My first class today was a 12 grade class that I know pretty well. I've been with them at least twice a week for the past 2 or 3 weeks. I've done one lesson on my own with them before, but it was basically a worksheet the teacher gave me with the questions already written there. So I pretty much had nothing to do with creating the lesson, I just carried it out. Well, for today's lesson, I was given the text again, but the actual lesson was left up to me.
To give you a little background, the text was about "smart" appliances, or how unnecessary they can sometimes be (e.g. a refrigerator that can tell you when it's out of milk). So we did the regular read-the-article-out-loud-in-class, go-over-vocab, talk-about-the-mood-of-the-author, give-examples-of-devices-used, etc. The thing that I love about this class (because lets face it, they are definitely my favorite class so far...) is that they all are so enthusiastic about participating! Even if no one offers up an answer right away, if you call on someone, they will speak. Which, I have found, is not always the case.
My "fun part" of the lesson was to create their own "smart appliance", draw a picture, give it a name, and write a description trying to sell it using 3 of the 5 vocab words. I was nervous that they wouldn't really get into the creative part, but they all responded really well! As I walked around the classroom to help them, I saw things like "the automatic board cleaner", "the cat washer" (which involved catching a cat with a mechanical arm and scrubbing it against a wash board), a few house-cleaning machines (including a broom with wheels and a full-on maid robot), the "super-duper-unbelievably-outstanding-marks machine" (a pair of glasses and bracelet to wear to school which help you always understand the texts you're reading and make sure you always write down the correct answer. The students also notified us that the upgrade would be released next year with in a contacts version). My favorite two (and by favorite, I mean most controversial/never would have been allowed in the states) were the "beer-and-more-o-matic" and the "woman translator".
Not that the idea of the Woman Translator would have been a bad one back home, but while presenting it they gave examples of a few translations. "If a woman says 'It's cold here', she means 'give me your jacket', if she says 'I want to go shopping', she means 'give me money'," etc. it was all pretty funny, but the real kicker was at the end. If you are easily offended by language, just go ahead and skip to the next paragraph... Their last example of a translation was "if a woman says she has a headache, what she really means is, 'I don't want to fuck tonight'." OMG. I can't imagine any setting back home in which that would be ok for a presentation! The class all laughed, but not the "I'm laughing because that was inappropriate" (the kind you would get in the States), just the "lol, that's funny" kind of laugh. The teacher was sitting right there and didn't say anything, so I just closed my eyes, had a good chuckle to myself, and pretended it never happened.
The "beer-and-more-o-matic" didn't have quite the shocking presentation, it was just the concept alone that would be an automatic no-no in an American classroom. "BEER?!" *gasp* Then again, these students can legally drink beer, whereas in the states, no high schooler is old enough to. The beer-and-more-o-matic was the perfect party machine: it brought you more beers, cleaned up after you, played music and had a deluxe version that would take your trash out.
Overall, it was a very entertaining class period for me and, I think, for the students as well! I was really pleased with their creativity and excited about their enthusiasm! :D Go team.
My next class was a 5th grade class. Adorable! I'd never been to this class before, so I didn't do any planning. First of all, I would just like to say how impressed I was with their language abilities! They can't have had much more than a year of English (if that!) and the entire lesson was conducted in English. The kids would often ask questions in Germans, and the teacher would sometimes repeat instructions in German, but otherwise, everything was in English. It makes me wish we had more options to start foreign languages at a younger age in the States. In the lesson, they were just learning how to use question words (who, what, where, etc.), so they were split up into groups of 6 and, group by group, were sent into the hall to interview me and figure out who I was (I wasn't introduced at all before hand, to help this exercise). It was really adorable! The first question from every group was "what is your name?", only one of the 6 groups asked for my last name as well. I thought it was pretty funny that almost all their 2nd questions were "how old are you?" The best part, however, was that only after a string of favorites (food, movie, song, color, number, outfit, among others) did they finally ask me where I was from :-p
My favorite question, that I only got from the last couple groups, was "Do you have a friend?" Sounds pretty depressing in English. "Well, I'm not even going to bother asking if you have friendS, because you obviously would only have one anyway, but I still have to ask if you have even ONE because I'm skeptical." Fortunately, knowing a little German myself, I knew that wasn't what they were thinking (umm... at least I hope not!) I knew their German question was "hast du einen Freund?" which literally does translate to "do you have a friend?", but the word "Freund" also means "boyfriend." There is really no clear way to differentiate in German whether "Freund" is supposed to mean "boyfriend" or "friend," it's mostly just contextually understood (well, there are idiomatic ways of differentiating, but I won't go into that). So when I got these questions, after quietly laughing to myself at the accidental and completely innocent demeaning question, I would repeat "do I have a boyfriend?"
And such is the life of the German English Teaching Assistant.
1 comment:
That's hilarious. Just shows how high-strung our education is here. Maybe we would actually enjoy learning, or learn more, if the environment was entertaining like that. :) Congrats on teaching them too!
Post a Comment