Fun times at school

A quick update on March before I leave for Berlin:

School school school. It was a really busy few weeks at school, perhaps the busiest since I’ve been here.  Last week, my 9^th graders spent a class period asking me about American high schools and their first question was “are the school busses really yellow?” – definitely an amusing couple of hours!  I’ve also had a few afternoons where I’ve subbed in for sick teachers with the upper-level kids.  It makes for long days, and my 13^th graders weren’t pleased with the work I gave them (practice exams), but the kids are always respectful and it’s cool to be able to organize class periods, even when I’m working off of a teacher’s idea. 

I’ve also helped correct some term papers recently, and got to create my 8^th graders vocabulary test for this week.  Both experiences have, once again, shown me just how much time goes into teaching outside of the classroom – correcting just one, ten-page paper in non-native and thus slightly confusing English took me well over an hour, and I wasn’t even grading, but rather just looking for mistakes and helping with overall clarity. 

Busy-ness aside, the less stressful moments with my 5^th and 6^th graders have been wonderful as usual.  This week one of my 6^th grade classes was having so much fun working on writing their own texts that they asked their teacher if they could have “another hour of English!!!” instead of switching over to history.  We were astounded and of course let them keep going. One task asked them to write me an email about things to do in Blomberg; I learned that we have TWO ice cream shops in the city and that the restaurant in the castle is supposed to be quite excellent :)

On a “school-systems-differences” aside, we were able to push the hour of history back and do another hour of English with the 6^th grade because Gymnasium teachers in Germany always have two subjects – thus, as their English teacher is also their history teacher she can rearrange the hours a bit when she wants to.  Teachers often have subjects that you’d expect to go together – English and German, or a language and history, or math and a science or bio and chem – but there are also combinations like English and biology.

Tomorrow, it’s off to Berlin, then Prague and Bamberg before heading back to Detmold for Easter.  In true German/European fashion, I’m looking forward to some more vacation time!