On Change. Part 2

3. The Transition

Had all the states in the world become communist, the progress of the human race would have stopped. However, there was another world out there and one day this world came knocking at our door. When the brutal race between the East and the West was over, there was no doubt which economy is more efficient. In 1989, the year of the Transition, I was seventeen years old and half-way through my high school.

Things started to change quickly. Of course, the first changes were improvements on food and clothing. People were euphoric because finally they could buy what they wanted. We were allowed to get and keep (!) passports, and the countries of the West opened the borders for us very quickly. When I started high school, a trip to Cracow, some fifty kilometres off my birthplace, was a major undertaking. Three and a half years later I was on the bus going to Belgium to spend my holiday with a Belgian friend. And I didn’t even need a visa.

However, the euphoria soon subsided and hard reality started hitting us again and again. The rate of inflation kept going up, and so did prices in the newly-opened shops. We were used to inflation, which was actually less severe than the inflation of the 1980s. We knew how to cope with it and at least there was work. Well, was there?

The inefficiency of the communist factory would make any American or Western manager jump out of the top-floor window. The two big factories in my hometown – one producing cotton materials and the other diesel engines – employed several thousand people, which meant that approximately three quarters of the local population depended on them. The factories provided jobs and kindergartens. They also ran health centres and canteens. But they were mismanaged and at the beginning of the 1990s they started to fall apart.

The government did everything to make things worse. There were attempts at privatisation, which actually ended in a massive, semi-legal take-over of national property. Who did the take-over? Frequently, it was the managers – former Party members – who bought the companies for peanuts and immediately sold them to Western companies. Some companies were sucked dry of money and left to collapse. What mattered most to people was that they lost the last bit of protection and learnt what it means to be unemployed.

I think it was hard for the generations born in the 1940s and 1950s, i.e. the generations to whom my parents belonged. They didn’t have the comfort of their parents who were already retired, and they didn’t have the courage and flexibility of their children (or we could say: the boldness and stupidity of the inexperienced). You couldn’t cook your newly-gained freedom in the pot and serve dinner, could you? So these people built a very thick wall, trying to protect themselves and their families. They were hostile to any novelty and by shielding the new, they chose a quiet and undisturbed vegetation.

With unemployment peaking at 25%, the generation of our parents re-embraced the post-communist parties and let the new government make a couple of steps back. When people such as Miller and Kwaśniewski gained power, Poland started meandering. Before, we had had at least some sense of direction, development and unity. Post-communists grasped the mood of the vulnerable and the disappointed, and played the whole thing skilfully, creating the mechanism which keeps the generations and social groups apart. They achieved it in two wicked steps: first, they provided those willing to retire early with the so-called ‘bridge pensions’, and second, they created separate systems of taxation, health insurance and pensions for farmers. To spell it out clearly: farmers pay far less tax than people working in the industry and services. Their health insurance is heavily subsidised and their contribution to the pensions system is negligible. In practice it meant that the young were forced to finance the stability of the old.

When the transition happened, I was completely unprepared for it. My mental set-up was for stability and submission, not for change and challenge. Yet, stability was gone and change was chasing us with all the force of a Shinkansen train. The situation would have been very hard for me but for a rare and useful skill I had: I knew English and I liked teaching it (I still do).

4. The roller-coaster of the 1990s

The 1990s were a wild time, yet I felt happy, because finally I was free to learn English. People established bookshops and sold everything – this is when I bought my copy of Thomson and Martinet’s grammar. I also acquired Murphy’s English Grammar in Use. I discovered Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary and I have loved it ever since. But freedom was not only about buying books.

The cage in which we had existed for so long was now open. You could travel to Austria or Belgium without a visa and this is what I did. I spent weeks in Belgium, staying with my pen-pal and his family. This was one of my formative experiences; I saw with my own eyes that people may and do live differently.

However, the greatest freedom was the freedom to think. We could talk about anything, we could watch films which were forbidden no more, we could embrace life with a tight hug. This was difficult for many of us, as our skills of adaptation had been suppressed. To give you an idea what what it was like, I will tell you a story.

