Jenny Suspects She Is a Bad Teacher

One would think that, after an evening spent in a nightclub abusing my lungs and ignoring my body's dire need for rest and warmth, I would suffer The Consequences, that I would collapse with pneumonia, would start coughing up blood. It sure felt as though that was what I was in for.

But no. I woke up the next morning feeling spry. Feeling clearheaded and cogent. How is it possible that I felt better? My lungs were slowly filling with goop, but my color and my spirits were high. I chalked it up to a combination of the techno mist and pure pugnacity.

You, socially inept kid—yeah, you with the blond hair and crusty lips!

If I was to have pneumonia, I was damned sure it would be walking pneumonia. After Ingrid left for the airport, off I went, trekking through the Prenzlauerberg neighborhood, ducking into little cafes and shops to read and write. I grabbed a currywurst—a hot dog sprinkled with curry powder—which is not as bad nor as good as it sounds. I walked across Museum Island as the gray sky darkened with the coming night, past Alexsander Platz and its bare trees festooned with ravens, hundreds of black birds wheeling into the trees.

The next day, I left Berlin. I found a train berth with only one person in it, which was a blessing, because I couldn't stop coughing. I coughed past green fields pocked with mole mounds, I coughed past Dresden's teal-patinaed bell tower domes, I hacked and coughed out of Germany and into the Czech Republic.

Where my companion, a pleasant Frau, took leave of me. "I move to zee uzzer compahtment," she said with a smile, "so you can stretch your legs."

Riiiight. I wouldn't want to sit anywhere near me now, either. She left. Two men entered. They introduced themselves and started up a conversation that lasted several hours. Rodrigo’s reenactment of a story about a tiny Indian man, quite drunk, asking every woman in line at the airport, "Lonely? Lonely? Are you loohn-LEE?" left me choking with laughter. I have never seen a more organized trip planner; his guidebook had color-coded and numbered tabs, highlighted sections, and routes to and from stations and hotels marked on the maps. He was embarrassed about this. When our train arrived in Vienna, I wished him and Luis safe travels back to Brazil and we went our separate ways.

Another train and another hour, and I was in Bratislava. It was a definite change of pace from Berlin: colder, utilitarian, monochrome and spare. The train station and the orange buses idling in the cul-de-sac outside looked run-down. People rushed through the doors, harried.

My aunt Jan arrived. Jan! I hadn’t seen her since 2002, when I visited her in Nome, Alaska. She had moved to New Mexico for a few years, then, after her only daughter went off to college, she sold her house, gave away her dog, stored a few cherished possessions, and signed on to teach English in Slovakia. She had extended an invitation to visit her someday; I make it a policy to take people up on their offers of a free place to stay. (Keep this in mind, people, if you ever get that beachfront property in Thailand, or that mountain chateau in the Italian Alps.)

My task in Bratislava, besides hanging out and soaking up the culture, was to lead a writing workshop for the high school students in Jan’s classes at the C.S. Lewis Academy. Cake, I thought. I do this stuff for a living. I’ve worked with teenagers for years. I will get them writing.

Oh, Jenny. Jenny, Jenny.

Teenagers everywhere are the same. By that I mean they all develop the same way, have the same squirrelly hormones making their faces break out and their limbs gangle—girls a touch sooner than the boys. They are loud. They are constantly eating. They cleave to their mates, amassing amoeba-like into amorphous social blobs, others into clear-cut cliques that throw up the battlements of their affiliated clans: I am a Skater Punk. You are an Overachieving Brainiac and are denied a chair on this side of the room. You, socially inept kid—yeah, you with the blond hair and crusty lips (get some Chapstick, dude, for real, you look like you’ve been eating sand)—you are answering too many of the guest speaker’s questions, and now you will be scorned.

But as the guest speaker, I loved the crusty-lipped kid! He was the only one answering my questions, which often were no more than requests for topics about which they’d like to write. Or what they liked to read. My idea of being the glamorous New York writer, come to dazzle the kids with stories of magazines and editorial derring-do, lecturing rapt students about the craft of writing and appreciating well-wrought literature, fizzled in the first class when one apathetic blonde in the back of class nodded off on her desk. I wasn’t terrific; I was soporific.

There was giggling. There were blank stares. There was eye-rolling. I have not yet been to Djibouti, but I’ll wager my firstborn that even there the teenagers roll their eyes at adults.

To be fair, there were a good many attentive, curious, polite kids who peppered me with questions: How much do I get paid for my stories? What do I write about? Do I get lonely working at home alone? There was even one enterprising class that brought me offerings: local cheese, a bottle of Kofola (the popular Slovak cola), and some candy they ate before I could sample it. Class number two, you brought me cheese! You rock!

The school’s teachers rocked as well. Patricia and Zuzka, with whom my aunt shared an office, clacked away at their laptops as we talked about the classes. They were so sweet, so energetic, and so helpful, plying me with shockingly strong cough lozenges and tea. Patricia even made the reservations for Jan and me at a spa in Piestany. (More on that in the next blog entry.)

Many students surprised me: One shy boy admitted to writing poetry and having won a contest. Another quiet young man, when I asked what he read, started prattling on about searching online for archery articles. Turns out he was a champion archer, nearly Olympic level. One girl reportedly woke at 4 a.m. every morning for her synchronized swimming lessons. When I assigned the classes a pitch-writing assignment, her pitch was: “Synchronized swimming: a real sport or a real joke?” The Goth Girl—black hair, black clothes, black-and-white striped stockings—had a solid pitch about up-and-coming local rock bands. A lean guy brought in a copy of Men’s Health (we were dissecting the parts of a magazine) and carefully articulated what he liked and disliked about the design and content of each section.

In another class, we got into a big discussion about the Roma (gypsies), most of whom live in ghetto-like conditions in the eastern part of the country. The conversation got a little ugly: some kids compared the Roma to dogs, called them dirty thieves. They repeated the worst stories they’d heard about dark, brutal crimes. When I ventured that I would like to go east and hear the other side of the story, from a Roma herself, many in the class admonished me, predicting that I’d be robbed and killed. (One young man with serious blue eyes even paused leaving class to warn me not to go.) I was really troubled by this discussion, and with what I saw as racist and intolerant perceptions of half a million marginalized, uneducated, reviled outcasts, a growing segment of their society they’ll have to cope with in the coming years. People they’ve never met face-to-face, whom they seem to understand so completely.

But this is youth, this regurgitating what you’ve been told to swallow. As all teenagers, they’re learning to chew things over for themselves. I just hoped, as I walked through the halls past poster projects about racism, the Civil Rights Movement, about Apartheid in South Africa, that they would start making the connections between what they were learning and what they were living.

Talking about it was a start. It was the only class where almost all the kids did talk, where I didn’t have long stretches of silence after I posited a question, or kids who glanced away when I tried to make eye contact. For those classes, I tried humor; Britney Spears references seemed to work. Then I tried cajoling their participation. Remember, I said, my experiences here are fodder for my writing. You will be material for my travel stories. I may write about you in my travel blog.

And so, children, don’t say I didn’t warn you.