Funny students

Well, here I am again. I guess you had not expected to hear from me again so soon, now had you? Well, don't worry I don't have that much to tell you. There are, however, some things I just have to share with you!

I forgot to tell you about my trip to Glasgow to visit my college friend Femke. She is on an exchange to do some in-depth study of Ancient Greek drama and has chosen the misty city of Glasgow, Scotland. I had been to Scotland before but never made it to Glasgow and having a friend there provided me with a second reason for a visit. And it was worth it. Besides the fact that it was obviously great to see Femke again and to have time to catch up and gossip about our old studymates, I found out that Glasgow is actually a lovely city. And it has got a great museum, St. Mungo's Museum of Religious Art, where the different religions being adhered to in the Glasgow region are presented without bias or presumption. It then goes on to explain how different themes such as birth, coming of age, marriage and death and dealt with by these religions. It does not represent the artifacts in its collection as art (though some may rightly be called art by their sheer beauty - and are probably worth a lot of pounds) and they do not propagate any single religion but the whole purpose of the museum is to promote understanding and acceptance of one's neighbours. In one word, awesome. For pictures, click here.

When I came back, I was in for a nice surprise. The school that had hired me as a Dutch teacher but had been hesitant to give me English courses as well offered me an intensive English course. It is 5 days a week (of which I do 4), 6 hours a day and the students are a Japanese-Korean couple on their honeymoon. They actually decided to spend their two-month honeymoon in Berlin to learn English! They learn English every morning and are then too tired to do anything else, who would opt for that? Though they are lovely, compliant and very grateful every time, I do struggle a bit. I obviously do not speak Japanese or Korean and their level is quite low. It sometimes takes us up to 10 minutes to figure out what we are talking about and I often have trouble understanding what they are saying at all. I believe they are making progress but I keep thinking it must be hard on them. After all, it is very hard to stay focused for that long and I simply do not have the energy or the imagination to keep our lessons fun and interesting for 6 hours straight.

I also laughed my head off today! I discovered that I have been spied on. One of my students admitted to having googled me and read this blog and suddenly turned out to know lots of things about me. I don't mind this at all but I never thought that would happen and it caught me off guard. Well, she is a communication specialist after all and I guess I should have been prepared for it. I never thought my blog could be a teaching tool but Kirstin, if you're reading this, just look at it as exercise. And I will just have to start being really careful not to make any spelling errors or grammatical mistakes!!!!