Days 2 & 3

After three days of lessons I could talk ad infinitum about the content of my classes, but I won't. I will only say that it is very strange to refer to 'my classes' while on the other side of the teacher-student relationship. For my entire life I have avoided teaching, and I am slowly realizing exactly why, but those are thoughts for another time.

After three days of lessons I feel as if I have lived in Poland for years. Each morning I have gone with Marta, my host, to the market, to buy fruit and food for the day. The fresh market is simple, with fruit stalls, vegetable stalls, some bakeries, two butchers, a small dry goods store, and what looks, oddly enough, like a travel agency. We've bought cabbage, beans, apples, cherries, strawberries, and this Polish fruit that I have never seen, not once in my life, that tastes like a kiwi and looks like a grape, but veiny-er, and hairy. We've bought bones for the dog, loaves upon loaves of bread, and Mexican pierogi, which somehow are a culinary practical joke, but taste like dumplings of taco meat. When we return we eat lunch with Marta's daughter, who is also teaching in the program, I make a cup of coffee, and classes begin.

Classes last from 2 in the afternoon to 7 in the evening, which gobbles most of the day. Yesterday I held a workshop with two absolute beginners to English, one who could not understand a word that I said, and the other who was not as advanced as my two regular students, but eager. We baked an apple pie, because Marta wanted me to cook something American with them. We used a type of oven I've never seen before, a stand alone oven without a temperature dial or timer, one that you plug into the wall. If that wasn't adventurous. I didn't even consider simple things, like the many uses of 'peel'- peel the apple, throw away the peels, be careful with the peeler- would be so foreign. The second student kept repeating, "Peel the ay-pull, peel the ay-pull," as she did so. It turned into a little song.

The first woman, the one who was a beginner and knew no English at all, stopped halfway through mixing the dough. Her eyes got wide, she looked at the white board, then she looked at the apples, and with a look on her face like she had been sleep walking, cried out, "Pie?" Like all in a moment she understood just that word, and it was enough to make sense of the rest.

The oven failed us, in the end, and the pie wasn't ready until 11 PM--- well after my students left. Today Marta encouraged me to try again with the student who said she had been bored with the book. She seemed dubious at first (to be fair, so was I), but once she smelled it, she blurted out, "I'm hungry." After that she was all about cutting boards and knives and apples, then she asked me if we could practice conditionals, then when the pie finished (the oven miraculously worked today!), she ate two pieces as we broke for coffee.

I take back what I said about only kids eating their vegetables hidden in mac and cheese. Adults will eat their English if it's hidden in apple pie.

In fact, I think I'm going to find another slice. Good night (or afternoon, as the time zone may be)!