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!

Country-kid Fireworks

       "'Stop here,' David said suddenly. 'Pull ahead just a little, so the headlights are pointing up into the field. Now turn off the headlights.'
       The field sparkled with what must have been millions of fireflies--the most I've ever seen in one place. They'd probably brought their families from adjacent states into this atrazine-free zone. They blinked densely, randomly, an eyeful of frenzied stars.
       'Just try something,' David said. 'Flash the headlights one time, on and off.'
       What happened next was surreal. After our bright flash the field went black, and then, like a wave, a million lights flashed back at us in unison.
       Whoa. To convince ourselves this was not a social hallucination, we did it again. And again. Hooting every time, so pleased were we with our antics. It's a grand state of affairs, to fool a million brainless creatures all at the same time. After five or six rounds the fireflies seemed to figure out that we were not their god, or they lost their faith, or at any rate went back to their own blinky business.
       David chuckled. 'Country-kid fireworks.'"
                             -- Barbara Kingsolver (Animal. Vegetable. Miracle.)


I'm sort of excited for things like this to exist in my life soon, though, of course, now that my departure is imminent, I'm not having such a hard time here in Prague. Granted, I've only been in this wonderful mood since Thanksgiving, but I've felt pretty good about my lessons this week, had a great weekend and maybe even feel like I'm starting to get the hang of teaching. Figures.

Last night was spent with good friends and free sangria, and again, sometimes I just feel an overwhelming sense of pride in myself for getting here, for finding myself in a place surrounded by so many inspiring people. Even though I'm leaving, I worked hard to learn the ropes these several months. The TEFL course was probably one of the hardest and most intimidating things I've ever done and I survived it with a strong pass. While most of the time I feel like I've no idea what I'm doing in the classroom, the number of days I feel good about my lessons is slowly increasing. Recently, I've even started to notice my students using words or grammar concepts I taught them, which would induce a motherly sense of pride in any girl...if my students weren't mostly middle-aged men with children of their own. No Matter.

Regardless, Prague will always be here and I feel generally confident that this is what I need in my life right now. I was always bad at goodbyes. Awfully bad at them for someone who seems to thrive on this constant motion, propelled towards each new place though it may only be some blurry silhouette of a plan on the horizon.

"Shit, I got a gallery in New York"

I would like to take a moment to point out some of the (I think) more hilarious artwork in one of my lesson plans, that I am still proud of somehow. This was for my second one-to-one lesson ever, during my TEFL course in August. Can you guess what the lesson was on? (The Amish). Even better, can you guess what vocabulary words I'm trying to elicit/teach from the reading based on the pictures? Probably not. I'll help you.

The top left is to demonstrate the noun "buggy". Nevermind that the horse is twice as big as the buggy. Those Amish know how to feed 'em. The next to the right is "to tolerate". No, those aren't boobs. How do you draw a stick figure crossing its arms, anyway? Bottom left with the swords, crazy eyes and psychotic hair is "to persecute". Did you get that? Last to the right is "appliances". I'm especially proud of my electric tea kettle. It may be one of the best things I've ever drawn and will forever remind me of the Hotel Pivovar, which is where all my models resided. My appliance models, that is.

Mind you, I can only draw about three things and those are: 1) trees without leaves, 2) small birds and 3) eyes with really bad pupils. Boring high school classes were really rough for this reason: I ran out of things to doodle pretty quickly.

I'm using this lesson again tomorrow, bad artwork and all because a) my first student was absolutely entranced by the Amish and had no idea they existed and b) everyone that's ever seen these pictures has had a good laugh. Takin' one for the team!

But seriously, the Amish are pretty intriguing. Ever since I heard they were all allowed a year off from being Amish to see if that's what they really wanted I've been especially interested. When I originally wrote this lesson I procrastinated for at least an hour trying to find out if this rumor is true, but the internets failed me. Oh well. That's what I get for trying to learn about the Amish from the internet. Oxymoron?

Also, looking over my TEFL lessons again in comparison to my lessons now, a mere 2 months later, is pretty funny.

"'Cause once upon a time the line followed the river..."

