The idea with the banner is to keep it updated to indicate where I am living at the moment, and as you might guess I’m heading back to New York for another school year. It’s supposed to be kind of a “view from my window” thing… One day when I install a webcam on my window frame it might even be for real! I am actually in Cyprus right now for a week, visiting my family, but will be in NY a week from Sunday.
I hope a few of you at least enjoyed my posts and photos from Berlin – I definetely haven’t been posting as often as I’d like to. I will keep posting photos from Berlin for a while I guess, once I’m back in NY and have more regular access. I’ve taken a lot of photos this summer, I actually had to buy an extra memory card for my camera, and my primary one is 2GB. Maybe I don’t really need to have it on the highest quality setting…
A few words on the language program I attended this summer in Berlin: The International Summer and Winter University of the Frei Universitaet, Berlin, which somehow is abbreviated FUBiS – don’t ask me why. I have attended other language schools in Berlin before, in 2006 and then earlier this year. They wear small private language institutes, with a very loose approach to scheduling – you could show up whenever you wanted, and they would try to put you in an appropriate level. FUBiS was much more structured, a regular 6 or 4 week program, with a final exam, certificates, and even the same teacher for the whole time you’re there. But perhaps I was mistaken in thinking that what I needed was more structure…
I actually had two very different FUBiS experience this summer: FUBiS is divided in two summer semesters (and one winter semester), and I participated in both. The first class was a disappointiing disaster, the second class was challenging and informative and rewarding. The whole thing reminded me that often education is more about the people you study with (both teachers and students). My first class felt like a frat house: of 8 students, 7 were male, and 6 were American undergraduates from fairly elite schools. They were as a whole very young, and very immature – they reminded me more of my own students. I really felt like I was wasting time in that class. It wasn’t that the level was too low – in fact I think they all spoke German better than I did (or maybe still do) – but the pace was slow to accomodate for their touristic mentality.
I don’t want to be a reverse sexist, but the second class, which consited of about 8 women and 4 men, was a big relief. It was also more ethnically diverse, with most of the students being from Eastern/Central Europe. Even our token American was much cooler! The teacher generally had higher standards, we spoke exclusively in German (it was also a higher level class, but still there was too much English in the first one), and what made the class very fun is that she had a theme and a concept, both for the whole class, and for each week. Everything was built around that concept, assignments, class discussions, excursions, and so on. For example on one week we talked about immigration in Berlin, read relevant articles, both historical and current, then looked at lingustic variations in the German spoken by certain immigrant groups, and on the excursion day visited two parts of Berlin heavily influenced by in-migration: one by Turkish workers, and one by yuppies from West Germany and English-speaking cyber-commuters.
I think she developed this as a way to keep the class interesting both for herself and for the students. I find that I do similar things in the classes I teach. I teach public speaking and I draw a lot of my examples and my topics for discussion from immigration-related news. This seems to work well since the majority of my students are immigrants or children of immigrants. (And I mean, like 90%, with another 5% being grandchildren of immigrants maybe. Yay urban NY college!)
Anyway, I learned a lot from her not just about German, or just about Berlin, but also about teaching. Thank you, Lucia!
I think I will do one more post about Berlin before I quit the subject, on the “city tour” I developed for a friend of mine that was visiting. I am wondering what I could use to design a map to go with it. Any suggestions from you travel bloggers?
