Ghosts to Carry, Stories to Keep

The heavy art of over-preparing — just in case.

Teaching across different schools and companies meant movement, and movement meant carrying half my working life on my back.

I had a little drawer in the teachers’ room at Górnych Wałów, but it held only the essentials: Jedyna chocolate, Prince Polo bars, and my backup supply of Śląskie Szloki boiled sweets. Because I was constantly on the move, I couldn’t rely on keeping my props and teaching materials in one place. So I carried everything with me, often including two different grammar books and their matching answer keys, depending on the level of each group.

My load included worksheets, a bewildering assortment of props, my iPad, MacBook Pro, Bluetooth speaker, portable Wi-Fi unit, spare marker pens, emergency lesson plans, and the inevitable Plan B, C, and D.

I didn’t just carry my materials, either. I carried them in style, though not intentionally.

Two of my bags were gifts from friends who shopped at Gryfnie in Katowice, that wonderful little shrine to Silesian culture. One tote was printed with everyday objects labelled in Silesian, including the legendary klopsznita, the workers’ two-slice sandwich that seems to have sustained half of Upper Silesia since coal was king. The other proudly announced, also in Silesian, that I was a student at the University of Katowice. I wasn’t, of course, but the bag had academic ambitions for me.

Then there was my Chrome messenger bag, the American urban-cyclist model with the enormous seatbelt buckle, the kind that made me look as though I were about to deliver classified documents by bicycle. I hadn’t meant to look like a hipster courier, but the bag made its own decisions.

Some days I felt less like a teacher and more like a travelling technician who happened to resemble a Silesian-themed exchange student with a side gig as a bike messenger, ready to improvise at a moment’s notice. Whatever the day demanded, I carried it, literally, along with the quiet hope that Plan A would behave itself.

It was a strange kind of devotion: the weight of a working life slung over both shoulders. Yet it felt right. It felt like doing the job properly.

I still laugh at the memory of it. My colleagues would watch me sweep into the teachers’ room, unzip the bags, and begin laying out materials like a magician preparing for a trick nobody had requested. Then I’d head into lessons, where students watched me unpack the three-bag system like a travelling circus arriving in town.

Whether it was the biggest classroom in Zabrze or the tiny room at the very top of Górnych Wałów, a particular favourite despite the puffing and panting required to reach it, the reaction was always the same.

I would open my bags and their eyes would widen.

Out came the books, the props, the worksheets, the iPad, the MacBook, the portable Wi-Fi unit, the cube speaker, the emergency markers, the backup plans.

By the time everything was spread across the desk, I looked less like an English teacher and more like someone preparing to run a small independent broadcasting studio.

It is funny now.

To be honest, it was funny then as well, though at the time I was usually too out of breath to admit it.

Timing the end of a lesson became an art form. Packing everything away took time, so I used the timer on my iPhone with an audible alarm. Eventually I learned how to chop MP3 files and use fragments of song intros or odd sound effects as signals to begin packing while keeping the conversation going. I became surprisingly creative with audio cues, and sometimes the students laughed so loudly it carried into the adjacent rooms and out to the next class waiting in the corridor.

Of course, carrying so much equipment came at a price, a personal one. I knew it. I weighed it up. The lessons were working, the technology was opening doors, and I could bring almost anything into almost any classroom.

So I kept going.

Ridiculous, devoted, over-equipped.

Just like I always did.

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