Awkward Adjectives
I’ll start this off with a great story from class today. I was working with a 6th grade class, and we were going over comparative adjectives. They were split into groups of 3, and they had to pick 5 adjectives and then did the following: ”Sara is funny, Martha is funnier, but Alexandra is the funniest”. Pretty simple. The first group to tell the class their 5 adjectives was a group of 3 girls. They started out with tall, funny, fast and then beautiful. The last adjective they chose was easy. It went something like this: ”I am easy, Brianna is easier, and Michelle is the easiest”. My adviser and I couldn’t hold our laughter in anymore. We didn’t tell them what was so funny, and I don’t think anyone else knew why we couldn’t stop laughing for 5 minutes. I didn’t think it was appropriate to tell 10 year old girls that they shouldn’t be calling themselves easy. Wasn’t my place.
In an 8th grade class, they were working on passive voice. I had two pictures: one was a room that was clean and the other was one that was messy. They had to construct sentences like “The clothes were folded”, etc. There was a picture of a night stand, and they didn’t know the name of it. I told them, and this one student asked me if that’s when you sleep with someone and never talk to them again. Wow.
Yesterday I did a MeetUS program in Wolfsburg, which is about 45 minutes from Hannover. MeetUS is a program sponsored by the US Consulates in Germany. They pay you €30, plus the train fare. You are supposed to represent the USA and it’s basically an opportunity for (typically) smaller cities to meet an American and talk in an informal setting. I talked to an 8th grade class for about 90 minutes about topics ranging from wrestling to chores to fast food. They are always a lot of fun, and the students and teachers are typically welcoming. I found out that German hospitality, much to my surprise, does exist. The teacher who requested that I come to the school picked me up from the train station, bought me lunch and coffee, gave me a box of chocolate and then took me back to the train station. It was a really fun afternoon, even if I had to be on the train at 7 am. I’ll definitely be doing more of the MeetUS programs.
3 years ago