In 1992, after one year at a newly-established private college in Bielsko-Biała, I was admitted to Teacher Training College at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Entrance exams were so difficult that only two or three students were those who graduated from high school in 1992; the others were people who spent a year somewhere polishing their English and getting ready for the ordeal of surpassing nearly twenty people competing to get a place. How brutal, how Darwinian.

The College was a new invention, we were the second class admitted, so it had to work out the rules and ways of teaching, particularly the ways of teaching how to teach. For that purpose, the College hired English-speaking teacher trainers. The first person we met was an energetic fifty-something Oxford graduate who had spent half of her life teaching English all over the world. She had several children and she was an extremely eccentric teacher with a passion to change the world. She had this peculiar talent which all the British possess: she felt superior and knowledgeable, and she was completely uninterested in learning about the local people and their habits. Maybe this is the right mix if you want to change the world (or at least a fraction of it).

Sandy – this was her name – decided that the best way to make us into teachers was to line us up along the pool and then kick each person in the butt. What a series of splashes that was! She established a Saturday School where students taught for free. She organised a field trip for pupils from her Saturday School. In her classes, she ripped our heads open and remodelled our brains with her bare hands. She made us come to her on Friday evening with our lesson plans for Saturday and she did not care how we were going to get back to our places. She juggled many eggs and, surprisingly, it worked.

Do you get the picture? There are those reserved and stiff twenty-year-olds and there is the teacher trainer who wants them to shine. Inevitably, there were many clashes. The director of the College, a strict, academic lady with distaste for any form of humanity with intelligence lower than hers, hated her innovative teacher trainer. Polish teacher trainers were partly in awe, but secretly hated this woman for her wild inventions. We, the students, were caught between Sandy the Hammer and Staff the Anvil. And, unsurprisingly, we were brutally reforged.

Yet, I think these were happy times. Our teachers, regardless of their approach to English and the ways of teaching it, enjoyed this freshly-gained freedom with us. Now I understand that they were as happy as we were to gloat over English, to gorge on books and dictionaries and films and whatever stuff that was their favourite poison. In a way, we studied simultaneously; they learnt something on a Monday and immediately passed it on to us on a Tuesday. They were eager to experiment with us and on us. They were passionate to explore all things English. So, we marched together discovering the new, emerging, post-communist reality.

On Change. Part 1

1. The Conversation

A couple of years ago, one of my English friends uttered a sentence which made me rethink my whole life. We went on a trip to Pszczyna, which boasts a fantastic piece of architecture surrounded by a still improving park. After walking for some time we enjoyed some ice-cream and coffee in a cafe in the former gatehouse of the palace. One remark about homosexuals sparkled quite a lively debate, although judging by the tone of our voices, the word ‘row’ would seem more appropriate. When we both ran out of arguments, my friend went quiet for a minute and then he blurted: ‘Roman, I think that you have to learn to absorb change.’

I was immediately exhilarated by the absurdity of this remark. Me, moi, myself being preached on absorbing change? What did my interlocutor know about the times when the world turns upside-down in a matter of weeks? When did he experience transition from the clumsy implementation of the socialist doctrine into the not-so-well working implementation of so-called ‘capitalism?’ What did he know about change?

Angry and frustrated with the outcome of our conversation, I pushed it somewhere deep in my head. However, to my surprise, the notorious utterance kept coming back to me. The idea of change seemingly did not want to be kept on the back burner. It nudged me and prodded me, it kept me awake late at late, it emerged suddenly when I was travelling on the train. It was a real pain and I didn’t know why.

2. The Stability of Communism

Being born in 1972, I belong to the generation which spent the first half of their lives in the kindergartens and schools run by the communist state. What kind of life was it?

The communist system implemented in Poland had it darker days in the 1940s and 1950s. The 1960s were the times of growing stability which was further strengthened by the money poured into the economy by Gierek, the leader of the Communist Party. He shamelessly borrowed billions of dollars from eager Western bankers for so-called development and investments. Surprisingly, some of this money was invested, but the rest reached us in the form of better food and clothes.

