Teaching in Rostock Updates!

Wow, have I been busy! Teaching an intensive course for 7 weeks is taking it's toll! I'm really rather getting the hang of it though. We have quite the little routine. Warmer, review the grammar we did yesterday, new grammar lesson, textbook activities and then English trivia or music quiz with the occasional test or field trip thrown in. My life is sort of boring as all I talk about is teaching or looking for a flat, which is all I do lately. I'm quite looking forward to just sleeping an entire week when I'm done, sitting around on the internet in my pajamas, drinking tea, watching horrible TV and cooking the extravagant meals I haven't had time to cook with this job!

Speaking of teaching, I've collected a few good anecdotes. First, during a lesson on modal verbs, I had my students write "Dear Abby" letters asking for advice and then I switched the letters and had them answer each other using "should", "could", etc. I have the younger class. I'd say most of my nine students are in their early 20s or 30s. Hence, these were the result:

"Dear Abby, I want to be an erotic film star, but my friends say I am too square to do this. They tell me I should be an erotic film producer instead. What should I do?"

"Dear X, I think you should be an erotic film star and then afterwards you can produce erotic films if this doesn't work. After both, you'll be so horny you could do anything!"

*and*

‎"Dear Abby, Every time I go to school I get beaten up by six very tall boys. I have a very big mother and I think it's because I'm ugly. I'm very tired of this, what should I do?"

"Dear X, I think they are right. You should go to the doctor and get a new face. After this maybe this problem won't happen anymore. I hope this advice could help you."

We've been working on thus huge list of vocabulary for the past few weeks that the students are supposed to know by the end of the course. Yesterday to switch things up I decided to send them on a scavenger hunt throughout Rostock in teams to take pictures of as many items in their list as possible and label them with the English words they relate to. I thought this would be a good activity before our vocabulary test that we had today. Anyway, here are some more beauties:

collision

suicide

So that is that. Two weeks left and eight teaching days (the next two weeks are only four days each). I'm definitely excited to get back to Berlin, but my trip to Rostock has been a better experience than I expected and I think this was exactly what I needed to do. Just looking at myself at the beginning of the course and now I see a big difference. Before the course I was having teaching nightmares and now it only really takes me 30 minutes to an hour per night to prepare for my class. Though there are definitely things I would do differently now in retrospect and things I need to work on, I feel like I've become a much more confident teacher and person because of it all. So there!

Next on the list is to find a long-term flat in Berlin...wish me luck! I am so over flat searching!