction?

Chewing Gum in Singapore

Friday 05 November 2004 | 0 Comments

Everyone knows of the "notorious" ban on gum in Singapore. It seems that liberalization is coming. You can chew gum now! That is, if you're registered to do so.

I was doing a search on this because there's a listening activity on the history of chewing gum in the intermediate English textbook I use. I was shocked and thrilled to find out that freedom of chew is slowly coming to Singapore.

And America is helping bring it!

The gum became a sticking point in the trade talks when Philip Crane, a US congressman from Illinois, called for Singapore to lift the ban on all gum. Mr Crane represents Chicago, the home of chewing gum giant Wrigley (BBC Article).

I guess Singapore better brace for an attack if these restrictions aren't lifted . . .