One-to-One
Names and identifying details have been changed.
I already knew the quiet rhythm of one-to-one teaching. These weren’t clients so much as friends, KAFO regulars, or people who drifted into my life in that Silesian way: quietly, naturally, without ceremony. If someone asked about private lessons, I usually said yes. It was never my intention to build a business around one-to-one teaching — I was busy enough already — but I enjoyed it. The people who came to me were curious and motivated, and each lesson took its shape from whatever they needed that day. Their questions, their conversation practice, a quick quiz, or a moment of clarity. It felt less like business and more like life unfolding around cups of coffee, conversation, and things they genuinely wanted to learn.
Maybe that’s why when Britam asked if I could take on a few one-to-one lessons, I didn’t hesitate. The rhythm felt familiar — the same quiet, human scale — just in a different corner of my week. They soon found their own rhythm, their own kind of landscape… their own kind of organised chaos.
Some mornings began in my kitchen at 7 a.m., the kettle boiling while I tried to look awake enough to teach someone who had grown up with horses. The quiet, the half-light, the shared coffee, the way conversation settled into the morning as naturally as the bakery opening downstairs and the first traffic on the street.
These one-to-ones were nothing like the structured world of the main language school. They were intimate, unpredictable, and often hilarious. People let their guard down in these spaces. They told stories, asked questions they would never ask in a formal classroom, laughed at their mistakes, and trusted me in a way that still surprises me.
This was another important part of my working life — the part that kept me moving, grounded, and laughing. The part that made Gliwice feel less like somewhere I lived and more like somewhere I belonged.
Zosia
My first one-to-one at Britam was with a twelve-year-old girl named Zosia. Twelve — though she carried herself with the calm assurance of someone older, and spoke English with a fluency that made me wonder what I could possibly teach her.
I remember that first lesson: pride, responsibility, and a quiet panic. A child. Alone. With me. No full classroom to soften it. Just the two of us, a table, a notebook, and later all manner of props, card games, lesson plans, and the realisation that this was a very different kind of teaching.
But Zosia made it easy. She was bright without announcing it. Funny without trying. Grounded, curious, and unpretentious. She came from a family who owned a cukiernia — a cake shop — and carried something of that world with her: warmth, steadiness, and a sense of belonging.
Talking with her often felt less like teaching and more like being invited into the quick, bright world of someone already becoming herself. She asked questions that surprised me, made observations that stayed, and laughed in a way that lifted the room.
And the trust — that was the part that stayed with me. Her parents trusted me. Britam trusted me. And she kept coming back. Each week another booking appeared, as if the decision had already been made: this works.
She made the work feel light. Some students do that. They remind you why you’re there.
Joanna
If Zosia was a gentle introduction, then Joanna was my first lesson in how unpredictable one-to-ones could be.
She worked for a Japanese ceramics company out in the industrial zone — a massive factory complex with forklifts humming past the windows and the air faintly metallic. She arrived composed, as if she had already handled several absurdities before breakfast. In the first few lessons, I wasn’t sure we had anything in common.
There was a stillness to her — a kind of composure that made her difficult to read. I remember thinking more than once that she probably didn’t like me very much. But it was work, so I showed up, punctual, fully prepared, and carried on. She didn’t cancel. Which, in hindsight, was the first clue I might be wrong.
Her humour began to surface gradually — dry, precise, and perfectly timed. Not offered freely, but placed carefully, as if testing whether I’d notice. I learned to meet her there, not by pushing, but by matching her — a respectful duelling of wit. She was quick. Quicker than me, most of the time.
And her English? Easily CAE level — nowhere for a native speaker to hide.
At some point in those early weeks, I discovered I was learning from her, too. She told me about the strange, disciplined world of a Japanese company transplanted into Silesia — the daily Chōrei meetings where staff stood in neat lines, recited goals, and clapped in unison. I was never entirely sure whether I was being teased about that; the line between sincerity and mischief was razor-thin.
Yet when she spoke about 5S, she was absolutely serious. She explained how the Polish workforce had embraced 5S — the order, the clarity, the shared responsibility for keeping things running smoothly. She spoke with a quiet respect for the place she worked. It wasn’t just efficient; it was genuinely a good company that treated people well.
She described all of it with that same deadpan delivery, letting the details hang in the air before raising an eyebrow, as if to say: See? The world is stranger and more interesting than you think.
Once, she told me that several Japanese managers wanted the Polish workforce to learn Japanese instead of English.
“Imagine,” she said, “a factory full of Poles speaking Japanese.”
After convincing me the entire workforce actually did meet each morning for Chōrei, she paused and said, “Imagine Polish workers shouting motivational slogans in Japanese at eight in the morning.”
Another silence. Another eyebrow.
I nodded, trying to look thoughtful. “Well,” I said, “it sounds reasonable… but I’d be out of a job.”
Another look from her — then the laughter, sudden and loud, the kind that made the whole room feel lighter.
“Maybe,” she said, “we should look into getting a Japanese language teacher after all.”
Some students learn from you. Some teach you. Joanna did both — and she didn’t even break a smile doing it.
