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.
