Flensburg Field Trip

Yesterday, I got to accompany the 5th and 6th graders on their field trip to Flensburg, a city right on the Danish border.  We had an impromptu spelling lesson while waiting for the morning ferry, where some of the 6th graders pointed out which of the profanities carved into the shelter were written incorrectly. ("That should be spelled with C-K, right Ms. Meek?")  There are opportunities for learning everywhere.

Our main destination once in Flensburg was the Phaenomenta.  The Phaenomenta is a hands-on math museum with amazingly cool exhibits.  One exhibit is just two large powerful magnets that are repelling each other, and you can jump on one to try to force them together.  Another is a set of three chairs tied to different pulley systems and you sit in the chairs and see which system is the easiest to pull yourself up (My arms are sore today from that one). There were a lot of exhibits with mirrors, here's one where you write your name in the sand so it's reflected correctly:

This was one that shows body temperature.  (I'm in the upper right hand corner, taking the picture.)

Here's the wall of pi, where every digit has its own color, 3 is red, 1 is green, etc.

And here's an arch I built with one of the 5th graders:

And there was a lot more.  By far, one of the coolest museums I have ever visited (even better than the Chocolate Museum in Cologne).

After the museum, the students were allowed to explore Flensburg on their own in groups of three.  Of course, most of the children just ate at McDonalds and then bought lots of useless trinkets in various shops, but everyone made it back to the meeting point safely and without the aid of adult supervision.

I got to explore a little of Flensburg too.  A friend recommended that I go to the Beste Stuuv cafe, so I did.  It was decorated like a little old southern lady's sitting room and they used real china.  After I asked to see a menu (perhaps a dead give-away that I wasn't from Flensburg), an elderly German man sat at my table and asked where I was from.  Then he proceeded to get out a pair of glasses, take my menu, and read it out loud to me.  I'm not sure if he assumed that because I was American that I couldn't read German, but he didn't offer any translation except at the end, where he asked if I knew the word "Mohltied."  I didn't.  He said that he wasn't surprised and that it was Platt Deutsch for "Mahlzeit," (which I do happen to know.  Directly translated it's "meal time" but it's used more along the lines of "bon appetit"). 

The man recommended the Flensburger Toast and I ordered it.  It was a slice of toast with something that looked like jam but tasted more like ketchup (it definitely was made out of berries though), mustard, thin slices of ham, and pear halves, all smothered in edamer cheese.  It was hot and strange, but I ate it all and the old man told me about his son, who married an Austrian woman who liked to go diving.  The Austrian woman's family was very traditional and the first time the man's son went to visit, he ironed his own clothing and the woman's mother and grandmother stood in the doorway, watching him in amazement and saying over and over how they had never seen a man iron before.  At the time, I agreed with the old man that that was strange, but come to think of it, I don't think I have ever seen a man iron before either, except maybe on TV.

Ich bin Zungenbrechermeisterin

Today in class, I recited the "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck" tongue twister.  When I was done, there was applause.  In what other profession are talents like these appreciated?

Valentine's Day

Here's a valentine I got from one of my students:

It might be hard to read, but all of those little hearts say, "You are a we-ary good tea-cher."  We-ary, of course, doesn't mean "worn out" but is the phonetic spelling (at least in German) of "very."  But it is sort of amazing how with language you can be wrong and accurate at the same time, often without even noticing it.  I'm going to go take a nap now.

A Couple of Confessions

Somtimes, I think I have achieved pedgogical awesomeness.  I start wondering how long it will take film producers to buy the rights to my story and start pumping out inspirational movies.  Soon, I find myself thinking, the whole world will know what a great teacher I am and wish they had had such a motivational force in their lives as Ms. Meek.  The honored few who have had the chance to drink from my fountain of knowledge will go on to share their own stories of success, citing me as the sole reason.  For decades to come, whenever anyone wins an award, regardless of the field, I will be on the thank-you list, right after God but before the recipient's own mother.

