I grew up in southeastern part of Poland. It used to be part of Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918 and was called Galicia then. I was the youngest of three children. Both my siblings were very good students, and I was a lousy one during the first few years of grammar school.
During summer vacation, right after the first grade, a friend of mine challenged me to recite the alphabet. I was eight years old. To my dismay I was not able to get past letter P. I thought that the whole year of education went for nothing. There was not much exciting going on during grades 1-3 to keep my interest, and I was mostly preoccupied with playing soccer at my favorite position of a goalie. My parents were worried, but I assured them that I had an easy solution to their anxiety about what would become of me; I planned to follow the footsteps of Mr.Szela, our mailman for many years. Mr.Szela was well-liked by all our neighbors who treated him to glasses of vodka, so he was a bit intoxicated by the end of the day. His job seemed not hard to do and one did not have to know the alphabet by heart.
Something curious happened in the third grade. I was ten years old. The biology textbook provided a definition of life. It was "the process of slowly burning in oxygen." That was my first encounter with axiomatized science. Apparently, the author of the textbook did not feel comfortable discussing life before defining it formally (and rigorously) first. My homeroom teacher, Mrs.Madro, was not mean in contrast to a few other teachers. Her favorite way of enforcing discipline was to hit male students with a ruler on their palms (girls, according to her, were genetically unable to do any mischief). The last time I was treated that way was in grade four. After hitting me 4-5 times, she asked, "Well, how does it feel?". I was not a happy camper as I knew the fight I was involved in was initiated by another student who was not punished, so I replied, "It feels really great." OK, it was Mrs.Madro's turn to up the ante. I was sentenced to sit for the remainder of the year next to a girl named Grazyna Sztorc. I must admit that I was not prepared for that move. I do not know anybody else who was punished that severely. Anyhow, if it happens again to me in next reincarnation, I am ready to turn such punishment into opportunity. The principle of looking for positives in every situation was not known to me at that time.
One day I was hanging around my favorite forest and I encountered Mrs.Madro. She was collecting young pine cones for a folk medicine. The pines were about twice her size and she asked me to help her. My job was to remove the cones and toss them to her. After climbing up and down on a few trees I was looking for a shortcut. Well, I rocked a tree back and forth and used it as a catapult to jump on the adjacent pine tree. She almost fainted.
I learned one practical solution from Mrs.Madro to problems posed by life. One day she noticed that my nose needed some attention and asked me to use my handkerchief. OK, it was misplaced somewhere, so she took me to the bathroom, asked to pull my shirt up, blow my nose in the lower part of it, then stick it back into my pants. I have never used that method again but I keep it in my mind just in case.
Mrs.Madro had an interesting way of controlling her 40 students. Every week we had one hour devoted to class issues. She would start by asking, "Well, girls, tell me about all the bad things boys did during the last week." She would get plenty of useful info, and she would administer justice.
I do not want to convey the wrong impression about Mrs.Madro here. One should look at her relative to other teachers. One of them, Mrs.Kaluza, was quite a character. In the sixth grade I got the second worst beating in my life from a wrestler named Wolek (incidentally, it translates to young bull) who was in the 7th grade. It happened in the corner of the school yard, and I was limping slowly on the way back to classroom when Mrs.Kaluza started yelling at me. I was not able to understand why she seem upset. She did not see that I was bloodied. Later on I learned that her main concern was that I was walking on freshly seeded grass, and that infuriated her. Mrs.Kaluza was considered by almost everybody a village idiot, and she did quite a number on the local educational establishment. Namely, she interviewed lots of peasants in local villages and produced "proof" that communist guerillas were active here during World War II, and contributed to the fall of Nazism. In case you are not familiar with Polish history, anti-communist groups did most of the fighting. They claimed that all the communists fled to Soviet Union right at the beginning of WWII and quite a few were later murdered by Stalin's government. Anyhow, Mrs.Kaluza turned it into a PhD in history at a university in Cracow, and suddenly she was higher on the pecking order than most of local principals. Wolek was a curious character, too. He became a junior champion of the world in wrestling a few years later, raped a girl, spent two years in jail, got out of jail, and married that girl.
