Tuesday, 16 November 2010

What else to do but chuckle?

Prince William announced his engagement today. Naturally it's all over the British media with David Cameron even calling it "a great day for our country". So on bumping into my landlord I attempted to make small-talk about it. The conversation (auf Deutsch) went along the lines of:

Me: "The big news in England today is that Prince William is engaged"
..momentary pause & slightly blank expression..
Landlord: "Prince William? Is he the younger one? Son of Philip? No?"

I dutifully put him right only to be asked "So is this a big thing then?" ..."Yes" ... "Oh, that I will never understand". Ohh Germany, you know you're jealous of our monarchy really!

In other chuckle-worthy news of the day... Klasse 6 were learning school subjects and how English schools are different to German ones. Now obviously I'm not going to nit-pick every mistake and demoralise them, but some I can't bear to ignore. Today's highlight? 'Language' spelt "langwich', like a sandwich. Legend.

Next? One of my year 5 classes. Last lesson they learned the alphabet (with the help of a 'rap') so we took half the class each to practise spelling. Fine, as long as the words you want don't contain the letters 'A E I R W'! Not so great idea number one - asking the kids to spell their names... would have been a lot easier if I knew what they were in the first place. Dread to think how many of them can now 'spell' their names incorrectly in English! Second mistake - asking "what other English words can you spell?" Cue one cheeky sod to suggest "f*ck you". Ahh, kids eh?

Somewhat worryingly I have been promoted within Klasse 8 once more, no longer just native speaker who teaches occasional grammar points / exercises, but I have now been given the task of planning their whole lesson next week, on anything :/ uh oh. Suggestions welcome!

Completely unrelated, I have also survived a trip to a German hairdressers! Can't say I'll be rushing back to the same one, but the international language of gesticulation supplemented by some dodgy German seemed to do the trick!

1 comment:

  1. I did a debate about school uniform with my Klasse 8 and got them to design their own uniform with labels and write what was better about theirs than the traditional british uniform

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