School Exchange

As I mentioned, last week Jarrett and I visited each others’ schools, as I have Mondays free and he’s off on Tuesdays.  After the two days, I had the feeling that things are far more similar between our schools than I’d anticipated.  Over in Oerlinghausen, they’ve also got a cramped staff room and rowdy (in American terms, unacceptably loud) kids!  Jarrett also seems to be used pretty much the same way I am; sometimes he’s just in a class and helping kids with work, other times he’s leading a special lesson on a US topic – last week, it was US geography with the little ones. 

Mondays is his AG (basically a lunch-time extracurricular extra lesson in English), so we did a swearing lesson with them based on materials I’d used before with another class.  It was a group of 7 ninth-grade boys, so they were a little wild, but did genuinely see the reason behind us doing an entire lesson on swearing – they didn’t have a sense of how offensive some words are, but I really think they did by the end of the lesson. 

The next day, it was really cool to have him at my school and see how the kids reacted.  My 9^th graders were pretty normal, but one of my 6^th grade classes seemed quite fascinated by him, and spent a good bit of time asking him questions.  My 5^th graders were even more intrigued, and spent literally the whole class period asking him everything from “What’s your favorite class in school” to “Are you rich?”… we let the teacher tell them that’s not actually an apprpriate question to ask someone, but it was a bit funny nonetheless!