Schule Macht Spaß

“Does he REALLY speak German??”

When I went to the HTL yesterday, my dear friend and colleague Alexa told me that one of the classes asked if I could really speak German. She told them “yes, he speaks super Deutsch”, but they didn’t believe her because its my policy to speak only English during my lessons. So, I went in to teach my lesson on Martin Luther King (good stuff), she told me “this is the class that wants to hear your German”. So, I said “Ok, I’ll speak German with you in the last five or ten minutes”. Once my topic fizzled out toward the end, I just launched off into a little speech about how it is definitely possible to learn a foreign language, using my near-fluent Deutsch skills as an example. After all, all of my socializing and business outside of the school is conducted exclusively in German, so it doesn’t even feel like a strain to speak it anymore. I pointed out that some things are hard for a native speaker to explain, using some rules of German that native speakers don’t know as examples of the kinds of things you have to do when you learn. Specifically, German natives have no idea that practically every word in the language that ends with “e” is feminine. They just know it instinctively. It’s the same way with me in English. I don’t have to think “Hmm, this is an action that started in the past but is still continuing, so I need to use present perfect progressive”. [Example: “She has been waiting for 20 minutes”. This verb form does not exist in German and is therefore problematic for learners]. The rule is just there in my subconscious somehow. The students were all sort of astounded. One of them asked me if it was difficult to understand the local dialect. I prattled off a bit of Burgenlandisch, much to their amusement, and effectively answered the question. IE, I’ve been here listening to the vernacular long enough that I get it now. I don’t usually SPEAK it, because it makes me sound like an Austrian redneck (I’m a redneck of the American variety, thank you very much), but I can understand it pretty well. You get used to it if you’re surrounded by it. This was all great fun, and hopefully something of a motivation for them to work at their own foreign language skills. This stuff fascinates me. If linguistics wasn’t such a dry and pseudo-scientific subject, I might consider studying it further. Trust me, once you’ve heard some of the studies they’ve done and arguments they make, you’d probably be turned off too.

“What’s an outline?”

My 8th form class in the Gymnasium is preparing to take an English test tomorrow. Their tests last about three hours, consisting of a listening comprehension section, reading comprehension and short answers, and finally a relatively lengthy essay. We have been working with the topics “the American dream” and “the media” for what feels like ages. I decided it would be a good idea to do some free-writing activities and outlines to get them thinking about the writing process and their topics. So, we started of with some “mind maps” or “thought clusters” or whatever the hell you want to call it. This is a helpful start to the writing process, allowing the free flow of topics and thoughts unhindered by organization and detail. It’s a great idea that is heavily taught in American schools and has helped my own writing on several occasions. The students had never heard of it. After doing a couple of mind maps, I moved into the next step: outlining. To my astonishment, they had never heard of this either! Maybe I’m feeling over-confident, but I think this may have been one of my most useful lessons ever, since the whole concept of pre-writing activities saved my academic career several times over. I will never forget my high school English teacher, Donna Hynes, and her comments on the three parts of an essay: “Introduction: Tell them what you’re going to tell them. Body: Tell them. Conclusion: Tell them what you told them”. [Note to Grandma and Grandpa: Tell Donna I say “Thank you!” and let her know that her insight is being spread to a new generation in a foreign country]. I told my students this, made a short example of an outline with these three crucial pieces, and got them doing their own. I also told them that these are great strategies for any piece of academic writing they may have to do, and it could easily work in any language. I really think that this will improve their chances on the test tomorrow. I’m very curious to see if the Direktor might notice an improvement in the grades. He wasn’t there today, so I was teaching on my own again, but I’ll have tell him tomorrow what I did and see what he thinks after he grades the exams. Sometimes, the satisfaction of teaching really does make up for the lousy pay.