Note: the following are my personal opinions and are in no way affiliated with my scholarship organization.
Hello, my beloved public. I hope this reaches you healthy and happy.
Today was my first day in the school, and as I have for the last 17 years of my life, I dressed for success in a brand new back to school outfit. As I walked into the teacher's lounge and took a deep breath, I sensed my change in status. In my old high school, we as students were never allowed to step foot on the sacred threshold of the teacher's lounge. If we had a question for a teacher (which I often did, because... well... that's the kind of student I was), we had to walk down a long carpeted corridor and wait at the door to the lounge patiently for a teacher to grace us with his or her presence. It was common knowledge to never go past the carpeting and only a few students could boast the privilege of having stepped into the non-carpeted area of the teacher's lounge.
4 years after graduating high school, I stood in a teacher's lounge with a cup of coffee, listening to the hustle and bustle of teachers and feeling deliciously grown up. I was informed that every teacher in the school is addressed with the familiar "Du" instead of formal "Sie" and was told to address my colleagues by their first names. Colleagues??? I have colleagues???
My mentor teacher warned me when she met me in the hallway that the students were a little quiet that day and she took me into the classroom. I'm not sure if the class she described had stealthily escaped the classroom and been replaced by their more energetic doppelgaengers (evil twins) or if they had each downed 4 Red Bulls a piece while my mentor was getting me, but any remnant of their quiet selves seemed to have dissolved into thin air as I entered the classroom. The girls chatted eagerly amongst themselves as the more vocal boys audibly vied for my attention. The rest of the boys starred at my chest.
"They are just excited to have such a pretty, young teacher," my mentor informed me.
I wasn't exactly feeling pretty, but all of a sudden, I felt very, very young and somewhat helpless. My mentor had told the students that I couldn't speak German so they would be forced to speak English with me. Although I respect the intent of this lie, it didn't exactly work out. Most of my students could not string together more than a couple words of English, so communication in English was very difficult. However communicating was not the most difficult of my problems. The especially perceptive students soon noticed that I was following what they were saying in German (but not the Turkish they whispered amongst themselves) and guessed that I could speak German.
Darn my expressive face.
Then, they decided to test out this theory by making outlandish statements and somewhat offensive statements to provoke a response from me. And I didn't know "any German," so I couldn't be angry.
Nombre de Dios, this looks like it is going to be harder than I thought.
As I made my way home from school and reflected on my day, I realized three things.
1. I have so much more respect for my teachers for learning all the names of the kids in their classes now that I have to learn over sixty new names... many of which are Turkish. Did you know that the Turkish alphabet has 29 letters? I learned that after a girl spelled her name with a letter I didn't know. Who would have thought that at 22 I'd be learning the alphabet?
2. I am going to learn Turkish. It sounds like a pretty language... and it might be helpful.
3. I may be allowed in the teacher's lounge, but I still have a lot to learn.
After I made these three conclusions, Pride and Prejudice popped in my head because my PLS brainwashed condition is permanent. Before settling on the name Pride and Prejudice, Austen considered First Impressions as the title, and I wish she had decided in favor of this title because her work shows the universal truth that everyone judges books by their covers. It's so easy to come to a resounding conclusion about certain people based on the initial meeting. Elizabeth judged Darcy based on his initial bad behavior. However, she missed out on a lot of happiness for a long time because she was blinded by her initial judgment of the man she would end up loving.
This year is going to be challenging. I harbor no delusions about that fact. I am going to have to be patient when students who are supposed to be conversing in English with me, speak to me in German. Likewise, I am going to have to be patient with teachers who speak English with me instead of German (ARGH!). However, any good thing in life does not come easily, and I look forward to getting to know my students and colleagues better. This year is also going to be full of joys and I look forward to being a teacher and being taught myself.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Humble Pie
Hello, children of God!
This post regards two points of information. Firstly, I arrived safely in Berlin on Saturday (minus my bag). However, the joke was on the airline, because they had to bring my MIA suitcase to my apartment door... which happens to be on the 5th floor... in a building with no elevator. And believe me, I used every pound of my 50 pound allowance. Bwa ha ha.
Secondly, one of my friends asked me what the title of my blog means. Flashback to 9th grade German class. 15 of us sat in a ridiculously warm classroom in late August, looking at posters with the lyrics of "Der Schnitzelbank" and the castle Neuschwannstein. When class started, the teacher asked us why we made the decision to take German. Most responded that they had a personal connection to the language, that their family came from Germany or their siblings had taken German. However, one student responded, "Well, I figured English is a Germanic language, so it will be easy to learn."