In the fourth grade I got a new homeroom teacher, Mr.Tkacz, a math instructor. He gained my respect the first day of classes. The girls started their usual, "He did this, he did that," report, but Mr.Tkacz cut them off immediately and told them never to bother him again with that kind of stuff. I really liked his classes, very little memorization, lots of unusual problems. I quickly became the best student in his class. Interestingly enough, the qualities praised by Mrs.Madro, who remained my literature teacher, like nice handwriting and using blue ink (blue ink and gold-plated pens were tops, black ink and steel-plated pens were the pits), were not admired by Mr.Tkacz, so there was a shake-up in the class structure. In the fifth grade, Mr.Tkacz went to another school and was replaced by our PE teacher whose name I do not remember. Apparently, Mr.Tkacz conveyed to him that I was good in math because Mr.PE could not hide his disappointment. He would ask me "What is 5 divided by 0?" and I would say 0 or 5, depending on the day of week. Everybody else knew the right answer (5/0 is undefined), but I had no idea what "undefined" meant. His other favorite directive was "State the law of distributivity of multiplication with respect to addition." Again, most of students could memorize and regurgitate the answer, but not me. I ended up with C in math for grade 5. I am happy to add that I do know now why 5/0 is undefined. Also, most of my students at UTK have seen the law of distributivity of multiplication with respect to addition, so I can get help if I need it.
Grade 5 was the first grade that I started doing well in some classes. It began in the biology class taught by Mrs.Skowron. Somehow I did well on a test and I remember Mrs.Skowron wondering out loud how was that possible. I always liked her and it hurt my pride that she thought doing well was out of my realm. Actually, she went so far as to ask Leszek Ziobro, my neighbor, if he helped me during the test. Well, that was way too far and I had to prove her wrong.
Luckily for my math education, Mr.Tkacz came back to our school and taught me in grades 6 and 7. His ways were quite strange. We had to do most computations in our brain, without using a notebook. I remember learning linear equations (of ax+b=c type) from my physics teacher, and I was very surprised at how easy it was to solve problems by using x as a variable. It seemed like cheating. In grade seven I used Pythagoras' Theorem to solve a geometry problem on blackboard and Mr.Tkacz was very unhappy. He told me not to read books ahead of time (Pythagoras' Theorem was covered in grade 8, I think). Essentially, he considered this cheating.
On occasion I was caught in a fight, and Mr.Tkacz would grab me by the ear, twist it a bit, and say "Dydak, you son, I am going to teach you." It was clear he had my welfare in mind, so it did not bother me. Mr.Tkacz was the person with the highest integrity among my all teachers. In my eyes he was a great man.
In grade seven I participated in math contest for Southeast Poland. Round One took place in my city. The problems were relatively easy, so quite a few students got the maximum number of points. I did not make it to Round Two. Since I got the maximum number of points, I asked Mr.Tkacz how is it possible not to make Round Two in such a case. Well, some teachers were more equal than others, and their students were sent to Round Two (top 60 students in the district, 60 was the capacity of a typical gym where written contest took place).
Grade 6 was the only grade in my life that I had straight A's in all subjects. At the end of the year all good students were given books as awards. Apparently, I was perceived quite high as I got the book entitled "What are Soviet Scientists Dreaming About." Everybody else got books of the type "Robinson Crusoe" and I got "What are Soviet Scientists Dreaming About" Being politically immature, I publicly expressed my opinion of the book without even reading it first. That created a certain perception of me which resulted in my loss of status in grade seven. This lowered status followed me to high school (grades 8-11 at that time) later on.
