Freshman Orientation

Well it is about time to get my butt in gear and catch up on this blog. But one of the reasons that I haven’t written in so long is because there are very few things to write. A lot of my time is spent at school where I sleep and read because other than me everyone has to do classes. I’ve learned I hate trying to learn French even more than Polish and I’ve explored the city a few times. But even then there was nothing specific to really say went on. But at one point of walking around the city I realized that what makes a foreign exchange great isn’t the big events such as meeting Holocaust survivors and visiting different parts of the country, but the small differences that emphasize that you are in a different country and culture. Of course the big events are still more exciting and fun to do.

So I have decided that I am going to start giving you guys some of the differences between Poland and the US. And because the Monday of the week I am writing this blog post for (October 14th-20th) was my Freshman Orientation in my high school (Here I was demoted to Freshman again.) I will talk about the difference between my Freshman Orientation in America and the one in Poland.

First I’ll explain what happened in Poland since I’m sure most of you know what my orientation in America was like. The first big difference is that we were asked to wear formal clothing to school on the day of the Orientation. That itself can tell you a lot of the differences of how schools are run here versus how they are run in America. At the end of the day we got out of class about a fifteen minutes early and we were taken to an auditorium that the school had rented in a big conference building. At the time I was helping one of the English teachers with her advanced English class so I at least got to talk with people pretty well. The actual ceremony is hard to describe because my Polish still isn’t great and I couldn’t really tell what was going on. They made some people swear oaths to the school and then they made each class of the school say a little thing together, which I managed to do even if my pronunciation was a little off. Then when everyone wanted to leave we had to wait and sit through a mini art show of paintings by students and one little orientation video some of the Seniors (called third years here) made.

During most of this time I kept pointing out the differences between this and the Freshman Orientation for Parker High School, personally I prefer the American way of doing things. The formality doesn’t work well with most American teenagers (how often do you see kids in Parker High School all wearing suits, and I mean the entire student body, not just the wrestling team before a bus ride). Beyond this is the fact that we did it before high school, which really didn’t matter much between here and there. And the biggest difference between American Freshman Orientation and the Polish one is that the American one was more fun, the student council dresses up like idiots (I still have the picture of Mr. Daly dressed as Peter Pan on my phone and my classmates couldn’t believe a teacher would show up to school dressed like that, though they said the same thing when I showed them a faculty picture from the Parker High School website.), there are interesting games, and it gives you a sense of school spirit, something that completely doesn’t exist in Polish schools. Though I was also told that one high school in Poland did do a little game thing, but theirs was gross. They had to lick whipped cream off the knee of the headmaster or a priest, which got the school in a lot of trouble from what I understood.

Anyway that is about it. Not much else to report, but I’m going to try to get caught up this weekend and manage to write about All Saints Day which happened a couple days ago.