As ever, Monday was spent preparing for tutoring, which mainly involved making lists of animals and creating worksheets, including one about what sounds different animals make.
Tuesday, of course, I was at work. In my first class, I taught the kids the elephant song that I translated last week. This meant singing. Alone. In front of people. That’s not a thing that I do. But the kids applauded, so I think that’s a good sign. Then they continued with the endless worksheets about house and home.
In my second lesson, the kids were learning about the seasons still, and to be honest, there’s not a fat lot for me to do when they’re mainly colouring in. And then in my third lesson, I brought out my pictures of wild animals again, and got into an argument about whether the snake was a rattlesnake. (Answer: No, it was a boa constrictor.)
On Wednesday my first two lessons were about wild animals. The first was with 1/2b who wanted to know what my favourite animal is and I panicked, so my official favourite animal in Germany is the lion. (I’ve been talking to too many Gryffindors, obvs.) For reference, my current favourite animal is actually the bison. Or baby sloths. In the second with 4d/e, they just wanted to know if I’d taken the photos. Which I had. Apparently having gone to a zoo with a camera makes me cool.
My fourth class had been split up because there were so many teachers ill, so I ended up helping out with maths in 1/2b. Maths with the 1/2 classes is so much easier than maths with the 3/4 classes. I wonder why… And my final class was cancelled because the English teacher was ill, so I got to go home early.
At tutoring we were doing about animals, which was lots of fun, especially as Luka has a stack of animal books. And as some of them were in Serbian I got to attempt to speak Serbian. Eastern European languages, man. They look and sound so pretty. The kids also got very jealous when they discovered I go to McDonalds on a Wednesday after tutoring and wanted me to take them with me. Which seeing as one of the servers now always speaks to me in English could, technically, be classed as part of English tutoring…
Thursday I had German on the computers with 3/4c. I had to explain what vowels were about eight times. And one of them got all giggly because a word they had to find in the wordsearch was ‘doof’ (stupid). And I told the teacher I’m not having one the kids in the computer room again, because she never does any work.
My first class on Friday was dealing with wild animals again and how to describe them. It turns out I know nothing about where animals live. Did you know ostriches aren’t Australian? I was genuinely shocked.
My second class involved singing the elephant song a record six times, telling one of the boys that yes, they could draw a secret lab in their dream house but only if they labelled it in English, and admitting to one of the girls that I had no idea how to spell latte macchiato. She was unconvinced by my reasoning that it was probably the same in German and English because it’s a loan word.
My third class was cancelled because, again, the teacher was ill, so early weekend for me. Because I am a true party animal, I went home and marathoned season three of True Blood.
On Saturday I was up at 7.30 because I was being picked up at 8.30 for a trip to Jena with one of my colleagues and her husband. 7.30 is not a time I often see on a Saturday. But we went to Jena and to the planetarium, which was pretty cool, except for the part where I fell asleep and missed a few minutes of the presentation… But, it was all fine. We then went to a shopping centre that I want to go back to. My colleague asked if we had such big shopping centres in England, and I was like, the Bullring is so much bigger than this.
Then we met up with one of her cousins, who gave us a short tour of Jena and a crash course in the Romantics and philosophers of Jena, which was really interesting though a little confusing. Basics, Goethe and Schiller are important people. Despite them never ever ever being mentioned in any lectures I’ve ever been in ever. I kinds feel like this is the equivalent of doing an English Lit degree and Shakespeare never being mentioned. Which is possible.
We were invited back to her cousins house, where he thoroughly he embarrassed his son by trying to get him to talk to me in English. Adults of the world: don’t do this to your kids. Just don’t. If we’re confident enough in our other language to attempt it, we will. And if we’re not, then you telling us to speak it will just make us blush.
After so much German and such an early start, I ended up going to bed at like half nine. Which worried my colleague and her husband a little (I was staying over at theirs), despite the fact that I’d explained several time that nonstop German was super tiring. Ah well.
Next day we went swimming and to a Chinese restaurant, which was all kinds of good. Never actually been to a Chinese restaurant before. New experiences, yay. Then they took me home, and I spent the rest of the day mentally making a list of all the things I should be doing and actually finishing of season three of True Blood. I’m so good at this being an adult thing.
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