Here's to our last drink of fossil fuels
Let us vow to get off of this sauce
Shoo away the swarms of commuter planes
And find that train ticket we lost
'Cause once upon a time the line followed the river
And peeked into all the backyards
And the laundry was waving
The graffiti was teasing us
From brick walls and bridges
We were rolling over ridges
Through valleys
Under stars
I dream of touring like Duke Ellington
In my own railroad car
I dream of waiting on the tall blonde wooden benches
In a grand station aglow with grace
And then standing out on the platform
And feeling the air on my face
Somehow Ani Difranco still says it best. If I had to choose one thing to describe my weekend, this would be it. It's funny that a picture of me in motion describes a moment where I actually begin to feel settled, but it seems that's often the way with me. Ah well.

Friday night was "Klit" at Friends, a gay club that holds a monthly Ladies Night. It was a good night overall, not too eventuful for me, though I must say the pillow fight theme was quite enjoyable. When else do you get to drunkenly rip pillows apart in a club, bashing them into random strangers?

Saturday my friend Gina and I took a train adventure to Kolín where my other friend Colleen lives. Yes, Colleen lives in a city pronounced exactly the same as her name, a fact which I find endlessly amusing, much, I'm sure, to her dismay. I hadn't been out of Prague since I got here, so it was nice to head out to the "country" (more like the suburbs, but pretty ones!). We walked around in the forest, climbed things and broke into a really cool looking semi-abandoned building by climbing up the brick wall into a window, then up a shaky looking ladder leading up to another mostly bricked-up window.





Another noteworthy event, I bought my cheapest beer yet in the Czech Republic (not counting 7 kč half-pints at Bukowski's on Sundays) at a little pub down the road from Colleen's flat in Kolín. Only 20 kč for a pint of Gambrinus! That's only a dollar for you Americans (approx. 18kč = $1 depending on the exchange rate). Average price for beer usually ranges between 30-45 kč for a pint in Prague. At the pub, Colleen thought up an ingenious drinking game where we had to drink every time we said "like". It was traumatizing, to say the least. I've been wanting to eliminate "like" from my speech for awhile, except for when it actually should be used for comparisons, but boy is it hard!

That's pretty much it for now. Finally getting settled, thinking up some pretty great lesson plans and such. Sunday was spent in Starbucks for a lesson planning date with my friend Jess, then to a free screening of Lolita at The Globe. I even have a lesson in the works using a section of The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. It's funny, as I was just being taught from that book in my Food, Health and Law class at Hampshire my last semester and now I'm teaching it! More for reading comprehension, conversation practice and vocabulary than for an understanding of the history of food policy in America, but still! Sometimes I don't hate teaching, though it's still really hard dragging my more awkward, shy students out of their shells sometimes for a 90 minute lesson.

Note: I stole all these photos from Gina, thanks Gina! Camera battery charger still MIA.

Thank goodness "get off" wasn't one of them...

Who knew phrasal verbs could go so awry...

A conversation about one of my lessons today over Skype:

me: I dictated the words "make, get, put, bring, carry, be, take" and "up, off, in, into, on, out, with, off" to him and had him write them down
me: then I told him to make as many phrasal verbs as he could
me: the catch was that every time he suggested one he had to use it in a sentence for me
me: so eventually he said "put out"
me: and I started giggling
me: because I'm clearly 5 years old
friend: hahahaha
friend: Put out the trash, Nicole!
me: so he was like...uhh whaaat?
me: and then I started explaining that "put out" has two meanings
me: one is like "put your shoes outside" and the other means someone who will have sex with you
me: and then I acted out being a bro and leaning over to another bro friend asking, "do you think she puts out?" *snicker snicker*
me: hahahhaa
friend: Man
friend: You are the hippest English teacher ever
me: and explained to him that you never ask someone directly or their close female friends if they put out, you just ask other people who've slept with them
me: and then later we we were done and he asked if there were more slang ones
me: I'm just happy I didn't have to explain "get off"
me: so then I had him do an activity where he had to describe his morning routine to me using at least 5 phrasal verbs
friend: uh oh
me: so he was like "I got up at 7am and made up my bed. I went into the fridge and took out my breakfast, then I left my flat and asked my neighbor if she puts out..."
me: I died
me: It was so funny.
me: I had to try really hard not to giggle the entire lesson.
me: I'm definitely going to teach phrasal verbs all the time now.