Back to School

This week has been busy, with four days of teacher orientation (students don’t begin until 1. September), and lots to do to get ready for the new school year—all of which has meant less time to visit churches and hang out in the market square. So this week, I’ll give you a look at the school where I’ll be teaching instead.

I’ll be teaching grade 8 and grade 9 English at IPS, an international school located in Wrocław. It’s a brand-new curriculum for me: the Cambridge IGCSE system that UK students experience (it’s also popular on the international teaching circuit). It features a pretty rigorous academic focus, with ultra-high-stakes national exams after 10th grade, and even higher-stakes exams (A levels) after 12th grade. I’m looking forward to taking a bit of a different approach—so far it strikes me as similar in some ways to AP English classes in the U.S.

There are just 4 core teachers in Upper Secondary at IPS: me (English), Leigh (an Australian teaching history, global perspectives, and geography), Amanda (an American science teacher), and Katarzyna (a Polish math teacher). Then there is Jakub (YAH-koob), who is the school counselor and also teaches mindfulness, PE, and classes in social-emotional well-being. And Eric, the principal (a U.S. former English teacher who has been living and teaching in Krakow for about 6 years before coming to IPS). A small team—I think they’ll be lovely people to work with. (Too British? Should I have said “great people” instead?) Students will also be taking Polish language classes from Polish teachers I haven’t met yet—they will come to Upper Secondary in the afternoon, after teaching at the Primary School campus (a 10-minute walk away) in the morning.

Anyway, IPS was originally founded in 2011 as a preschool only, and has gradually added grades through the primary years as the students have gotten older. This will be the first year that IPS will include grade 9—and to make things even busier, IPS is also opening a brand new Upper Secondary (equivalent of high school in the U.S.) campus in a brand new building. So new, in fact, that when you look for the IPS Upper Secondary campus on Google Earth, you find a vacant lot.

It’s just over two miles from our apartment to the school—about 45 minutes walking time right down Swidnicka through the center of the city:

On the south side of the Odra River, you’re walking through the Stare Miastro (Old City), past the beautiful market square. (In the map above, you can see a half-circle of canals and trees that define the southern border of the Stare Miastro).

The school is located in a modern glass office building south of the Old City—it occupies part of the ground floor and second floor (what we’d call the third floor in the U.S.) in the nearest corner of the building in the photo below—in fact, some of the second (third) floor windows you see in the photo are the IPS classrooms:

The sign just above (and to the left of) the man in the photo reads “IPS International School.”

The school is located right across the street from the Sky Tower, the most recognizable modern building—also the tallest, I think—in Wrocław:

Here’s a look at the Sky Tower from the spire of the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist to give you a sense of where things are:

You enter the building through automatic revolving doors and into a sleek modern lobby:

From here, you can use a key card to enter the school’s reception area on the ground floor (just out of sight to the right of the photo above)—here you’ll find the main office, the principal’s office, the computer servers, a conference room, and (for some reason) the science lab classroom. All the other classrooms and student spaces are on the third floor.

Again, you need a key card to access the lifts (the school runs a British curriculum so I’m trying to de-Americanize my English) or the stairwell. You scan your card outside the lifts, and choose your floor before the lift opens—our key cards only give us access to the second floor and the basement parking, so those are the only choices. Once you choose, a lift will open and take you there. Kind of weird getting into an elevator (oops!) and not having any buttons to press to choose a floor.

The second floor is made up of a wide hallway with student lockers, and classrooms on one side:

In the photo above, the door to my classroom (2.05) is just visible on the right-hand edge of the picture.

The other end of the hallway hosts the canteen/lunch counter, lunch seating area, and a foosball table (there’s going to be a digital piano somewhere in the hall, too):

The classrooms are bright-shiny new—big windows with lots of natural light:

It’s all very sleek and modern—no chalk boards, no white boards. The big screen on the wall is an interactive smart board that can apparently do all kinds of groovy things (draw on it with your finger, connect to your laptop, browse the Internet, save a PDF file of whatever is written on the board, etc.)—we’ll be getting training on all that next week.

There are a few quirks and kinks to figure out, but overall it seems really nice. I’ve been gently planting suggestions among the bosses that a large wall-mounted white board might be a necessary back-up for those day when the electronics aren’t working (every teacher can tell you that those days will happen).

One interesting aspect of how the bosses want us to use the rooms is that no one—students or teachers—will be keeping anything in the classroom (coats, lunches, backpacks, etc.). For that, students will have their lockers in the hall; teachers get closet space in the hall as well:

At least I should be able to store some of my school clothes there to open up a bit more space in our apartment. Even better, there is dedicated bicycle parking in the basement, and showers! Eventually I imagine that I’ll ride a bike to school, and cut my commute time in half. I can already see that cycling is a lot safer and more pleasant in Europe than it is in Wisconsin. I only seriously bike commuted for one year during grad school in Eau Claire, but I nearly got run over twice. Here there are dedicated bike lanes, AND they are mostly separated completely from the auto lanes—they run alongside the wide pedestrian sidewalks.

If there are teachers reading this, you’re probably wondering “What’s the workload like?”

The standard workload in U.S. public schools is to teach 5 class periods per day, usually involving two or three different classes to plan for and teach (e.g. in Chippewa Falls, an English teacher might teach 2 sections of Advanced Composition, 2 sections of English 10, and 1 section of Science Fiction & Fantasy Literature). In my experience, a schedule like that means I’m teaching between 125-150 students every day, with 125-150 papers to grade when I assign work.

At IPS, I’ll be teaching the equivalent of 4 class periods per day: 2 sections of English 8, and 2 sections of English 9. Better yet, the school caps class sizes at 18 students maximum—and this year we won’t be at max capacity. I’ll have a total of 42 students to teach. I’ll also run an extra advisory class for my homeroom (9A, 14 students) every week, and also an extra EAL (English as an Additional Language) class on Tuesdays.

It sounds great, really. What I’m expecting, though, is not a tremendous reduction in workload. I suspect that, instead, I’ll be able to be a much better teacher, giving much more individual attention to students, and teaching a much more rigorous curriculum. In fact, my impression is that parents will demand it.