Teaching in tongues
This is the closeout month for the Peace Corps in Poland. The bigwigs from Washington came in to assess the impact of the decade of thousands of English and business-consultant volunteers.
Sometimes, the impact was not in the formal lessons but in the informal encouragement by those pushy Americans who urged talented Poles to seize the moment and start small businesses that would build on their skills.
That was the case with the cofounders of IKO, which teaches Polish to foreigners. Dorota Drewnowska and Malgosia Kujawska met early in the decade at the Peace Corps office. Drewnowska was a part-time Polish teacher, while Kujawska was in the administrative end of the Peace Corps program.
The first year had been a disaster, using conventional methods of grammar first and conversation later (sometimes never), severely handicapping the business volunteers. Before the second year began, Washington sent in specialists to train Poles in language-immersion techniques stressing interactive conversation. It was a revolutionary practice for Poland, where the complex grammar had been preserved for centuries as a matter of national pride even if this meant the language was too daunting for most outsiders to learn.
By 1993, Drewnowska was under pressure to start a private language school using immersion techniques. One of her mentors was David Elliott, a retired business executive who was in Bialystok on his second stint as a Peace Corps volunteer. "David played a big role in my life he probably doesn't know it," she said. "I received the first positive feedback about the work we were doing in Peace Corps training." When he and his wife Helen went off to Bialystok, they kept at her to "develop my enthusiasm" teaching Polish to foreigners.
"That was my first work, my very first contact with foreigners, so he came at the right moment in my life," she said.
Another mentor was Barbara Heatley, whose husband Bruce headed the Gemini small-business development program. Barbara took Drewnowska's classes at Warsaw University and urged her to take those skills private. "Every two weeks, she'd call up and say, 'Dorota, did you prepare a business plan for the school?'" Drewnowska said.
At the time, she was actually trying to find out what a business plan meant. She'd had no contact with business and wasn't sure she wanted to start. But Heatley didn't let up.
Ultimately, Drewnowska and Kujawska became partners in founding IKO in 1994, with a small office and one computer, using zl. 3,000 (about $1,000 then) from relatives and savings. They taught all the students while preparing their own teaching material. And Heatley donated 18 months of her time helping them establish professional standards, writing brochures and working with them on a business plan to track costs and revenues and to plan for growth.
With conversation in Polish a primary goal, the instructor's success in getting the students to talk was crucial. When Kujawska asked the students, in one early session, to talk about the fall of the Berlin Wall, she got minimal comment. Craig Edelman a personal mentor and Peace Corps volunteer asked why she'd chosen a subject near to her heart, but not too important to foreigners. "When I asked them about their own family situations, that was the catalyst for an hour and a half discussion, which I hadn't expected," Kujawska recalled.
Edelman also helped IKO train its first teachers. When this concept of small-group conversation was still new here, "he was the only one who could build up their self-confidence and creativity," she said.
By the end of the 1990s, IKO was the largest and most successful school teaching Polish to foreigners and was the Polish liaison working with other European linguists on a standardized test for learning "smaller" European languages. Its book on Polish verbs was a sellout.
Drewnowska, now 34, and Kujawska, now 38, had worked out a partnership that got them through many crises. In 1997, French investment picked up and many managers flooded into IKO. Kujawska is a French-speaker, but she was on maternity leave and Drewnowska had to cope. She did and today the French remain part of IKO's core clientele. Last year, Kujawska picked up more of the workload when Drewnowska began an MBA program at the Warsaw School of Economics.
This winter brought another challenge, set in motion partly by the Social Security Administration's (ZUS) changes, which eliminated the "independent contractor" exemption from 48% ZUS taxes. Five IKO staffers left to form a rival company. Imitation may be a sign of success, but it can also be a killer blow if the right moves aren't made.
The IKO partners recognized that they were well beyond a mom-and-pop business: IKO had 40 teachers and 800 students in an average year. By spring, it had upgraded its internal-audit systems to reflect their size, including feedback from students about their teachers with dismissals of those who don't measure up.
"You have to be very tough to reorganize from being this 'friendly' company to a different one," Drewnowska said.
