Lessons at a Polish University

Though university classes started at the beginning of this month, this past week marked the first time that I was teaching lessons by myself. Overall, though I was initially anxious about how I would get a group of Polish students to talk about the Elgin Marbles for over an hour, everything went surprisingly well. I worked on how to structure the content of a letter, and with my older students I discussed the strict format for a formal letter, especially cover letters. If you're rusty on how to use the block format, I discovered the following resources:
Letter Writing Guide.com
Using English: Letters

I'm also learning more and more about Polish Universities. For example, after being spoiled by my American University, I assumed that all universities issued their class schedules well in advance. (We typically received ours in early April for classes that started in September). However, I did not receive a finalized course schedule here until 3 days before the classes started -- and I'm told that we were lucky! Some unis only issue it the day before. (The bureaucracy sometimes reminds me of Bruno Bozzetto's comic interpretation of Italy).

However, there is some sense to this. Whereas many American Universities follow the liberal arts structure and encourage students to take classes in all different disciplines, regardless of major, most Polish universities (and perhaps the majority of European universities in general) require students to join a specific department and degree program when they begin their studies. Thus, there are specific classes that all the students in that degree program must take every year and very few (if any) electives. Many students in the same degree program have identical schedules and move from class to class together as a group.

However, it is becoming increasingly popular with Polish students to study with two separate departments -- or even at two separate universities! (Polish unis are free). This is where the problem comes in. Because these departments have no communication with each other, it is possible, and sometimes likely, that courses will conflict. Thus, a Polish dual-degree or double-major student may spend the entire year missing a class every other week in order to attend the conflicting class, or leaving one early and arriving at the other late. There seems to be no easy solution to this, and it requires a lot of hard work and dedication to be successful! This may explain why many of the dual-degree students that I've met wait to start the second program until the 3rd or 4th year of the first program; thus they only have a few years of these frustrating conflicts and double work, but their university experience may be extended from the usual 5-year program (for a Master's) to 8 or 9 years of study!