I know, I know.  It's a little over the top.  But there is evidence of my greatness: English grades are going up, students who were once afraid of speaking up in class are now standing in front of the room and spouting out syntax like there's no tomorrow, mind-maps are charting whole new intellectual territories.  Sometimes, I just skip down the hallways covering students with stickers telling them "Way To Go!" and "Great Job!" I am so proud of them (and me).

But there are days when I am plagued by a completely different kind of fantasy.  I have heard that my grandmother used to say, "Lord give me strength, I could just shake their little gizzards out" in reference to children.  I totally know where she's coming from. There are times, usually when someone is defacing the class posters, or is inexplicably running around the room as though they are on fire, or is eating in class and gets condiments all over the papers they have to turn in to me, or when they throw their scissors so they get stuck in the ceiling and then expect me to get them down, (and these are all things that happen), those are the times when I start to think about strangling our future Homer Simpson-style.  But instead I just assign them tedious grammar homework, which is basically the same thing.

The Quest Continued...

Yesterday in the hall:
"Hey Jonas, how are you today?"
"I am god."
Fantastic.

I Have A Quest...

There are some language mistakes that I am reluctant to correct because they have a poetic quality about them.  For example, one of the fifth graders leaves off the ending of "question," so before he asks anything, he says, "I have a quest."  I find this preface casts a certain nobleness on whatever banal query that follows, usually something along the lines of "How spell you guinea pig?" 

By the way, "How spell you guinea pig?" is the most frequent question I have been asked since coming to Germany.  I had to look it up.

FUUUUUDGE <-----Germans don't get this reference

In America, when it's your birthday, somebody else bakes you a cake and you don't have to worry about anything.  But in Germany, when it's your birthday, you are expected to bring in a treat for everyone else.  My birthday is coming up, and in the spirit of "when in Rome..." I want to make something to share with my colleagues.

Now, I have a quaint little kitchen in my apartment, but no oven, so that rules out anything that requires baking.  In my mind, that leaves preacher cookies and fudge.  Preacher cookies are out because it's hard to find peanut butter.  So, fudge.

I made the first batch today, and despite the fact that I just guesstimated all the measurements, I think it's turned out well.  I have at least accomplished to fix something with a fudge-like consistancy, and I find it hard to believe that anything with four cups of sugar, a pound of chocolate, and two bags of marshmallows could taste less than amazing.

I'm also pretty sure that this will count as bringing American culture to Germany, but I only say that because none of my colleagues seemed to know what I was talking about when I tried to explain what fudge was.  Or fudge could be rampant in Germany and I was just banging my head against the language barrier, as usual. 

We'll see.

Back To Work

Today was my first day back to work after the two week break.  Although I only worked for 3 hours, I felt extremely productive.  Today we learned about animals and animal vocabulary, my knowledge of which is impressively extensive, at least in comparison to the island's ten year old population.  Do birds have ears?  Where do lions live?  Can a turtle run?  I'm pretty sure even as a ten year old I knew the answer to all of those questions, but they popped up a lot today.  In one class, I gave a poignant lecture on all the different names for baby animals, paralyzing the students with my formidable wisdom.  I decided to spare the other classes this, although I'm sure in the long run they'll be worse off for it.

The younger students (10-12 year olds) seem to think their teachers and educational materials are infallible.  Which I guess has its upside, but whenever there's a typo on a worksheet or somebody (somebody being me) misspells something on the board, it's like the whole universe caves in.  Even in German, when you'd think the kids would have had enough experience by now to deduce from context clues what was actually meant, they seem incapable of accepting that there would be a mistake.  "Grabben? I've never seen that word before, I have no idea what it means" several of the students whisper amongst themselves.  "Well, that's because it's suppose to say 'graben' with one 'b'."  This is answered with dull stares.  "Just mark one of the 'b's out," I say.  And then after they've marked out one of the 'b's, there is a chorus of "Ach, so..."  which is German for "Oh, yeah."

