Alles Neu

So, I haven't posted here in over a week. I've had internet access; I just haven't had either anything particularly interesting happening to me or the desire to write about nothing in particular. But now I do! I wrote a list in school today, an actual list of things to talk about on my blog. Like, for example, the fact that I had to make a list of things to talk about on my blog. Or the fact that I was in school today.

So, let's see ... school is awesome. I have a 5th grade class, an 8th grade class, a 9th grade class, two 11th grade classes, and a 13th grade class regularly. The others I will occasionally sit in on, but I don't do as much with them. I'm really enjoying working with the students on my own. Usually I'll get a group of five or six kids and, while the teacher is doing the lesson in one room, I'm doing either the same thing or a conversation group with my kids in another room. This makes me like a special vacation to the kids, who are eager to get out of the classroom where they spend the day for any reason. Everyone wants to go hang out with Raychel. Yeah.

So, I sometimes get to plan my lessons. Like for one lesson, my co-teacher was talking about magazines -- just magazines in general, and how they're different reading material than books or newspapers. An hour before the class starts, he's like, "Would you like to take a group and do your own lesson on magazines?" You betcha! I was on that like syrup on waffles. What we did was this: first, we brainstormed all the magazine titles we could think of. My students named them and I wrote them on the board. This was actually kinda funny, because there were a lot of titles that I didn't know (being not German and all) and they kept having to explain it all to me. Then we talked about what sort of things are in a typical magazine -- cover, table of contents, articles, letters to the editor, advertisements, fashion shoot pictures, yada yada ... This is all pretty normal stuff to do in a class. But then we played this fun game: I had the students rip pictures out of some magazines I'd brought (all sorts of pictures - old men, pretty ladies, babies, weird guys in outlandish swimsuits), then I posted them around the room and asked the students to go around looking at them all. I said, "Okay, imagine that you have to spend one weekend in Braunschweig with one of these people. Who would it be?" and then I had them go stand by their choices. Of course, there was a huddle of boys around the pretty lady picture. Us talking about this decision went like this:

Me: "Okay, so why did you choose her?"
Boy: *with laughter* "Well, it's obvious ...."
Me: *i'm-waiting look*
Boy: "She is very ... uh ... beautiful." *and we're all laughing*
... at this point I'm just getting a kick out of the fact that he's shy about his choice, so I press on.

Me: "And what are you going to do on your weekend together?"
Boy and friends: *increasingly childish laughter at what we all know is the first answer to jump to mind.*
Me: *i'm-waiting look*
Boy: "I would take her swimming."

I genuinely did not expect this answer, and it cracked me up. So, I laughed, he laughed, everyone laughed, and we had a good time. After that exercise we did another one where students read an article in pairs, then one member of the pair rotated groups. The new person had 60 seconds to explain to the person who stayed seated (in English) the plot of what they just read. More switching of places and 60 second explainations lead to a kind of fast-paced loud game of Telephone. At the end I had people tell me what they learned from the other articles, and the result was also funny. The lesson plan itself wasn't actually brilliant, but we did have fun and I did get my students talking the entire hour, which is pretty tough to do with older students. The older they get, the more reluctant they get to talk and play games. It makes it hard to be a language teacher and not just resort to worksheets all the time. Bo-ring. So, I guess what I'm saying is that I had a lesson plan that really made me proud of myself at the end of the day because 1) they spoke the language, 2) they heard me speak the language, and 3) we all came out smiling. English doesn't have to be torture! Hooray!

Speaking of speaking the language, I get made fun of so much for the way I talk here. Not by Germans, mind you: by other English speakers. I hang out with people from England, and at least once a day (on a day that we all meet up), they will laugh at something I say that is "American". Like "tomato". It's not "tuh-MAY-toh", apparently, but "tuh-MAH-toh". Oh! Or the way I say "dig this" which is, admittedly, really more of an idiosyncracy than an American thing, but still ... oh, and don't even get me started on the way we pronounce the Dreaded D-Word, the tasty late night meal of lamb and yogurt sauce on pita bread -- the döner/donner. I have been told that I say this word "wrong", and that it is physically painful to at least one of my English friends to hear it my way. That's okay, though. I don't mind. I just call it "soccer" instead of "football" and watch them all freak out. >:-)