Day 4, Tuesday – “I am happy today"
My older host brother is still just learning to speak English, so he knows some phrases and vocabulary words, just as I know in German. Today, when I came home from school, he greeted me, asking, “How are you?" in English, and I responded that I was fine and asked how he was. He responded, as he sometimes does, with, “I am happy today." This struck me as something quite sweet today as I am realizing how little time I have here and as I realize that I too am happy today. Life goes on even after a shocking and disappointing buzzer-beater.
As I write this blog post, my older host brother and his friend Noah are intermittently calling me into the other room to teach me and quiz me on German words, and then they send me back into my room whenever they run out of things to ask.
Today at our host school, Libby and I attended two classes again. The first class was about culture wars (in the U.S. specifically I believe), and it was an IB class of 12th graders who are attending their last week of class. The students discussed a difficult article about socialism and capitalism that they read in preparation for their Abitur exams. They then got into partners and then jigsaw-type groups to share research that they had conducted on different aspects of American polity such as foreign policy, the current Democratic and Republican candidates, gun control policy, and women’s rights movements. These presentations were impressive as students seemed to do fairly thorough and unbiased (more unbiased than I would expect to see in a U.S. classroom – perhaps being removed from the U.S. political atmosphere helps with this) research that demonstrated their efforts to truly understand the topics. I was able to sit in a circle with one of the jigsaw groups during this activity, and I shared a few comments in between their presentations. After each student had presented, the students were allowed to ask me questions about the United States, and they seemed very eager to do so. Almost all of their questions were political, and many were related to the presidential election. The first question they asked me was who my favorite candidate is and what my political leanings are (straight to the point here whereas this is a more taboo question in the U.S.). They also asked me if I thought that Trump would really be the Republican nominee and what I thought would happen if he became president. One student asked me if I “felt the Bern." The students also wanted to know how schools were different in the U.S. and Germany (I obviously had the same question since I traveled here 😃 ). One of the girls in the group discussed spending a year in Arkansas and said that she noticed teachers sharing, or even kind of indoctrinating students, with their political views. Another girl referred to Trump’s candidacy as the “Trump crisis," which made the other students laugh, but this particular phrasing did not sound so out of the ordinary to me. I really enjoyed talking with the students about U.S. culture from my perspective and hearing what the students wanted to know about U.S. culture.
Another interesting thing that happened in this class was that, just a few minutes after the teacher had introduced Libby and me, the class had a brief discussion about how to pronounce “schism." The teacher said that the British pronunciation was “shism" and clarified with Libby and me that the American pronunciation was “skism." The student using the word then said, “Of course, then, I will say ‘shism.’" I was not sure exactly what the student meant by this because he was respectful during the rest of the class, but the comment seemed a little discourteous.
The next class that we attended was with Konrad again as he taught a history class to 6th graders. I really appreciated the fact that Konrad (and assuredly other teachers as well) teach students at such a variety of ages. The students were learning about ancient Greek, doing a “stations" activity using materials from a book focused on building students’ competencies through content knowledge rather than on building specific content knowledge. This sixth grade classroom had lockers and bags for each student, and student were growing small plants in the window such as paprika. One student went over to water the plants toward the end of class.
I have a few more school-related observations to share from the day:
- The students in each class all seem to be engaged (i.e. there are no kids sleeping in the back or just looking out of the window). Not all students participate voluntarily, but they do seem to be paying attention. This may not be true, but I think that the fact that the teachers change rooms instead of the students could have something to do with this. First of all, students are not distracted, flustered, or disorganized by the transition of changing classrooms, which may leave them more prepared to learn. Also, this practice may change the way students think about learning. With the teachers changing rooms, it is as if the teachers are bringing something to the students. Perhaps the students are ready to listen more because lessons are presented as if teachers bring something to offer the students with them into the classroom. Alternatively, in the United States, it may feel more like students are pushed from class to class and forced to do tasks in each class before they are pushed to the next activity.
- We observed today that Konrad often talks over the students (especially with the sixth graders), almost yelling at times even. Upon further reflection this seems to be an international trend relating to teacher gender. In my experience, male teachers are more likely to yell over students while female teachers are more likely to try intentional expressions, timers, or an “I’ll wait" approach to silence students.
- Libby and I also discussed today why America seems to be the country to which every other country compares itself; it seems like it is the “it" country, if you will. I say this without conceit, as it was a somewhat surprising observation. In the first class we attended, students were quite interested in our political news and followed it quite closely. They also had a fairly extensive knowledge of our political system and processes. Libby and I observed that we do not study any one other country this much in depth in the U.S. Perhaps this is how foreign language classes should be in a more ideal situation, but I think it would be more practical to split this into two classes – one for language and one for culture. We thought this emphasis on the U.S. in Germany might be because of the extensive presence of the American media (in the news, movies, music, etc.) or because our national history is quite short relatively. Libby also suggested that it might be because of the circumstances under which our country was founded – in rebellion and opposition to the general inertia of the preceding European history.
After school, Libby and I walked to Bergedorf again and bought some lunch from a small place called Ditsch. I had salami pizza in a kind of box or sleeve (or “pizza in a box," as Libby and I called it) and a soft pretzel-type bread with a lot of cheese on it. We also bought some Italian ice cream (mine was Tiramisu flavored), which was delicious. I have included a few photos below of our excursion to Bergedorf.
I took a nice long nap because of the UNC game last night, and then my host parents and I enjoyed some Chinese food for a late dinner.
