I'll never forget the first day of teaching my third year advanced group. A Polish colleague accompanied me to class and proceeded to lecture the 15 young men, in Polish, on how they were expected to behave toward me. I didn't understand all of it. What I did understand sounded fairly condescending. I think they agreed with my assessment since they were all lined up against the back of the room glowering at me and my colleague. So it was up to me to win them over after she left. My relationship with my students was much more informal than was the case with the average Polish teacher. This was partly by accident. When confronted with a long list of Polish names to read out for roll, I found it virtually impossible to stumble over first and last names while maintaining any sense of professional decorum. Of course, the students found this incredibly amusing. I quickly adopted a policy of using first names and when even these were too cumbersome, I used their nicknames. I ended up becoming quite close to my first group of pilots. When they were assigned a different English teacher the following year, they went to the head of the department to complain. I still correspond with several of them.