I've also noticed that they rely far too heavily on rulers.  Anytime a chart or a simple line has to be drawn, a forest of hands rises up, all asking to go retrieve their rulers from their magical place of ruler safekeeping.  All of my attempts to convince them that they don't really need rulers, that they're learning English, not geometry, have failed.  I have switched my efforts to avoiding any lesson plans that might involve lines.

The North Sea In the Morning

I stayed up late last night.  So late, that it was suddenly morning.  (My sleep cycle has been kind of off due to New Year's Eve and my headache day.)  I'm not really a morning person when I have a reason to be up, but when it's just a coincidence that morning and I cross paths, I find it delightful.  So I bundled up and went out to greet the day.

This particular morning was gray.  In some places, the North Sea was frozen over and it was hard to tell where land ended and it began.

Here's one of the docks.  I think the tide was out, so that darker gray line is actually the North Sea, and the dock is just buried in the ice floes the sea left behind.  But I could be wrong.

Here's a picture of a ferry.  Surprised that they were still running today.  My friend Karen told me that there was one winter during the war when it was so cold that they drove trucks over the North Sea to get supplies from the mainland. 

And here's a couple of slides I ran across.  They looked oddly out of place, but they didn't seem to mind.

The North Sea At Night

When I look out at the North Sea at night, I can understand how people used to think the world was flat.  At night, the sea is black, so black that it looks like nothing.  The sand seems to fall away where it meets the water, and the edges of the ice floes still detectable by the light of the city hang in the nothingness like ghosts.  I had a headache all day yesterday and couldn't sleep last night, so I took a walk on the beach.  I had the feeling that I was the only one awake on the whole island and that the crunch of the sand beneath my feet was disrupting everyone else's dreams. 

I am afraid of being attacked by rabid seals.  This is a fear I was completely unaware of until last night.

The Same Procedure As Last Year: Another German New Year's Eve Tradition

You may think, "Hey, wait a minute, this film is in English and doesn't really have anything to do with New Year's."  Yeah, go figure.

2011: Year of the Hedgehog, Harbinger of Doom

In the spirit of cultural immersion, I partook in some molybdomancy on New Year's Eve.  Molybdomancy is a popular New Year's ritual in Germany, where you melt a small piece of tin, then cool it in water and interpret the resulting shape to predict how the coming year will turn out.  This is what I got:

I don't know what it looks like to you, but all of the Germans in the room blurted out almost automatically, "Oh, it's a hedgehog!" (Actually they said, "Oh, ein Igel!"  But you get the idea).  However, after Bernd's daughter looked up the divination in the molybdomancy booklet, she said, "Maybe it's not a hedgehog."  And Bernd, reading over her shoulder agreed that it was no longer a hedgehog, but perhaps a dragon.  A dragon?

Don't get me wrong, I always appreciate when people care enough about me to lie to protect my feelings, but I am an adult and a rational one at that (the majority of the time).  I can handle getting the Hedgehog of Doom.  I don't place much faith in the accurate forecasting abilities of tin, anyway.

That being said, the third time I slipped on the ice walking back to my apartment, I thought, "Damn that hedgehog."  Once I made it home, I iced my knee and caved into the temptation to google all the possible molybdomanic interpretations of the hedgehog to see what I was dealing with.  Because there are several levels of doom.  You can be doomed to die a horrifically painful death or you can be doomed to have frizzy hair.  And then there's a bunch of levels of doom in between.  And it seems to me that a hedgehog, which is actually quite a cute little animal, would be more likely to signify bad hair doom, which I've dealt with for the past 20 or so years, so what's one more?

There's not really much out there for the combination of molybdomancy and hedgehogs, but a general hedgehog search brings up multiple critters with broken limbs...

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

...And this hedgehog, who is prepared for chemical warfare:

So, yeah, the more I look at it, I think my little figurine does look like a dragon.