The ABC's of the Polish School System

Here’s a picture of my school!

Today I’d like to highlight the top ten differences I've observed between American and Polish schools (in no special order):

1) The bells – In American schools, the bell determines when class begins. If you arrive to class after the bell, you are tardy. I confused my students here the first week of school because I would walk to my classroom and set up before the bell. Then the bell would ring and I would find myself in an empty classroom – no students! Now I know the drill and follow the other teachers’ leads. I sit in the teachers’ lounge during passing periods (5 or 10 minutes) and drink a cup of tea or eat a small sandwich. When the bell rings (the bell that signals the “beginning of class”), I continue to sip tea for approximately 2 minutes in a calm, relaxed manner. Then I watch as teachers, suddenly realizing that the bell rang and that they must teach, begin to hurriedly rush about the room collecting keys for classrooms, attendance books, and materials (and I follow suit). Then I locate my students in the hallway, open the door to our classroom, and begin class (approximately 4 minutes after the bell rings). I have issues with the loss of instruction time (it’s only a 45-minute period!), but I can’t fight the system!

2) No electives or extracurricular activities – Could I have survived middle school and high school without art, photography, guitar, band, and other miscellaneous electives? I don’t know! The students here are enrolled in at least two foreign languages (German and English and sometimes also French) so it’s a built-in, pre-determined “elective curriculum.” There are no art, music, drama, shop, etc. electives here. I’ve talked about not having extracurriculars before. We had our after school cookie decorating party this week and about 20 students participated – a great success! I loved interacting with the students in a more informal setting. The informality of the event did confuse a couple of the students. Robert, pictured below with his cookie masterpieces including a Christmas tree decorated with the Italian flag, was a little confused by the informality. We were talking about Christmas (we had both decorated our trees over the weekend), and I asked him a question about tree traditions in Poland. His reply: “I must presentate about this in class?” “No, Robert, you don’t have to give a presentation about this in class. I’m only curious about Christmas traditions in Poland!”

3) Technology – Of the 35 classrooms in the school, only two have computers - the computer lab (with 12 computers) and one math classroom with 4 computers. None of the classrooms have overhead projectors. Only 4 of the classrooms have TVs. I have my laptop, but I cannot get Internet access at school. Teachers frequently play cassettes - not CDs - in their classrooms. Sometimes I love the lack of technology; sometimes it would help if I could show the students images online or create one overhead projector outline instead of writing on the board or printing dozens of handouts for the students.

4) Registers – Registers are attendance/grade books for every homeroom in the school. Students are grouped by grade into homerooms with approximately 23-26 students. Instead of every teacher having his or her own attendance and grade book, every homeroom has one book for all of the teachers who teach that class. After every class, I have to write what I did in class, note how many students were absent, and sign the book. I also record all of my students’ grades in the book. This ritual was stressful at the beginning of the year, but now it’s part of the routine (although sometimes other teachers hog the books and that’s a little frustrating because you get in trouble if you don’t promptly mark the books).

5) Classmates – Again, students are grouped into homerooms of 23-26 students, and students attend all of their classes (science, math, gym, English, Polish, German, etc.) with only the students in their homeroom. For example, there are three 7^th grade classes – called “1ag,” “1bg,” and “1cg” (each with 23-26 students), but students from 1ag never have class with students from 1bg or 1cg. I’m pleasantly surprised how well this system works. I know I loved middle school and high school because you saw different people in all of your classes. Overall, I’m impressed by how well the students in homerooms work together, how well they know each other, and how well they take care of each other.

6) Internal substitution – Anyone who asked me about the biggest and most challenging adjustment this fall has heard me talk about internal substitution! In Polish schools, if a teacher is ill, absent, or chaperoning a field trip, another teacher at the school serves as the substitute. I joked at the beginning of the year that I was the school’s “#1 substitute.” Substitution is difficult for a couple reasons. 1) Substitution is typically very last minute. Sometimes one of the school directors will dash into the teachers’ room and say “Miss Sarah, can you substitute for this class in 5 minutes?” 2) Substitution typically involves very big classes. I’m lucky that my conversation classes are never more than 17 students. However, when I substitute, I typically have between 25 and 35 students. It’s not that it’s super difficult to manage 25-35 students; it’s that it’s super difficult when you only have 5 minutes notice before substituting. (Once they tried to give me 60 students for 2 hours, but I asked the director to split the class and she said that they made a crazy mistake by assigning me 60 students. I’m glad I asked!) What do you do when you substitute? I asked this question very early on and was told that it’s a great opportunity to give the students an extra English conversation lesson (obviously, if I’m subbing for a Polish class, I can’t teach them Polish!). Typically, I try to have a good lesson plan for substitution. I now create substitution lesson plans over the weekend and can quickly pull them out when an emergency substitution arises. I’m now very relaxed about substitution (my “chilled” attitude about last minute substitution crises would amaze anyone who knows me and my love of planning and preparation), but it caused a lot of stress the first couple months.

