I love when seemingly separate strands wind together like Wittgenstein’s rope. Here are reflections while observing the first of several classes at Akademeia High School in Warsaw. I’m posting this while two visiting scholars from Akademeia are at my school, in their first class observation here. AND a third visiting scholar, here with her family, will continue her European travels to Athens because her children are so interested in the ancient Greeks and Greek mythology. Good teaching, good parenting, good learning, strong rope.

I wait outside my first class visit at Akademeia with just a touch of self-consciousness. I sat down on a bench outside the room with a student, who promptly got up and left. I’m the new kid here, so to speak.

The teacher opens the door and we stream in, eleven of us, 9th graders who must be 14 or 15 years old, and me at 57, grandpa-age for these kids. I’m feeling my age, actually. I’ve definitely got a few years on the teachers I’ve seen here so far.

We start with a quick review of philosophy terms. Do you remember the branches of epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics? The students do.

We are at an oval, blonde-wood boardroom table. Students take notes – with no prompting – as the teacher begins her lessons. There is quite a bit of terminology: secular, anno domini, atheist … Most students write with pen and paper, a few on tablets. The teacher creates openings for students to contribute, which they do, some more than others. And then a map of Ancient Greece on the screen – this is the main focus of the lesson.

Students make fun connections with Ancient Greece. They mention the gods, the Mediterranean, the economy (I’m interested in learning more about that), and sports. She has focused their attention, drawn them in. Not bad for first thing in the morning and the study of ancient civilizations.

I’m struck that we are thinking about a time period three thousand years ago. Will there be anyone thinking about us in three thousand years? 

A meta moment: the teacher asks the students about their process. “From the discussion so far,” she asks the students, “what have you written down as notes? How do you know what is important?” This is nice, we’re talking now about how to learn. Skills that transcend the subject matter, another way of making three thousand year old Greek history relevant this September morning, in Warsaw.

We make the switch to reading, an excerpt from “The Philosophy Book: Big Ideas Explained Simply.” One student remarks that he’s seen this book in the library. Another student says he read a different book about philosophy, the teacher recommends he brings the book to class. Affirms how great it is that he has encountered philosophy before.

The students copy five guiding questions from the screen. What marked the birth of philosophy? What was the main concern of the early philosophers? I’m guessing the students will answer these as they read. I’m guessing, too, that they will read independently. The teacher takes a moment to discuss study skills again. “Reflect on the questions first, before reading,” she offers as a tip. “Be ready to annotate, to read carefully. This year is about getting ready to handle the IGCSEs.” 

The student who has been most active in the discussion so far offers to read out loud. Her English is excellent, she only stumbles over the Greek names, Thales, Pythagoras. The teacher takes over again when she finishes reading and leads the students to answers for a few of the guiding questions. 

During the discussion one boy defines empirical as “God-like.” The quick-thinking teacher replies, “I wonder where you got that connection?” in a face-saving way, a way that says to the student that he is making connections, albeit not always the right ones. I’m sure the other students notice they can be factually wrong but still right, in the sense that being a learner is about being both wrong and right and learning which is which. She straightens out the meaning for the class, ties the empiricism back to the early philosophers.

The lesson has been teacher directed, with seamless movement between the course topic and an emphasis on developing academic skills. Students contributed the whole forty minutes, flagging just a bit toward the end of the lesson. I can’t ask them, but I imagine they feel very good about themselves. 

After the midpoint break in the first block of classes, I join a grade 12 math class. They are looking at inequalities. The graphs look familiar, they bring back to me the smell of the dusty math classroom at Cooper High School, they make me think of my friend who never brought his math text to class. He borrowed one of the texts in the room instead, and for some inexplicable reason kept it after class to store it in the bottom of my locker. Every now and then we cleared the locker of math texts. His record was 12.

To get the students restarted after break, the teacher projects a problem on the board, gives a brief explanation, and lets the students know they have five minutes to work it out. They are looking to find the equation of the quadratic in the form y = ax² + bx + c. A hint of recognition flickers in the back of my mind. 

The students work mostly alone, on paper or tablets. After a few minutes the teacher moves to one student to help him out. “You’ve made it a bit too complicated,” he says matter of factly, as he helps the student get back on track. Other students check in with each other. The tables are arranged in a rectangle and we are sitting on the outside perimeter. The student in the middle of a group of three confers with his colleagues to the right and left. He has the luckiest position for getting help, or for helping others, it occurs to me. The teacher takes a look at his work, saying that it is the same answer he has come up with, the student goes back to conferring with his friends. 

The teacher writes out his solution on the board as the students finish their own. This helps me remember a bit more, it must help the students, too. The teacher gives a couple of hints, gives the students a bit more time, lets them know they’ll be looking at a second problem in a minute. As the students finish their work I take a look around the room.

