Back to school

Well hello again! Currently celebrating my first day of feeling really, truly healthy and fit in 2011. A day or two after New Year's I finally caught my one big cold of the year. Every season one comes around that absolutely lays me out, so after having avoided it for months it finally caught up with me. The timing was pretty bad too, since it coincided right with the beginning of school after winter break, so I got an unwanted extension to the winter holidays. I was actually pretty stoked to go back to school, so it was disappointing to have to stay home. I finally ended up visiting a doctor after a while, and they set me up with various medications and things, which are starting to kick in.

Also, quick aside: very interesting experience visiting the doctor in Germany. No copay, reasonably short wait (30 mins.), and as I understand it the whole cost of the visit, about 50 Euros, gets covered in full by my health insurance. And the antibiotics they put me on (a week's worth plus some other pills for fever and headache) cost a whopping 14 Euros, also covered in full. They take pretty good care of you over here, and surprisingly enough this country hasn't fallen apart yet in spite of its job-killing socialized health care system.

In other news, school has been going pretty well. These students are a little crazy sometimes, difficult to teach and keep quiet, but when you get down to it they're all fundamentally decent, sweet, friendly little people, so I missed them over the holidays. Last week I tried heading into school a couple times (inadvisable, but I was incredibly bored), and it was good to be back. An added bonus to the holidays is that nobody wants to be in school for the first couple weeks back, so they've all actually been pretty well behaved out of sheer exhaustion. Right now the younger classes are all working on abridged and simplified versions of some famous English-language novels. The seventh graders are reading White Fang by Jack London, the eighth graders are reading this really cool graphic novel adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, and the ninth graders are reading The Street Lawyer by John Grisham. It's actually kinda funny that the seventh and eighth graders are reading White Fang and Romeo and Juliet right now, because I read both of those books when I was exactly their age. Quite a twist of fate that I'd find myself all the way on this side of the world ten years later doing lessons on those same books.

Otherwise not much to report. It was super cold and snowy in December (very out of character for Hamburg as I think I mentioned), but now it's warmed up a little bit, so I can walk out of my front door without wanting to cry and I'm not slipping and falling all over the place anymore. Much as I love this city, they don't have the infrastructure around here to, you know, clean the snow off of their sidewalks. I think I've seen exactly one snowplow this entire winter.

Being Mr. Fry

I exist in a strange world in my school. In the first few weeks of hustle and bustle and trying to figure out the system I rarely had a moment to stop and consider my place in GS Eidelstedt, especially considering that I was still figuring out just what that place was. But now that I've dug pretty deep into the system there's more opportunity to reflect on how my particular little gear fits into the huge, complex machine that is this school.

Even nowadays, four months into this experience, I don't quite know what I am--what my primary function is if you will. I'm certainly not a teacher, which, all things considered, is a bit ironic. One of the many reasons I applied to the Fulbright program is that I wanted to get a perspective on what being a teacher is actually like. It's a career I'm interested in, so I wanted to give it a test run before committing myself to it. "Assistant teacher," however, is very far away from the real thing. Sure I do lessons and make up worksheets and have authority in a classroom, but the teaching part of being a teacher is only a part of the whole package. Sonja, one of the seventh grade teachers I work with, put it to me one day in a very short, off-hand remark that actually ended up being very much to the point. After I had finished doing a lesson in her class and let her take over to assign the homework, she told me, "Well, you're the good cop. Now I get to take over and be the bad cop."

This "good cop" relationship I have with the students is about the closest thing I can come up with to describe the persona I use around them. Older students come up and high five me or shake my hand in the hallway when I walk by; groups of younger students wave me over to come and chat with them in the courtyard during breaks; fifth and sixth graders swarm me when I walk all the way down to their playground and beg me to beatbox for them. I would have rarely done anything like that with a teacher when I was in high school, but around here it's the norm. It all makes the title of "Mr. Fry" seem a little strange sometimes, like I'm not quite in a position where people should be calling me mister just yet. It has made the experience much more enjoyable than if I was actually in the position of the "bad cop," it's actually a lot of fun being so close with the students, but sometimes it can be a little strange and difficult to tread the line between friend and teacher.

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In other news: been miserably sick for the past week now. I went the whole winter break without a problem, and then a couple days after New Years I caught a pretty bad cold, which laid me out for all of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. I was fine on Thursday, overestimated things and stayed out late, and now we're back to square one. Good news is that I've finished the reimagined Battlestar Galactica in it's entirety after having started it and stopped junior year (really, really good TV, I highly recommend it). Bad news is that spending all day in bed drinking tea is really effing boring. So here's hoping that things get better.