To start off, here is a picture of a beautiful, ivy-covered house that Libby and I saw while walking around in the neighborhood near our host school!

The first class we observed today was a 7th grade English class with a teacher we have met a few times. She has been really friendly and has even invited us to visit her hometown of Lüneburg one day after school. In her class, this teacher had more control and used stronger classroom management than most of the teachers we have seen. She called students down when they were talking and forcefully repeated instructions when students did not act on them. In this class, we split up into three groups or stations and Libby, the teacher, and I rotated among the three groups during class. The teacher had a certain worksheet to discuss with her groups. She provided Libby with a discussion sheet related to introductions and talking about the places from which each person comes. The teacher gave me a discussion sheet related to discussing different holidays and celebrations. She also gave Libby and me sheets that would help us create groups so that students could practice writing situational dialogues relating to awkward situations in which one would have to apologize. (For example, one of the situations on my handout was one in which a woman asks her friend how her boyfriend is doing. The second woman responds that he is not her boyfriend anymore, to which the first replies that this is a good thing since she thought he was a little weird. The second woman then responds that he – the boyfriend being discussed – is now her husband.) I really appreciated that this teacher planned an activity that really allowed us to be involved. We will be in her class again on Friday, and we are planning similar discussions surrounding the topics of shopping and meeting new people. The teacher will prepare a discussion relating to eating dinner at the table. These students will travel to England in June, so helping them feel comfortable in these situations will be really important!

Libby and I walked to Bergedorf for lunch and tried out the highly recommended Jim Block burger joint. It was a little funny to have an all-American lunch of a burger (not called hamburgers here actually), fries (pommes), and a coke while in Germany, but it was very tasty!

The second class we attended was the same class we had before in which they discussed the Fire of London, but it was with a different teacher. Also, this class was an English class instead of a history class, but we certainly discussed politics a lot! This teacher had developed a unit on African-American experiences for the class since the textbook did not cover this. The students listened to America the Beautiful, My Country 'Tis of Thee, and Formation (by Beyoncé), and they read Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream Speech," among other things. The also read about the recent events of Ferguson, Missouri and the Michael Brown case. Libby and I introduced ourselves, and began answering any questions the students had. Libby stayed for a good while of the class, but she had to leave early to get back home for an electronic job interview. I spent the rest of class answering the students' questions, and they still had more after 90 minutes when class ended. This was honestly really fun for me. The students asked incredibly complex and controversial questions. One student asked why prostitution was illegal in the U.S. but the porn industry wasn't, and we discussed the Puritan (I called it Judeo-Christian) heritage and cultural foundation of the U.S. Another student asked whether I thought that the U.S. participated in terrorism (and later commented that the U.S. had trained future Taliban members). Other students asked why the United States has negative feelings against Russia, whether I had met any Amish people, and what we learn in history classes in the U.S. Several students came up to me after class to ask a few lingering questions. These students are so engaged in politics and are unafraid to form critical perspectives. I am not sure about how well they can challenge their own perspectives yet, but the very fact that they were asking informed questions about these issues was impressive and pretty inspiring. I also really love how this teacher encourages her students to think about challenging topics and pushes them to think about issues as being more complicated than a simple “black or white" understanding. We will return to this class next Tuesday to talk about comparisons between the German and American political systems, and I am very much looking forward to participating in this discussion and learning about German politics!

This evening I had the pleasure of visiting with members of the Moravian Church in Hamburg. Stefan generously offered to come pick me up in Wentorf since he and my host mom had determined that taking public transit there would be very complicated. We talked during the drive over, and he pointed out some things in Hamburg as we drove by them. I told him that we had visited Neuengamme this past weekend, and at one point, he told me that some of the buildings we were passing were built from bricks that were produced at Neuengamme. Stefan also mentioned a documentary that discussed American Nazis, and I realized that I had never considered the fact that there were, of course, Nazis in the U.S. as well. Once we arrived at the church, Stefan showed me around, and several of the congregation members began to arrive. As I mentioned already, the Moravian Church is quite small in the Hamburg area, so the congregation shares a church with a Lutheran Church (photos included below). One of the members of the Lutheran congregation (they really meet together) who is considering becoming a pastor joined us for the evening. There were nine of us in total who gathered together. I hadn’t realized that our get together was organized as a special meeting, but it was so heartwarming to know that the people I met came out on a Tuesday night just because a fellow Moravian wanted to meet up with them! I showed pictures of my home church (Kernersville Moravian), Winston-Salem (mostly God’s Acre at Easter), the 2015 Moravian Young Adult Convo trip to Prague and Herrnhut, and KMC’s mission trip to Peru. I also shared greetings and blessings from KMC’s pastor, John Rights, and the pastor of one of the Peruvian churches, Walter Calle Peralta, and warm messages were extended back to these brothers and sisters as well. I felt so welcomed, and I am so fortunate that all of this came together so that I was able to meet these wonderful people.

An interesting concept one of the Moravian congregation members mentioned was the fact that Europeans who speak different languages often use English as a lingua franca, which is nice because they feel like they don’t have to obey the rules since it’s not their first language.