The first decade of my life was happy. We had a flat which consisted of three rooms, a kitchen with a gas cooker, a bathroom with a real bathtub and a separate toilet. For my father, who was brought up in a single room with a simple stove, that must have been a real improvement. Of course, we had running hot and cold water, and electricity (not just a tap in the yard as my father had back in his school days). My parents even bought a car, one of those small, weak-engined Fiats produced locally, whose capacity for transporting furniture, refrigerators and even live animals such as pigs quickly became legendary.

We moved in due time, when my parents got a larger flat ‘from the factory’ because three factories were the institutions which governed life and death in our little Andrychów. There were four of us now, and what we didn’t know was that life was about to change because our dear red country went bankrupt. One of the consequence of this bankruptcy was General Jaruzelski’s decision to turn against its own people and declare martial law in 1981 which lasted for one and a half years. Another consequence was a huge economic crisis; inflation sky-rocketed, goods disappeared from the shelves, we had to buy everything with coupons. They were badly printed pieces of paper which stated how much meat, butter or vodka you were allowed to buy every month. Only children were entitled to chocolate, and when you managed to get it, you had a small celebration. Anyway, our parents refused us the taste of sweets because they were a valuable trading commodity on the black market. You wanted something fixed or arranged? Well, vodka and chocolate were the best currency.

From the perspective of a child these years were not hard. Life was simply… life. We had to endure occasional blackouts, as our power plants fuelled with coal couldn’t produce enough electricity. Would you believe it? This is the country whose coal deposits would sustain Europe for the next one hundred years. True is the saying which states that if you let communists manage the Sahara Desert, there would soon be no sand left…

Winters were harsh, and poorly built blocks of flats were difficult to heat. We lived in a kind of box constructed with concrete walls floors, and ceilings. These ‘building blocks’ were stacked atop one another and held together with some kind of steel or iron links. I’ve heard that in the Silesian area these links are becoming corroded and a segment of a wall sometimes… falls off. You might wake up in the middle of the night and see that, well, one of your walls is gone.

Regardless of everything, the 1970s and 1980s may be declared the times of relative stability. Life was entirely predictable. You were born, your mother had a long maternity leave as the communists supported the family, and then she could take another three-year leave. One of my mother’s friend had four children consecutively, so she spent over a decade out of her office. When your children were three or four, you sent them to the kindergarten. And then school started.

School was predictable to the same degree as anything else in this rotten country. In little towns teachers were real institutions: in high school I was taught mathematics by the same guy who taught my mother. What did lessons look like? We had to sit at our desks and we were… bored. There was no excitement of learning something new. There was no debate, no questioning, no experimenting, no exploration. School drilled us into thinking that the Party was the ultimate institution governing our lives. School taught us that being average and not ‘sticking-out’ was good. Primary school divided us into the bright who would go on to high school, the not-so-bright who would go on to technical or vocational high schools, and the dim who would be denied a chance of taking the ‘maturity’ exam. In short, our lives had been programmed even before we were born.

In doing this, the communist state was evil. It produced millions of handicapped people who were denied a chance of developing the skills of innovation and adaptation. ‘Keep to yourself, don’t stick out,’ they would say. ‘Children and fish make no sound,’ they would say. ‘Know your place,’ they would drill this into our heads, because in this replica of hell on earth everybody had a place designed for them. There was no changing it. Ambition was doused, talent was squandered, and curiosity was killed like the proverbial cat. During the mid-1980s change was a non-existent commodity, and neither was hope.

Let's Visit the United States

Dzisiaj chciałbym pokazać przykładową jednostkę z książki, nad którą obecnie pracujemy, czyli Let's Visit the United States. Photocopiable Resource Book for Teachers. Autorem podręcznika jest Manuel Amado. Urodził się w Tuscon w stanie Arizona, a języka angielskiego uczy od ponad 15 lat. Książka będzie zawierała 15 jednostek poświęconych różnym aspektom USA; geografii, historii, kulturze oraz życiu codziennemu. Materiały przeznaczone są do kopiowania i wykorzystania na zajęciach szkolnych lub na kółku języka angielskiego. Książka zawiera pełny klucz z odpowiedziami.

Przykładową jednostkę wraz ze spisem treści i kluczem można pobrać ze strony wydawnictwa Polonsky w dziale Download.