First Day of Work

I started bright and early at 7:45 this morning. I went to four class hours today and I'm going to four on Monday - theoretically that means I am already one-third of the way done with my required work. Apparently this job is really what you make of it. It can be a total joke and you don't do anything - or it can be a really good experience and you really learn a lot about teaching and all of that. Luckily, my Betreeungslehrerin really seems excited about me being here and really flexible about what I am going to do. We're supposed to sit down on Tuesday and look at all of the English teachers' schedules and figure out what classes I want to work with and when. I'm really hoping that I can get two days free. They're required to give us one day off per week - but if I could get two days off - like Friday and Monday or Monday Tuesday or Thursday Friday that would be FANTASTIC. Just think how much more travel time I will get. And really - if it is going to keep raining here EVERY FREAKING DAY - I'll need to get out of here at some point. Other than the stupid rain, I like Ilmenau a lot.

The first class I went to today was a double period of twelfth grade Leistungskurs (these are the top English kids in the school). I did a little introduction of myself and then I answered questions. The amusing part was that they had gotten to see my transcript and course lists and CV type thing that I had written - so they started asking me about why I had taken Japanese. So I basically ended up teaching an entire lesson about the three different Japanese writing systems. And then of course, all the students in the next English class heard, and so on, and so I basically taught people Japanese for four hours. Funny how I thought I was going to be teaching English here.

In the second half of the double period, I did a little "teaching". Not really. They were doing some vocabulary work and they wanted me to read the words out so they could hear the American English pronunciation of them. They are learning about characterization so they have this 280 word list of words to do with talking about people. I got a copy myself - which was very useful because I don't know the German equivalents of most of them myself. They are reading "The Old Man and the Sea" in class - which I actually have never read - so I helped out a little bit with that as well.

The second class was an 11th grade Leistungskurs - and they spent a period and a half asking me questions. One girl was definitely asking the hard ones. I got asked "What do you think of George Bush?", "What do you think of Arnold Schwarzenegger?" and some other exciting ones like that. We definitely got a bit of a lecture at orientation about sort of sidestepping those questions - so it was lovely to be asked them on the first day.

Famous People in my Classes: Max's father is both a world and Olympic champion in the bobsled - and now he does skeleton. Impressive eh?