Rectangular, exposed concrete, big windows that go all the way to the floor, it is wonderfully sunny outside and nicely cool inside. One entire wall is white board, from floor to at least a meter over the teacher’s head. I believe this wall folds together to combine with the classroom next door. If I remember correctly, a third room has a similar configuration so that all three rooms can be combined. That’s flexible. And from other math teachers I’ve worked with, I bet the teacher appreciates all that white board writing space. I wonder if the students solve problems at the wall, too?

The teacher works out the second problem, speaking aloud as he writes each step on the board. Students ask questions without raising their hands, there are only seven of them and they are obviously used to this approach of discussing problems, taking turns politely, seemingly willing to ask questions when they don’t understand.

Apparently the teacher has been prepping the students for a bigger assignment, a handout  labeled “classwork” with six graphs. He leads a discussion about the first curve. I love his constant smile, how he leans toward a student when asked a question. Now, in fact, he just stepped over to the student so that they are looking at the problems, projected on the white wall, together. This isn’t a know-it-all teacher, even if he does know it all. This is a colleague who shares an interest in math and is willing to wonder along with the students. 

He leaves them to their work. The student next to me, in a red Audi cap and gray sweatshirt, is already finishing. Other papers in front of other students, from what I can tell, are not nearly as complete. The teacher circulates, but hasn’t made it to our side yet. Red Audi has a question, though, I’m anticipating it’s going to be to confirm his thinking, to make sure he’s done things right. I wait for the teacher to finish helping another student …

And then Red Audi asks his question. The effort of formulating the question is enough to give him the answer before the teacher can reply. So the teacher waits, listens, and then says “Exactly” with that big smile. And then he calls the attention of the class to the front to check the answers to each problem. He asks if they have understood, if they got it right. I suspect it’s possible that some haven’t, but aren’t admitting it. Or maybe I’m just thinking back to my own unhelpful strategies when I was in high school. To sort of pretend I knew what was going on. A horrible strategy. The teacher is satisfied with their answers, the students look as if they are tracking, and now in the last ten minutes of this 80 minute block, the students are given a packet of problems. They all begin working immediately. 

I haven’t thought about discipline issues at all. There are none. There is no shushing, no silly rewards, no cajoling, no shaming. No permission to go to the bathroom. Just discussion about math problems, respectful assistance between some students, and a palpable interest in math. It almost makes me nostalgic for Mr. Omen (I’m not making that name up), my math teacher when I was their age. Almost.

Blogging while observing class – here is another post in the series. The photo is a doorway in Stare Miasto, the old town in Warsaw. Not much remained from 1666 when this house was rebuilt in 1953.

The students are on break, one student mentions the long wait at the border over the weekend, coming back from Lviv to Warsaw. The war in the neighboring country feels suddenly very close.

I’ve grown accustomed to the physical space of the school. Oval tables with students bunched on the side furthest from the whiteboard, the teacher right next to the whiteboard with empty chairs to both his left and right. I know a number of these students now, I’ve interacted with more than half of them during my week-long visit here at their school. Many of them say hello when they see me, one tall boy waves at me through the glass wall. 

Like in other classes, there isn’t much time for rapport. Class gets underway directly and the students start taking notes on their tablets or computers as the teacher begins reviewing the lesson from the last class. I chuckle to myself a little. Not because the teacher is being funny, but because he’s explaining the incredible gray blur of history while dressed in a white shirt, black jeans, and white Adidas with black stripes on his feet. His coffee cup is white. There is a black screen behind him, a whiteboard next to that. Everything here is black-white. Everything in history is anything but. 

Apparently there was a Moroccan crisis in 1905. This is new territory for me, I admit to knowing little about Morocco. I need spellcheck to even write it correctly here. Three o’s, not a single a. I know Casablanca, the city, and Casablanca the movie, and the incredible destruction in the country by the recent earthquake there. I know that the Moroccans I’ve met speak Arabic and French.

We move to the subject of the day, Germany’s dependence on the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The teacher introduces (or perhaps reintroduces) me to the Schlieffen plan, named for Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen. The students are familiar with it, they have done the reading. The plan details the invasion of France, arriving in part through Belgium, the takeover swift, just a couple of weeks. The plan is preemptive, although one student feels differently. Now the discussion takes off, several students start debating at once.

These students are discussing military tactics. What-ifs. Manners in which to win a war, to take over a country.

One student has been trying to get the floor, but too subtly. Her hand is up, sort of, it’s next to her face, unmoving. I haven’t noticed students raising their hands in the other classes, they usually just join the conversation. I wonder if she is somehow feeling good by not being recognized by the teacher. When he does call on her, she declines to take the floor. Little things that might not mean a thing. Or might indicate something that should be addressed. Or I’m reading too much into it. She  leaves her hand next to her face, and a few minutes later the teacher calls on her. Now she states her opinion confidently. There really is no way teachers can know all that is going on with students, know what they need, know what they are struggling with. Something is going on there.

