Katrin's video diary for February: transcript - translation from German into English
Hello, this is the video diary from Katrin for February.
I've been teaching mostly in small groups, but sometimes also whole classes, and I had an experience with a group... I was doing a little project with them and they would come to my cupboard - my room! - in groups, and the first group was there to make up 12 questions to play a game, and the next group would play a game with those questions and make up questions for the next group. So today, I just have the very first group come in again, and they had to play with the questions the last group made up. And they were really easy questions, like, I don't know, 'Where do you live?' or 'What is your name?' and the intention was to get them to repeat the question words and really get them to stick in their heads. So they would have help with whatever other work I could do, because knowing the question words really helps you with rest of the questions. So I was really surprised when they came in after four weeks and I asked them questions like 'Where do you live?' which was actually also one of the first things that they learned in German, that they really had problems with that, and they couldn't even remember those six words. So I don't really know what I should do about that - I need to talk to my other German teachers but also, some other teachers, maybe French teachers or whatever, what they do about things like that, when they really have just a small amount of words. They just don't seem to be able to remember. So, I don't know what to do about that.
Yeah, it's February already and more than half of my year is already over. And I am quite surprised because, in some ways it still feels like you are at the very beginning of your year, you still experience new things, and sometimes you have a whole class which you haven't had before, because you just had them in groups, or things like that. It really went very fast, and you still feel like you're at the beginning but actually, you're closer to the end of your year than to the beginning.
Well, there are some things I wish I had done. For example, I have a German club at one of my schools and, three weeks before Christmas, they told me they wouldn't come in the next three weeks because they had... I don't know what they had, so they couldn't come, so I didn't do any Christmas things with them, which is kind of sad, because Christmas in Germany is really different from here.
And then, of course, I have a feeling that my time is running out and I won't be able to see as much of Scotland as I wish I could!
Yeah, so if you come here as an assistant, you will notice that lots of teachers in any subject just teach to what the papers... I don't know about how it is in Bundesländer where they have the Zentralabitur - I'm not used to that. But I was told that they used past papers; I don't know... But I am just not used to it, but I think that's a good way, because you can use the assistant to provide further language skills, or different things, just things that are not used in the past papers, or provide natural things or just normal, everyday language that won't be in the papers. So that's a really good thing for the assistant and, I guess, for the teachers and the pupils because they learn different... things.
In some ways, it's really challenging to use a lot of German, because for me, for a native speaker it's really hard to try to express myself in easy German and, actually, sometimes I think the teachers are better in that than I am! Yeah, it's really hard and I really speak a lot of English with the pupils even in small groups. Also, I guess because it's easier for me to explain it in English real quick. But I should try, I know, and speak more German, so... I hope I'll be able to do that in the next month. So... see where that takes us.