Tomasz
If Zosia showed me brightness and Joanna showed me precision, Tomasz introduced me to the quiet intimacy of early-morning lessons.
Tomasz was the opposite of what people imagine when they hear “business client.” Quiet, funny in a dry, sideways way, and sharper than he ever let on. I can no longer place his home precisely on a map. What remains is the landscape he described: rolling fields, horses that seemed to have been part of his family for generations, and long summer days that lingered in the memory. What I remember more clearly than the place itself was the way he spoke about it — calmly, fondly, as though those summers never entirely left him: early mornings, bedroom windows open, the smell of hay drifting in. He’d describe it so simply I could almost hear the horses breathing.
By the time I met him, he was a partner in a local start-up run by a young entrepreneur with more ideas than hours in the day. Despite his rural background, he was fast-thinking, modern, and quietly amused by the world.
Our lessons were at the ungodly hour of 7 a.m. — in my kitchen.
I overslept once — only once — and woke to the sound of him knocking on my door. The communal entrance had been left unlocked, so he simply let himself in.
“No problem, Gary,” he said, already halfway to the kettle. “I’ll make coffee. You can get ready… or stay as you are.”
I chose option two.
I ended up teaching the whole lesson in my pyjamas, parked at my kitchen table and doing my best impression of someone who was both awake and in charge. He, of course, carried on as if having a teacher in sleepwear was the most standard thing imaginable. And honestly, there’s something hilariously disarming about explaining English grammar while wearing slippers—fluffy white ones I’d just snagged from the local Biedronka, still so new they practically squeaked with innocence.
Tomasz didn’t seem to mind. And somehow, neither did I.
Teaching someone in your own kitchen changes things. The boundaries soften. You see the person, not the student. And in those early hours, with the light lifting over Gliwice, I found myself looking forward to the simplicity of it — the clarity, the trust, the quiet companionship.
Jacek
If Tomasz brought the quiet of mornings, Jacek brought the city itself — its architecture, its rhythm, its intelligence.
He lived in one of those impossibly hip loft spaces above a wine bar — the kind of place that made me feel like I’d wandered into a magazine spread by accident. That whole building seemed to attract interesting people. One of the most creative and genuinely innovative corporate clients I gave lessons to had their office in the same building, tucked away in a space that felt more like an artist’s studio than an office.
Jacek was a doctor working his way through paediatric specialisation. He came from a family of doctors, was brilliant, cultured, and wonderfully stubborn about the things he cared about.
Worksheets were tolerated, not welcomed. He’d accept them with a sigh that was almost theatrical, glance at them, and then steer the conversation toward something entirely different — architecture, films, restaurants, or marques of cars. I know nothing about cars; he knew everything. He’d talk about engines and design lines while I nodded, pretending to follow, waiting for a moment to slip in a correction.
He had the kind of mind that moved quickly but never made you feel left behind. Our lessons were officially conversation classes, but they always drifted into architecture, cars, design, the city, the strange beauty of Silesian buildings, and the quiet humour of everyday life.
With him, the lesson was never the worksheet. It was the conversation, the wandering, the thinking aloud. The hour became something I genuinely looked forward to. Jacek — like the others — existed in that smaller, more personal world of teaching. One person, one conversation, one hour at a time.
Zosia, Joanna, Tomasz, and Jacek — I can still picture each of them as clearly as if it were yesterday. One-to-one — the part that felt human. The part that grounded me. The part that made Gliwice feel less like somewhere I lived, and more like somewhere I belonged.
Beyond these one-to-ones, there was another world I moved through each week — a world of companies rather than individuals, of conference rooms and design studios, of engineers, creatives, and entire teams who somehow became part of that belonging, too.
It was strange, exhilarating — a different kind of chaos.
One moment I was cycling across Gliwice to a tech company; the next, Pan Bronek was driving me to a firm out towards Zabrze, into a gentle in-between where the cities blur at the edges. There, I’d teach grammar from a workbook and attempt to revive the dreaded CD player under the steady, thoughtful gaze of industrial engineers who were far too polite to comment, while clearly wondering why the foreign teacher was losing a battle against basic audio equipment.
They weren’t critical, just precise.
I remember how the silence in that room was extraordinary — the kind that made every hopeful button press sound like a public announcement. I’d keep my voice bright and optimistic, narrating my attempts as if confidence alone might coax the machine into life, all while mentally preparing Plan B: to abandon the audio entirely and act out the dialogue on international business etiquette myself.
Among all those corporate clients, one company in Gliwice stands out in my memory. They nudged me toward technology, urging me to experiment, to weave new tools into my lessons in ways I’d never imagined. I’d always believed I taught them one ninety‑minute lesson a week, but an old timetable told a different story: some weeks I was there twice, swept up in the energy of it all. We were clearly having such a good time that the extra lessons simply folded themselves into the blur of those last months without me noticing.
Those evenings were full of warmth, absurdity, and creativity. And, though I didn’t realise it at the time, they helped carry me through a moment in my life when things were beginning to unravel — one of the reasons I kept going long after I should have stopped.
Ghosts to Carry, Stories to Keep 