Until grade 6 my family lived in an apartment complex which would be called a subsidized housing project in the USA. We moved there from another city when I was 2 years old and my brother was starting first grade. Being an outsider, he was picked on by school bullies and beaten almost daily. At a school meeting, my mother tried to alert other parents and one of them (a woman &endash; men did not go to school meetings at that time) offered an honest explanation, "They just do not like him. What do you expect?" My mother lost any sympathy for the city and thought of it as quite barbaric. My life was easier in the sense that I felt safe in the immediate vicinity of our apartment. I grew up there, I was a local boy, and nobody bothered me. When I left the security of my apartment life became more dangerous. My school was located about 15 minutes away (by foot. I had to be very careful about which street to choose on the way to and from the school. There were gangs of hoodlums (fellow students) who enjoyed beating up kids. My constant enemies were the Mlynarczyk brothers. They would use the youngest among them (about 3 years younger than me) to provoke others and then beat them up in defense of the youngest one. For example, he would sneak behind me, punch me on the side of the face and run away while the other brothers would roll laughing. On another occasion the youngling would start swinging a knife, trying to puncture the tires on my bike. I have never been seriously hurt, but I had to be on constant alert. I knew I was on my own. One day I got kicked in the stomach by one of the hoodlums (a classmate who was retained a few grades in his life and was five years older than me) in the presence of ever helpful Mrs.Madro. She was very kind, leaned over me (I was crouching on the floor) and advised me to file a complaint with the principal.
As a result, I became a very good sprinter, and a decent jumper, too. One day I was being chased by a mean fellow. He was just about to get me when I jumped over a fence. The fence was about a foot taller than me, so I had to use my momentum, a technique I practiced many times before. One had to jump so that half of the body was over the fence and use legs to flip over it. Somehow in the process, I managed to kick the guy in the face and there he was, totally surprised, as he had not seen that maneuver before. I think I acquired a good practical background in classical mechanics.
I was always attracted to thermodynamics. My apartment was very close to a sizable forest, and I used to spend hours baking potatoes in a small fire on the outskirts of that forest. We would keep potatoes for a few hours deep in ashes of the fire and their skin would become charred. Once you opened them up there was steam coming out. If one added a bit of salt and butter, that was gourmet food in those times, especially in the fall.
One day with a friend of mine, we decided to start a small fire on the top of a haystack. We gathered wood (in the form of fallen branches) and we had an old newspaper and matches. It was known that flames go normally up but to our surprise the whole stack caught fire. That was hard to explain. Luckily, a few neighbors contained the fire but my father was notified about our experiment. It was a golden moment for him to introduce me to theoretical physics. Instead, he spanked me pretty bad. From then on I lost my confidence and I was never any good in a lab setting.
After I emigrated to the USA in 1982, I was not able to go back to Poland for 9 years. That gave me plenty of time to think about differences between the educational system in Poland and USA, so I started asking my parents questions immediately upon visiting them in 1991. You have to understand that life in Poland was essentially a survival game and there was no time for parents to share their stories with children. Actually, during the Stalin era, it was dangerous to let children know too much about what parents' views were. I was surprised to hear my father's story of his years in grammar school. In the first grade he was told to follow teacher's instructions while drawing a picture. Somehow, the directions were worded in an unfamiliar manner, so my father continued drawing his way. The moment his ear was struck by the ruler wielded in the teacher's hand, my father immediately understood without any words being spoken. Interestingly, my father was not bitter. It seems he recognized the value of "corporal encouragement" in teaching. Somehow, by the time I reached grammar school, "corporal encouragement" was replaced by "psychological encouragement." One may speculate that changing the education system from all-male and all-girls schools to coed schools caused teachers to abandon their motivational techniques. It did not seem right to spank a nice girl for drawing a picture incorrectly.
Looking back I see that I had to overcome two obstacles in my early education: hoodlums and state officials in charge of teaching. One has to know that, after Stalin era came to end in Poland in 1956, quite a few of members of the secret police were sent to universities on KGB bill. I am almost certain my principal was one of them and the vice-principal was a quick learner.
Interestingly, of all my teachers, the two I had in grammar school; Mrs.Skowron and Mr.Tkacz, I consider as really special. One would think that high school or college should have more influence on one's life. In my case it was grammar school.