7) School schedule – I was amazed at the beginning of the year at the number of school-aged children I saw wandering the streets of Cieszyn between the hours of 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. on school days. Why aren’t they in school? I quickly learned that there is no standard school day in Cieszyn. Students start and end their days at different times depending on the day. For example, a student might go to school at 8 a.m. on Mondays, but 9:45 on Wednesdays. On Tuesdays, she or he might go home at 2:30, but at 1 p.m. on Thursdays. Rarely will a student stay at school for a straight 6 hours. (I’m remembering my high school days – 7:30 a.m. until 3:15 p.m. – almost 8 hours – and that didn’t include extracurriculars before and after school!)

8) Locked classrooms – Teachers here “travel” from classroom to classroom. I teach in 9 different classrooms (#1, #3, #10, #13, #16, #20, #22, #31, #32 – classroom #10 is pictured above). The classrooms are also always locked. In the teachers’ room, we have a box of keys for all the classrooms. After the bell rings, you have to attempt to locate the key for your classroom. Sometimes you’re successful and you open your classroom door, the students sit down, and you begin your class. However, if you can’t locate the key, the search begins. Typically if you can track down Andrzej (our school’s “keeper of the keys”), you can get the spare key from him. However, if Andrzej is missing in action, or if he lent his spare key to a teacher who then failed to return it to him, you are literally locked out of your classroom and then have the challenge of finding 1) an unoccupied classroom (and it’s a very crowded school) 2) with a key so you can open it 3) with 15 antsy students typically trailing behind you.

9) Discipline – There are no discipline policies at school for tardiness or behavior issues. Well, the policy is that you report the issue to the student’s homeroom teacher. I’m happy to report that the discipline issues are, overall, mild. The students are good-natured and especially kind to their classmates and overall very respectful to their peers and teachers (my school sometimes feels like a big, loud family – teachers are very close and students are very close). However, I’ve talked to a couple teachers at school who are also frustrated by the lack of disciplinary procedures and the fact that the individual teacher has no control over classroom discipline issues. I dislike the lack of procedures because it’s a waste of classroom instruction time if teachers have to devote extra time to discipline issues because there’s not a standard procedure for how to respond to typical problems. Tardiness is also acceptable here, and that’s difficult for me as a teacher! If students arrive to class anywhere from 4 to 8 minutes after the bell rings, you waste valuable instruction time or have to repeat instructions that students wouldn’t have missed had they arrived on time! My students know that I do not like tardiness (well, hilariously, because of the bell schedule, you are “tardy” to my class if you arrive more than 4 minutes after the bell rings) and are typically very good about arriving on time. I appreciate their willingness to adjust to my “cultural norms” in this instance!

10) Chit-Chat – Students are also very talkative in class. They constantly chit-chat. They’ve improved over the semester, but it’s also a basic cultural difference. I feel that students should listen to each other when they talk because it’s 1) respectful and 2) valuable for them to hear each other speak English because it’s exposure to the language and they learn from each other’s mistakes. However, I’ve learned from students and other teachers that it’s rare to ask for students to sit and listen quietly in class (another challenge of teaching in a new culture – sometimes it’s difficult to know if a behavior is “typical” or if students are acting out because I’m the “native speaker” with no background knowledge of the Polish school system). Typically students talk to the teacher one at a time and during that time the rest of the class is allowed to talk and chit-chat. My students and I have found a “happy medium” solution to the chit-chat dilemma. They’ve drastically improved their listening skills (sometimes extrinsically motivated by a “listening grade” I include in their assignments) and slightly lowered the intensity and frequency of their chit-chat, and I’ve adjusted to the (in my opinion) slight chaos of always hearing chit-chat when I’m talking and other students are talking. I still savor quiet moments when only one person is talking and everyone is listening! Perhaps these last two differences (#9 and #10) are the most surprising to me. I anticipated that Poland would have quite strict schools, and I’m frequently surprised by the intensity of the chit-chat (10xs more than in any American classroom) and the lack of standard school discipline policies.

(I submitted my semester grades (called “marks”) this week, and I promise to post about the Polish grading system soon! It’s also very interesting and was not included here because the topic deserves its own post!)