Precerpt from In with East Wind: A Mary Poppins Kind of Life - Czechoslovakia: Official Work
Official Work We did not have programs in Czechoslovakia even though we taught the Czech. My mission on this first trip to Prague was to acquire authentic materials for use in the classroom. (This pre-dated the Internet). Among these materials were textbooks used in the public schools, the purpose being to allow Czech language students in our content-based program to sign up for various subject matter courses, using real textbooks from Czechoslovakia with native speaker teachers from Czechoslovakia. This approach often led to classrooms that allowed our students to experience classes in physics, zoology, čítanka (reading – in this case, the fourth grade reader, which could be challenging enough for students learning Czech from scratch), among others, that closely resembled the experiences of their counterparts in Czechoslovakia. To get those books, however, meant meeting with the State Publishing House. A meeting had been set up, and I was hoping I would be able to u...