There's an Egg in My Soup Read Online Free PDF

bothering me was the fact that the Polish language differs so greatly from ours and is, in fact, missing what we would take to be basic elements in language. There are no articles, for example. If the Poles are used to saying, ‘Cat walks down street,’ how can you convince them to put ‘a’ or ‘the’ in front of the nouns? Worse still, how do you explain when it’s ‘a’ and not ‘the’? The Polish language also lacks the perfect tenses. ‘He has been here twice this morning,’ doesn’t make any sense. ‘He was here twice this morning,’ is adequate in Polish. Also, because of the amount of cases their language contains, there is no need for a definitive word order in sentences. Where we must put, for example, place, frequency and time in the correct order, for the Poles it makes no difference. ‘Twice to the cinema went I last week,’ is a well-constructed sentence in Polish.
    I was staring at time charts that showed you how to carefully divide up a forty-five-minute period so the students don’t lose sight of your goal. Then there were the problems of the goal itself, which should be based on a language function, a concept to present that language function, a medium through which to present that concept and a method of checking to see if it wasfully understood at the end. I don’t remember any of that from when I was in school. Maybe that was because the teachers all spoke the same language as me. Now, somehow, we were supposed to teach English, through English, to people who had no English. The trainers in Dublin had a convincing enough logic for doing this, but eleven hundred miles away in a remote town in Eastern Europe, the same logic just didn’t seem very compelling at all.
    When I finally got to bed I think I must have prayed myself to sleep. I prayed that I would be forgiven for thinking I was a teacher. I prayed that if I was going to try to be a teacher, that the Lord would come halfway and help me. I even reasoned with Him, offering up the view that I was really here to do a good service for people and, in a world with more evildoers than good, I deserved a break. He did come halfway, actually. But that’s about as far as He got.
    At half-past eight the next morning, after a night where sleep came only in fits and starts, two large pairs of knuckles battered the paint off my hall door. I knew there were two pairs because of the incredible racket and because of the hollow clatter of four high-heeled feet coming down the corridor beforehand. I was already beginning to detect some odd habits in the Polish people. Knocking on doors, for one, was extremely rare, and was not meant as a request, but a warning. Sure enough, no sooner had the knockingfaded but the door handle was being wrenched out of its socket like a limb. So, this was my first introduction to the teachers. Thankfully, I had anticipated it and locked the door overnight.
    The knuckles belonged to two women, English teachers, who had come too early – another distinctly Polish habit – to escort me to the opening ceremony. One was older and seemed on the brink of retirement, the other was younger and broke into a giggle when I opened the door in nothing but a pair of trousers. Both stared at me as I scurried between the bathroom and bedroom in a fluster, making myself look respectable for my first day.
    Once outside we slammed into a wall of heat and I immediately began to sweat. My bowels rumbled with nerves. The shirt itched. The collar was hard and tight on my neck. The trousers were too heavy. But this was the opening ceremony and all ceremonies, big or small, are important events here. They involve the staples of music – preferably with a good parp of brass – plenty of speeches and applause, an abundance of flowers and immaculate dress.
    In the main hall, several hundred students were assembled in rows of seats, with several hundred more