Most English teachers come into the career unambitiously and discover―quite shockingly―that it is an actual job. A job that includes 7 am classes, written reports, and hours of unpaid grading and planning. Within two weeks of the month long TEFL training course that is mandatory (but not standardized) for all teachers living in Prague, people have more or less self selected themselves into two groups. The tier 1 teachers will work for better firms, have more resources and better protection; the tier 2 will work for lesser schools but often for more money and freedom.

There's no secret to success really. Andrea worked for one of the top schools in the Republic, drew clients from all walks of life and level but made half as much as I did. Meghan had found a job in the lower rungs where she could spazzily blow off classes when she was too hung over and made enough money to afford to live in a Náměstí Republiky sublet, but had no visa, no resource room and very little recourse should she get caught by immigration or ripped off by a client.

There are good classes and bad classes. Unfortunately it's impossible to tell which will be which. Schools try to lure teachers with big names: Vodafone, Almay, a number of foreign banks, but I've found the best classes in the most unusual places.

I wasn't all that enthusiastic the first time I walked into my second class at a large computer software firm. The young male receptionist looked up―a sloppy mop of curly black hair flopping back into position―and directed me to the correct floor. I was over 20 minutes late (first because my tram had broken down on the tracks, but also because I hadn't yet figured out how long all the transfers from the white mountain to greater Prague took to make. In other words I was late before the tram broke down). I was a vile wave of cursing and nerves in professional clothes.

Petr (number 9) was waiting for me by the security door onto the floor. This was the bizarre thing about this particular company: you needed a security pass key to get farther than the elevator shaft, but the thick, locked doors that sported bulletproof glass had their hinges on the outside, where any capable thief with a screwdriver (or perhaps more practically a blowtorch) could simply take the door off. I pointed this out to one of my students one day, and he dryly responded that the security system was not to keep people out, but to track the movements of the people in.

Despite this, or maybe in fact because of this, my students have a calm, eager disposition in class. They wander in in blue jeans and T-shirts and seemed quite happy to chat away in English. We debate art, science, culture; or sometimes they will just listen with curious attention to grammar instruction, make notes and ask questions.

"I don't get it..." Vojta―who resembled something of an overgrown Hobbit with a childlike expression―frowned. "Why should it be ‘my plane lands at three’ instead of ‘my plane will land at three’?"

As an English teacher you are charged with developing a method to pass on your mastery that no one who has actually mastered English has ever (or will ever) use. It is in a very real sense a farce. You cannot make a 25 year old computer programmer fluent in English, you can only bring the student to the level of ‘good enough’. What ‘good enough’ is depends on the student―how and why they use the language. But for Vojta there were always questions. He was never satisfied with ‘good enough’ and was endlessly frustrated with the limitations. He had an analytical mind and wanted English to be elegant like math, with real defined confines of space. Language, unfortunately, is the one four dimensional object in our world: we manipulate a sense of time through our choice of words.

It’s easy for me to explain the concept of perfect tenses or continuous tenses. It’s easy to define the elements of space and time that words like ‘has’, ‘had’, ‘going to’ map out. And to give a student drills or exercises meant to provoke the right response from them, this too is easy. But to actually ingrain in their heads, to change the landscape of their thinking so that they feel the right situations once the textbook and teacher have been put away, this is a different story.

The spaces that math defines―angles, equations and ratios―are unchanging and universal. Vojta wanted English to be this way, but saw the obvious flaws in the idiotic set of rules and pseudo-equations English textbooks lay out and could not be satisfied with it. Whereas scores of other students simply ignored the fact that the “rules” bear little or no resemblance to the way English actually works. Vojta wanted to grasp the empty space beyond what he could perceive.

He quickly became one of my favorite students. I enjoyed the intellectual challenge of his constant questions and arguments. He inspired his three classmates who watched our banter filled digressions as if everyday curiosities were being explained in front of them.

