Polish students pay visit in exchange program set up through the United States Peace Corps
Polish students pay visit
Mar 15, 2000 - Las Vegas Review-Journal
Author(s): Tina Allen
By Tina Allen
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Students from Faith Lutheran Junior-Senior High School recently shared their classrooms and culture with youth from Poland.
The visit was part of an exchange program set up through the United States Peace Corp.
"I wanted to bring some students home and let them experience my home and my culture," said Peace Corp volunteer Tearsa Coogan, who brought eight students, ages 15 to 18, to Las Vegas for two weeks. "A lot of them have shared their homes and their culture with me."
Coogan teaches conversational English at a high school in Poland. The Las Vegas native has been with the Peace Corp for almost two years and chose the excursion as a required secondary project with the Corp.
"Peace Corp has three goals," Coogan said. "The first goal is to help developing nations in need and another one is to help those nations understand the American culture. (The third) is to bring the culture we lived in back to America and help Americans understand more about it."
The Polish youth, who stayed with host families, were paired with American students during the day.
Lindsay Tuls, a junior at Faith Lutheran, brought 15-year-old Jolanta Bochelnska to a number of her classes, including honors English, history, ceramics, psychology, math, and religion.
"The lessons in America are `cool,'" said Bochelnska, using a bit of American slang she picked up on her trip. "I think the school is fun.
"There are very nice teachers and students. The school is big. In Poland the school is small."
The education system in Poland differs from the United States in that students can opt to leave school after junior high school, Coogan said.
If they choose to attend high school, they are given a choice of either a vocational school or a college preparatory school, which requires them to pass entrance exams in order to be accepted. Students graduate when they are 19.
Bochelnska attends a college preparatory school called Maria Konopnicka in Krosno, Poland.
The course work is similar, she said, to what she has seen at Faith Lutheran.
Although the language barrier posed a bit of a problem, Tuls and Bochelnska discussed some of the issues facing teens.
"We were talking about legal things, like when you can drive and the drinking age," Tuls said. "We were discussing how many people drink in America when they are underage and how it's not much different in Poland and throughout Europe.
"Everybody in America does it just to rebel."
In addition to their time at Faith Lutheran, the students from Poland visited Disneyland, Death Valley, Hoover Dam, Red Rock, UNLV and a school in Pahrump.
The trip was paid for through fund-raisers, donations and $600 from each of the students.
