After a week of relaxing, it was time to start with the hard graft - not that my first week of work was exactly hard graft! My job for the first few days was basically to introduce myself to what felt like every class in both of the schools which I'm working in. Let me tell you that after the tenth round of "How old are you?", "What's your favourite colour?", and "Which do you prefer: Twilight or Harry Potter?", answering questions about yourself starts to get old. (It started to get old after the first round to be honest, but I could at least feign interest for a while). The kids were very friendly though and, as I'm teaching in two Gymnasiums (Germany and Austria have three different types of secondary school for students of different abilities, and the Gymnasium is the equivalent of a British grammar school), very bright - some of the students in the older classes speak English better than I will ever speak German (I think some of them speak English better than me!).
My two schools are very different, in one the teachers practically fight over me (I quite regularly have three of them wanting me to teach a lesson at the same time) whereas at the other they don't seem that bothered and quite often don't want me to teach at all (which is fairly annoying given that it takes me forty five minutes to get there). However, the students are lovely in both schools, and I had some real comedy moments even in the first two weeks: highlights have to be being asked to swear in front of a class by a teacher (when I said that it was the only way I could do a northern accent), and the lesson about dreams during which a student said, sounding very disappointed "I don't have liquid dreams." (He meant lucid. He will never make that mistake again. Nor will he ever live it down.)
As if introducing myself to a load of foreign kids wasn't enough, Weeks 2 and 3 were the weeks in which I started making friends which meant, of course, more introductions. Making friends on your Year Abroad, given the limited amount of time, is usually anything but natural. In fact, it generally involves a good dollop of Facebook stalking, followed by some slightly desperate-sounding messages and then a little Freshers' Week-esque (i.e. awkward) conversation. Now I hated Freshers' Week, so I wasn't too keen on the awkward conversation stage, which took place over coffee one Saturday about two weeks into my time here, but obviously I did something right because the next day I was meeting two of the other teaching assistants, Hannah and Christina, for ice-skating. Perhaps this wasn't the best idea, given my track record of ice-skating, but the setting in front of the Rathaus was beautiful, and I only fell over once. (It may have been the only time I let go of the wall, but it did only happen once).
My two schools are very different, in one the teachers practically fight over me (I quite regularly have three of them wanting me to teach a lesson at the same time) whereas at the other they don't seem that bothered and quite often don't want me to teach at all (which is fairly annoying given that it takes me forty five minutes to get there). However, the students are lovely in both schools, and I had some real comedy moments even in the first two weeks: highlights have to be being asked to swear in front of a class by a teacher (when I said that it was the only way I could do a northern accent), and the lesson about dreams during which a student said, sounding very disappointed "I don't have liquid dreams." (He meant lucid. He will never make that mistake again. Nor will he ever live it down.)
As if introducing myself to a load of foreign kids wasn't enough, Weeks 2 and 3 were the weeks in which I started making friends which meant, of course, more introductions. Making friends on your Year Abroad, given the limited amount of time, is usually anything but natural. In fact, it generally involves a good dollop of Facebook stalking, followed by some slightly desperate-sounding messages and then a little Freshers' Week-esque (i.e. awkward) conversation. Now I hated Freshers' Week, so I wasn't too keen on the awkward conversation stage, which took place over coffee one Saturday about two weeks into my time here, but obviously I did something right because the next day I was meeting two of the other teaching assistants, Hannah and Christina, for ice-skating. Perhaps this wasn't the best idea, given my track record of ice-skating, but the setting in front of the Rathaus was beautiful, and I only fell over once. (It may have been the only time I let go of the wall, but it did only happen once).