“So what’s this a picture of?” I pointed to the image that opened up chapter 11. Our chapter on weird science that was really just a thinly veiled attempt at bullying the students into using hypothetical language. It was interesting seeing the kind of verbal acrobatics my students would get into to avoid using the prescribed language, as if it was some kind of contest.

“A sheep.”

“Well there are two,” Lukaš pointed out.

“Fine then, two sheep.”

“Have you ever seen this picture before?” I asked.

“No.”

“Nu’uh.”

Petr squinted a bit and adjusted his glasses. “Isn’t that the sheep they … uhhh…” he looked helplessly at his classmate, and blurted out something in Czech. They shrugged dumbly.

“If you don’t know it, try explaining it.” With advanced classes there was no excuse, limitations with vocabulary were just prolonged speaking exercises.

“Uhhh … they made it.”

“What?”

“The baby.”

“How?”

“Uhhhh…”

“Clone!” someone shouted out, snapping the brain teasing tension in the room. “They cloned it!”

“Right, this is Dolly.”

I tapped the picture with my finger as dumb looks floated my way.

“What?”

“That’s what they named her: Dolly … after Dolly Parton.”

“Who’s that?” Vojta asked.

“A singer. She’s had so much plastic surgery she’s practically artificial.“

“Michael Jackson,” Lukaš and Vojta said in unison.

“Uhhhh… yes, except Dolly Parton was a woman originally.”

With surprising ease I was able to mime my way through an explanation of Dolly Parton’s better ... assets. It’s always interesting the situations that come up when you’re in an industry where the majority of your clients are men. The coordination that it takes to make such moments amusing like secret covert English lessons instead of awkward and inappropriate…

Vojta blinked. “It’s like Dolly Buster.”

“Who?”

Petr9 looked like he was going to have a coronary, which caused only momentary pause.

“You don’t know her?” Lukaš asked.

I shook my head.

“Really?”

“…should I?”

Lukaš and Vojta glanced at each other in a vague way I did not like. This was going to be good.

“Well” Lukaš hesitated and shifted in his seat, his eyes looking towards Vojta for direction. “She is Czech.”

The thing about language barriers is it creates an invisible curtain, like a secret backstage area where the fluent speakers can gather and conspire right under the noses of everybody. The thing about small, obscure languages like Czech is that native speakers assume that the language is carried in the genetics. That is if you don’t speak Czech from birth, you couldn’t possibly really speak it. To their credit though, the debate about whether to spill what everyone wanted to talk about or not was mostly a silent conversation carried in little looks and shrugs.

“…so…”

“Has she been in the news lately?” I made a habit of attempting to read the free newspapers distributed around the Metro. Actually it wasn’t really reading even, I was just skimmed the text, trying to pick out words that looked familiar and digest the grammatical structures around them. But in any case, I never paid much attention to the names.

“Yes.”

“Well not in a couple of months.”

“But she’s real famous.”

“And she’s Czech,” Lukaš grinned.

“She’s a porn star.”

“Uhhh…” Warning! Conversation veering off into strange unknown territory. Must devise diversion strategy…

“She ran for a seat on the EU parliament once.”

“She Czech,” Lukaš was still grinning.

Vojta shrugged and turned to Lukaš, “But she did mostly German movies.”

“Yes but she was born in the Czech Republic.”

“…and you guys must be so proud.” Ah, jaded sarcasm, easily the best tool in the teaching arsenal.

They grinned gleefully.

“I bet this is the first thing you tell all the foreigners…”

Most of the time we managed to keep the conversation topics to language issues. They would argue and debate and explain the material to each other. Class would always stretch on ten, fifteen, sometime twenty minutes past where it should. English class was a welcome break from the demands of work, we all dragged our feet when it was time to leave.

-------------------------------

When I came home quiet murmurs in Czech greeted me at the door. A strange speckled man tilted his head curiously at me and sipped from a big blue mug. The mug I recognized, the man I did not. He had short, conservatively cut salt and pepper hair, large glasses, sort of squinty eyes and a husky build.

Jan looked up from his coffee. “Oh hello.”

“Hi.”

