rainy sunday
It's still a little rocky with the new washing machine. She's a little too enthusiastic, is the problem. Sometimes she just washes away for three hours and more without stopping, and I have trouble convincing her to give my clothes back.
Got up very late today, ate some toast, put my jeans in the wash. I'm allegedly getting around to forming a lesson plan for tomorrow; bright and early in the morning I'm teaching an English Leistungskurs (13th graders who've picked English as one of their two, ah, something similar to "majors") all by myself--two 45-minute periods. Normally we TAs aren't supposed to be asked to substitute teach, but I'm tired of not really doing anything in class, and I figure I can lead a discussion on a book (T.C. Boyle's Tortilla Curtain) that I actually really enjoyed. Plus the oldest students are more forgiving than the 7th and 8th graders. (I filled in once in an 8th grade English class too, and the result was a confirmation that, if I were ever to become a teacher full-time, I would quickly turn into a jaded and hateful old hag.)
But so far today I've been fairly lazy. Since I'm in Germany, I'm justified in blaming it on the weather. Germans do it all the time. (The other day at ballet I was frustrated cause nothing was working the way I wanted it to, and one of the 30-somethings--the one who brings her really cute daughter to class with her--consoled me, saying the weather was throwing her off too. I once actually saw, in the newspaper, a health forecast next to the week's weather. Something along the lines of, "Expect intermittent headaches mid-afternoon to late-evening on Tuesday, followed by a front of cold-like symptoms moving in on Wednesday.")
It's been slow going, trying to make inroads on my little side project. Independent research is harder than it looks on paper. I've been feeling generally very uninformed and unqualified. If I'd only read about fifty more books than I have, I think it would be going more easily...but unfortunately I'm still in Student Mode, which means I turned my brain off over the summer. I read about half a book, back in Grand Rapids, instead of the fifty that would have given me a better overview of what's out there, so that I could start narrowing down my focus to something manageable and talking informedly to professors and such people in the field who could advise me.
So now I'll just have to kick it in gear and get busy reading and talking to people and figuring out what I'm going to do with all the information out there. I know there's plenty of opportunity in Berlin to make contacts with people who know a lot more about and have much more experience with the whole immigration/integration issue than I do. I'm lucky to be placed at the school where I am; because of the high percentage of students with immigrant backgrounds, the school does all kinds of events that they invite me along to. Last Friday the German Marshall Fund brought a group of young American professionals and businesspeople over to talk to some of the students and have an informal Q&A session. I had an interesting conversation with a guy named Dakota, probably a couple years older than I am, who got a job with GMF after doing a stint in the Peace Corps. It's cool to be meeting other "transatlantically-minded" people, and I'm hoping to pick their brains and put it all into my project somehow.
Got up very late today, ate some toast, put my jeans in the wash. I'm allegedly getting around to forming a lesson plan for tomorrow; bright and early in the morning I'm teaching an English Leistungskurs (13th graders who've picked English as one of their two, ah, something similar to "majors") all by myself--two 45-minute periods. Normally we TAs aren't supposed to be asked to substitute teach, but I'm tired of not really doing anything in class, and I figure I can lead a discussion on a book (T.C. Boyle's Tortilla Curtain) that I actually really enjoyed. Plus the oldest students are more forgiving than the 7th and 8th graders. (I filled in once in an 8th grade English class too, and the result was a confirmation that, if I were ever to become a teacher full-time, I would quickly turn into a jaded and hateful old hag.)
But so far today I've been fairly lazy. Since I'm in Germany, I'm justified in blaming it on the weather. Germans do it all the time. (The other day at ballet I was frustrated cause nothing was working the way I wanted it to, and one of the 30-somethings--the one who brings her really cute daughter to class with her--consoled me, saying the weather was throwing her off too. I once actually saw, in the newspaper, a health forecast next to the week's weather. Something along the lines of, "Expect intermittent headaches mid-afternoon to late-evening on Tuesday, followed by a front of cold-like symptoms moving in on Wednesday.")
It's been slow going, trying to make inroads on my little side project. Independent research is harder than it looks on paper. I've been feeling generally very uninformed and unqualified. If I'd only read about fifty more books than I have, I think it would be going more easily...but unfortunately I'm still in Student Mode, which means I turned my brain off over the summer. I read about half a book, back in Grand Rapids, instead of the fifty that would have given me a better overview of what's out there, so that I could start narrowing down my focus to something manageable and talking informedly to professors and such people in the field who could advise me.
So now I'll just have to kick it in gear and get busy reading and talking to people and figuring out what I'm going to do with all the information out there. I know there's plenty of opportunity in Berlin to make contacts with people who know a lot more about and have much more experience with the whole immigration/integration issue than I do. I'm lucky to be placed at the school where I am; because of the high percentage of students with immigrant backgrounds, the school does all kinds of events that they invite me along to. Last Friday the German Marshall Fund brought a group of young American professionals and businesspeople over to talk to some of the students and have an informal Q&A session. I had an interesting conversation with a guy named Dakota, probably a couple years older than I am, who got a job with GMF after doing a stint in the Peace Corps. It's cool to be meeting other "transatlantically-minded" people, and I'm hoping to pick their brains and put it all into my project somehow.