The logic seemed to be viable. Not only does German have a similar sentence structure, but they also have similar words. Poster in German is das Poster, video is das Video, glass in German is das Glas... even some of their sayings are the same. You can say that it's raining cats and dogs or that someone has been with you through thick and thin. After four years of high school German, you start thinking of German and English like the twins in The Parent Tra: two identical languages raised in different environments causing some idiosyncratic personality traits, but not enough differences to cause immediate suspicion when they decide to exchange households.
As you might guess by comparing this logic to a Disney movie, this theory does not hold up in everyday usage. In fact, the number of similarities gives you a false sense of security, which sometimes results in incredulous looks and a "Wie, bitte?" ("WHAT ARE YOU SAYING, YOU CRAZY AMERICAN GIRL?!" I am editorializing a bit). If you directly translate "I am cold" in German, you are actually saying that you are a cold person. If you want second helpings you say, "Yes, please" not "Yes, thank you," because "Thank you" is an indication that you are finished.
The instance, from which my blog title stems, occurred during my first summer in Germany. I was at a party, listening to a discussion about the changes to the German academic system. In addition to knowing very little about the topic, my vocabulary was somewhat limited. One person turned to me and asked if I understood what they were talking about. I smiled and said in German, "It's all Greek to me."
He turned to me with the look of confusion, which I would soon anticipate every time I spoke that first summer. "If you think they are speaking Greek, then you understand less than you think."
Ouch. I mentally put a "NOT FRIEND" check mark next to his name in my head.
Later, I looked up what an equivalent phrase in German would be: "Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof" or "I only understand train station." As I marked down the new phrase in my journal, I realized that there were going to be many times that I was only going to understand train station, considering most German 8 year olds had a larger vocabulary than I do. Although it's frustrating when a little girl on the U-Bahn says a word I don't know, it's good to know that after eight years of studying German, I'm still learning new things, even if it means I have to eat some humble pie. And no, I have NO idea how one says "to eat humble pie" in German. I'll get back to you on that.
This post regards two points of information. Firstly, I arrived safely in Berlin on Saturday (minus my bag). However, the joke was on the airline, because they had to bring my MIA suitcase to my apartment door... which happens to be on the 5th floor... in a building with no elevator. And believe me, I used every pound of my 50 pound allowance. Bwa ha ha.
Secondly, one of my friends asked me what the title of my blog means. Flashback to 9th grade German class. 15 of us sat in a ridiculously warm classroom in late August, looking at posters with the lyrics of "Der Schnitzelbank" and the castle Neuschwannstein. When class started, the teacher asked us why we made the decision to take German. Most responded that they had a personal connection to the language, that their family came from Germany or their siblings had taken German. However, one student responded, "Well, I figured English is a Germanic language, so it will be easy to learn."
The logic seemed to be viable. Not only does German have a similar sentence structure, but they also have similar words. Poster in German is das Poster, video is das Video, glass in German is das Glas... even some of their sayings are the same. You can say that it's raining cats and dogs or that someone has been with you through thick and thin. After four years of high school German, you start thinking of German and English like the twins in The Parent Tra: two identical languages raised in different environments causing some idiosyncratic personality traits, but not enough differences to cause immediate suspicion when they decide to exchange households.
As you might guess by comparing this logic to a Disney movie, this theory does not hold up in everyday usage. In fact, the number of similarities gives you a false sense of security, which sometimes results in incredulous looks and a "Wie, bitte?" ("WHAT ARE YOU SAYING, YOU CRAZY AMERICAN GIRL?!" I am editorializing a bit). If you directly translate "I am cold" in German, you are actually saying that you are a cold person. If you want second helpings you say, "Yes, please" not "Yes, thank you," because "Thank you" is an indication that you are finished.
The instance, from which my blog title stems, occurred during my first summer in Germany. I was at a party, listening to a discussion about the changes to the German academic system. In addition to knowing very little about the topic, my vocabulary was somewhat limited. One person turned to me and asked if I understood what they were talking about. I smiled and said in German, "It's all Greek to me."
He turned to me with the look of confusion, which I would soon anticipate every time I spoke that first summer. "If you think they are speaking Greek, then you understand less than you think."
Ouch. I mentally put a "NOT FRIEND" check mark next to his name in my head.
Later, I looked up what an equivalent phrase in German would be: "Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof" or "I only understand train station." As I marked down the new phrase in my journal, I realized that there were going to be many times that I was only going to understand train station, considering most German 8 year olds had a larger vocabulary than I do. Although it's frustrating when a little girl on the U-Bahn says a word I don't know, it's good to know that after eight years of studying German, I'm still learning new things, even if it means I have to eat some humble pie. And no, I have NO idea how one says "to eat humble pie" in German. I'll get back to you on that.
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