I looked pointedly at this stranger sitting at our dinner table. Jan picked up the conversation where he left off.

The speckled man and I shared a look that totally shut out whatever Jan was saying. He rose politely from his seat and offered his hand. “I’m Milan.”

“Milan,” I repeated carefully. “Nice to meet you.”

“Would you like to join us?” Jan asked. He remained sitting.

“Sure.”

“Great,” Milan smiled. “Let’s have a bourbon.”

Despite his shy bordering on rudeness beginning, Jan jumped at this prospect, eagerly fetching a few fat juice glasses and the bourbon from the lower cabinet.

“So Milan … what do you do?”

“I’m a computer programmer.”

After the fall of Communism, the Czech Republic became something of an IT hub for Europe. While the US outsources to India and China, the Republic quietly has had a little bit of its own dot com boom. Andrea and I had been speculating with secret whispers about Jan’s net worth for months. He owned our apartment, his own business, a car, and plenty of expendable income. He was certainly better off than us.

“Where are you from?”

 

“New York.” I beamed.

“Wow, and you moved here?”

“Prague is so small,” Jan nodded in agreement.

“Maybe, but it’s different. I like it.”

“But compared to New York…”

“New York is so expensive. I couldn’t make a life there for myself.” I took a sip of my bourbon, the bitter alcoholic tinge smoothly rolling over my tongue. “I was totally dependent on my parents, so were all my friends. It was like a delayed childhood.”

“Well, you’re not married so it’s fine to live at home.”

“Not for us.”

Milan laughed, “Oh I know! In America you must leave home at 18; parents throw their children on the street.”

“Not exactly no…”

“Milan,” Jan grinned shark-like. “You live alone too.”

Milan pressed his lips together, thinking this over as if he wasn’t sure what one point has to do with the other. “Yes, but I make a lot of money!”

Obviously Prague is hard pressed to compete with New York-- a place where you can find everything-- but two cities are so different it’s impossible for me to compare them. New York can be a dreary place to live because there is no Center. If you want something, if you’re bored, if you’re eager for adventure you need to know where to go. If you don’t know, you need to hunt, try to find connections, tap into the grapevine. New York is a harsh and cynical city, she does not betray her secrets easily. I liked Prague’s village feel. It was large enough to get lost in the crowds, but small enough that all it took to tap into the underground was a few clicks in a web browser or a trip to the Globe Bookstore.

For a person like me, endlessly out of the loop, that was nice.

“Honza,” Milan whined. “Are we going cycling again this year?”

“Hm?” Jan looked up. “I don’t know, maybe. Last year was too much.”

I sat up like a prairie dog, trying to decode their conversation.

“Last year,” Milan said to me. “We took a cycling trip all the way to East Bohemia. It took us three days!”

I had spotted Jan’s bicycle collecting dust behind his bed but I hadn’t thought him much of an enthusiast. Its discarded position seemed like one of those well intentioned New Year’s Resolutions.

“Wow. Where did you sleep?”

“We camped.”

“Meh, it was better coming back.”

“Of course,” Milan put his glass down so that he could use his hands to illustrate. “It was all up hill there, then all downhill or flat the way back.”

The door creaked as Andrea came in for the night. We could hear her iPod blaring away.

“Oh, hello.” She stopped in her tracks.

“Hey.”

“Want a bourbon?” Jan grinned.

“Oh.” That one syllable hung in the air awkwardly. Andrea looked like the idea of drinking bourbon out of aglass in the middle of the evening was something clearly deviant. There seemed to be something scandalized about her expression.

“I really have to prepare for tomorrow.” Her voice was mousy and shy, a hint of hesitation pickling her soft vowels and consonants so that they seemed fused together. “Thanks though.”

Andrea went to her room and closed the door. The doors in our apartment felt like kitchen cabinets: they consisted mainly of cheap white plastic with ugly freckled foggy glass panels that rattled nervously when ever you moved in the general direction of them. From those dappled windows I could still see Andrea’s shadow bent over her books several hours later.