First Time Teaching

My internship has been going really well. I've been getting closer to some of the teachers who work at the Gymnasium (German High School) I'm doing my internship at. I taught my first class today. I think I psyched myself up so much about it that it ended up being so much better than I thought it would be. Of course teaching is by no means easy but I wasn't as nervous as I thought I would be. Confidence and Knowledge is really what you need. Since I was teaching an English (as a foreign language) class I had the knowledge. Some of the kids actually came after class and told me how good my English was! I don't think they had been told I was from the United States and English is my first language haha. Even though English is my first language I still needed to plan the lesson and make sure I knew about the subject I was teaching.

Fortunately they use an English book so there were pictures and audio that I could use as tools. I was also able to talk with the teacher about my lesson plan and that was very helpful. I was mostly worried about the students not participating but thankfully that was not the case. I had been in this same 8th Grade class the previous week just as a spectator and so I had seen how some of the students hadn't really been paying attention to the teacher and were having a lot of side conversations. Anyways, there was some of that today as well but for the most part a lot of the students were very attentive and participated and were eager to speak in English and talk about sports.

I talked with the teacher after I had finished the lesson to see if she had any tips for me and she said that I actually did a really good job and I had "talent." Whether that's true or not, I'm not sure but it was still nice to hear. She did have a few tips though that were actually very helpful. All in all it went really well and I actually enjoyed it so it was very cool for me to see that I could actually teach a class.

On Friday I will be teaching another English class but this time it will be an 11th grade English Class. It will be not such a fun subject, because we will be talking about 9/11 and "America as a Global Superpower." It will be interesting to see what the students here will say about these two topics though and I am looking forward to it because their English is actually quite good.

If you have any questions for me my email is drussosavage@lclark.edu -- feel free to contact me for any reason if you would so like.

Tschüss!

-Delia