"Good Teach"

A year ago, blonde Anne Waterman, fresh out of Vassar, was a little dissatisfied with the life she was leading. In Washington she heard a Polish Embassy official complain about the teacher shortage in Warsaw, and decided to help, because "I wanted to show my family that I could do something worth while."

In Warsaw, 80 Poles in tattered clothes now crowd into a dingy classroom at the bombed-out university to learn English from Anne. For nine months, she has been the only U.S. teacher at the University of Warsaw.

Between English nouns and verbs, she began trying to tell the Poles about life in the U.S. The pamphlets she got from the U.S. Embassy were of little help ("They had too much propaganda that America is wonderful. It is wonderful. But you don't throw it at the Poles that way. You lead them up to it"). Some of her pupils wanted to learn U.S. slang ("Anne is such a good teach"); others wanted to know about boogie-woogie.

Until last week the Polish Ministry of Education, which pays her way, had not interfered with what she tried to teach. But presumably she will run afoul of a new Polish law to test the party-line faithfulness of its teachers. Says Anne, who hopes she will be allowed another year on the job: "If I succeed in having even 20 Poles speak English well and understand about America, then I'll have done a good job for the first time in my life."

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