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Teaching: the View From Poland

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By Christopher Phelps

Back in high school in 1980 and 1981, I used to wear a tiny white pin with distinctive red letters reading "Solidarnosc." The reference, of course, was to Solidarity, the independent Polish workers' union that led the opposition to the country's top-down party-state and helped clear the path for the Eastern European revolutions of 1989.

To explain why that old pin pops back into mind, I must backtrack to a day this past autumn.

It is a sunny October afternoon when I arrive to teach my first American-studies class in the School of International Relations at the University of Lodz. Our classroom is located in the old law school -- a desirable building, I've been assured. It turns out to be a narrow, deep room, covered from floor to ceiling in 60s-era linoleum. A long wall of windows runs parallel to Narutowicza Street, one of the busiest in the city, just yards away.

The conditions are not auspicious. Enrollment, at 47, is far too large for a seminar. The all-surrounding linoleum amplifies scuffling and whispering, and from my perch on a raised platform at the front of the room, I can barely understand students speaking to me from the back, amid the din.

I pass out index cards, asking students to write their names and something unique about themselves. This can work well with American students, helping me to memorize names more quickly, and I hope it will work here, where the attendance roster includes daunting names like Malgorzata Wojciechowska and Karolina Skolasinska.

But the device falls flat. The best response is Bartosz Domaszewicz's: "I think that I am a quite imaginative person with a great sense of laziness." I like Bart already. Most students, however, limit themselves to vague expressions of interest in film or travel.

The temperature in the crowded room rises steadily. I could open the windows, but the noise from the street would be even greater. Sweat begins to trickle down my brow. I loosen my tie.

In the belief that participation should be encouraged from the outset, I attempt to spark discussion. I pass out a timeline of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and ask students to identify significant patterns on it. But the rush-hour traffic makes discussion nearly impossible. Nobody can hear anyone else over the cars and thundering trams that rush down Narutowicza every few minutes, rattling the windows.

So begins my first semester of teaching in Poland.

I later obtain a change of rooms. That helps, but I am afraid I cannot supplement the larkish travelogues of my three previous columns in this series about my Fulbright year with a Whiggish narrative of teaching progress.

The truth is that I have hit many snags along the way, and at midyear I am ambivalent about the Polish university and its students.

In the Polish higher-education system, the crown jewels are premier public universities to which students who perform well on a national entrance exam are admitted free of charge. These "day" students are joined by paying "evening" students -- underperformers who may also choose private institutions (more like Phoenix than Princeton).

Once enrolled, the top 20 percent of students, as measured by grade-point averages, receive scholarship stipends. In other words, the government pays meritorious students to attend public universities, reflecting what Vaclav Havel calls a "social Europe," in contrast with American market dogmatism. The Polish university also differs structurally from American institutions. It is led not by an appointed president but by a rector elected by the faculty from its own ranks.

We could, I think, learn a great deal from all of this. Other features, however, make the Polish university far less attractive. Part of the problem lies in numbers. After Poland's 1989 transition from guaranteed employment to a competitive labor regime, the pool of degree-seeking students ballooned as young people sought to improve their job prospects. Less than 400,000 in 1990, the number of students is now more than 1.7 million.

No proportional increase occurred in faculty members. The result is increased class sizes and heavy teaching loads for Polish instructors.

I discover all of this while groaning under my own teaching load. For Fulbright scholars, the load varies widely. Some host institutions and departments assign light schedules. At the University of Warsaw, one Fulbrighter I know teaches just one low-enrollment seminar each term and has the help of a teaching assistant.

My luck is rather the opposite. I have more students, courses, and grading here than I do in the United States. The contract signed between the University of Lodz and the Polish-American Fulbright commission specified that my courses were to have an enrollment of 10 to 30 students, but my contract with the university included no such promise, and my fall enrollments range from 45 to 60 in each class, totalling more than 150 students. More have signed up for my four spring courses.

All grading is my responsibility. Recently I began kvetching to a Polish graduate student about the 79 students enrolled in my spring labor-history course. She informed me that another of our colleagues teaches a course with more than 300 students, no grading assistance, and other courses to boot.

Clearly Polish universities need to consider enrollment caps, or make enrollment a factor in determining course loads and pay.

Another challenge in Poland is that instructors have little control or advance notice over what they will teach, precisely. My lecture classes I envisioned as seminars; my seminars I envisioned as lecture courses. My course schedule arrives in my box four days before the start of classes. How effective can the general level of pedagogy be under such conditions?

Students' studies are largely directed by their universities, with most courses mandatory. That curricular rigidity does not prevent an excessive degree of leniency in other matters. For one pregnant student of mine, the dean waives attendance at all class sessions. When the student fails her final paper, it does not surprise me.

What does raise an eyebrow is the amazingly lax standards: Any student who fails for any reason may resubmit their final paper or exam twice, for a grand total of three attempts, before actually failing the course.

Many students -- day and evening -- pay to take "extramural" courses meeting several weekends each term. I find it curious to be holding class on a Sunday morning in Europe's most Catholic nation, but the extramural program is advantageous for students in remote areas who hold jobs during the week.

The drawback is that they experience less-intensive contact with professors. My extramural course meets just six times each term. In an unpublished paper, Andrzej Pelczar, former rector of Jagiellonian University, worries that the present "massive education" of primary and secondary teachers by the "extramural form of studies ... is dangerous."

What are the Polish students like? The best are brilliant. Some of my most exciting Fulbright experiences are in the classroom, seeing the American past anew through Polish eyes.

In a discussion of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," a Victorian story of a woman's descent into madness, one student observes that in Poland "yellow papers" are given for disqualification from military service on psychological grounds. Another tells me, after a lecture on the Cold War, that I have neglected aspects of the Marshall Plan, including Stalin's veto of Poland's participation. A trip to the library proves her right.

On the whole, however, student performance is weak. Completion of reading is uneven, although I deliberately keep the English-language texts to a mere 20 pages per week. During lectures, students cannot be troubled to be quiet. Although I underscore the critical, analytical, and argumentative nature of expository writing, most students persist in thinking of information-gathering as the sole point of papers.

In short, with some notable exceptions, I find Polish student performance mediocre. Primary blame, I believe, rests with university policy. Given three attempts to pass any class, why should most students care? Negative results have no lasting consequence.

I see this with startling clarity during finals week in January, a bacchanal of student malfeasance. First to arrive are the papers from my seminar, several plagiarized from the Internet. I fail seven.

Then comes the final examination for my lecture course, where I witness more flagrant cheating than I have ever seen (I have taught in four countries). I fail four students who cheat under my very nose, but the whispering frenzy that breaks out every time I turn to write the time remaining on the board gives me the sensation I ought to fail the whole room.

This experience was shattering for me. It violated the ethics and respect I consider essential to education, but I found myself affected in some deeper way. I believe I must have harbored unexamined romantic illusions about Poland tracing to my adolescent support for Solidarity, subconsciously associating Poland with social idealism. No longer. This new Poland will take some time to assimilate.

But don't worry. None of my students failed. Not really. They all now receive their second chance.