The discussion turns to a few influential figures who contributed to the notion that the expansion of the German Volk beyond Germany was justified. I learn of Max Weber, who preached liberal imperialism, justifying the German Weltpolitik, and Kurt Riezler, a journalist and an advisor in the foreign office, who also justified German colonization. Another German mentions needing more land in order to support growth, I missed the name. All of this smacks of Lebensraum, which I associate more with the Second World War. The notion was incubating, growing, setting the stage for atrocities of a scale we still cannot comprehend. 

I can’t help but think about the tours I took this weekend, here in Warsaw. The Jewish ghetto, the Polin Museum, the Umschlagplatz from which so many innocent people were removed from Warsaw and killed in Treblinka. We are learning of the past to prevent repeating our mistakes, yet CNN online, at this very moment (I switch from my document to a browser to check) leads with the story: 

Strikes cause ‘significant damage’ to Odesa port.

These students are studying history, yet they are also studying people, what they think and how they act right now. I don’t know if they realize yet that history is also today and tomorrow, despite the refugees from Ukraine who are their classmates, despite the daily news, despite a weekend spent waiting at a border of a country at war.

Je suis toujours un peu nerveux, quand j’observe un cours de français. C’est normal que le prof me demande quelque chose pendant l’heure et je sais que mon niveau de la langue n’est pas très bon pour les quinze ans que j’habite en Suisse romande. Mais voilà, c’est comme ça. 

“On commence,” says the teacher, as the screen comes to life. Students take out notebooks or tablets. The assignment is to connect a phrase in the left column with its logical continuation in the right column. Un terrain ー de sport, for example. Une école ー privée. There are a few questions about vocabulary as the students complete the activity. The teacher writes on the whiteboard facultatif ≠ obligatoire. I’m pleased that he runs the class in French, far too often world language classes are conducted in English, with the result that leads many of us to say,  later in life: “I had three years of French, but all I remember is “bonjour” and “ça va.”

One of the students to my left has a beautiful French accent. There must be a story there. Lived in France? Mother is French? She entered the classroom speaking Polish with her friends, the school is run entirely in English, she’s well on her way in French and who knows what other languages. These students are really something.

There’s a chance for a vocabulary twofer that we missed. A student asked what améliorer means. The teacher explained, in French, making a connection with the word meilleur, or best. But ameliorate is a nice, highbrow English word, too. The high falutin’ words in English are so often connected to French. I remember studying for the graduate records exam before learning any French. The fancy words I learned, like ameliorate, keep popping up now as I read and hear more French. The word fenestration came up just last week in an art class. Listen for them, English is full of them: rendez-vous, coup de grâce, promenade, coup de grâce … déjà-vu. See what I did there?

The students listen to a recording of young French voices explaining why they like cultural exchanges. Then the teacher gives everyone the transcripts and the students, in pairs, find and correct the errors. Now they are ready to move on to an exercise in the textbook. (Except that one student asks to go get his textbook, he didn’t bring it to class today. He’s gone for a few minutes to fetch it.)

The students turn to a cloze exercise. It’s about exchange programs again, the teacher is working this theme from different angles, but this time words are occasionally deleted from the text, leaving just a blank space. The missing words are provided, randomly, at the bottom of the page. Cloze exercises were first described by Wilson Taylor in 1953, but you can bet the basic strategy here is a time-eternal way of learning a foreign language. 

Tutor: “So the girl picked up a …. 

Tutee: Pen! 

Tutor:… and took out a piece of 

Tutee: Paper!” 

At least, that’s how it sounds when the tutor is working with an informed tutee. If the tutor picks vocabulary that is too advanced, or if the tutee doesn’t really care to learn, you are left with the tedious:

Tutor: “So the girl picked up a …. 

Tutee: [silence]

Tutor: …. a …

Tutee: [continued silence]

Tutor: pen and took out a piece of …

Tutee: [silence]

Tutor: … a piece of …

Tutee: [continued silence]

Tutor: paper. 

Luckily, in this class, the teacher is working at the right level and the students are applying themselves. The teacher assists when necessary, the cloze exercise seems helpful. I do the exercise along with them, in my head, happy that I don’t need the random cue words at the bottom of the page to get the right answer. In the study of French, small victories are important to celebrate, because there are so many ways to get things wrong. Just ask my own French tutor about me.

I wasn’t asked to speak, and now the lesson is done, so I don’t have to share my accented French with this group. There are always plenty of opportunities for that at home.

Au revoir !