Thoughts on Teaching

School's started again. I'm teaching three courses at two different universities this term. Business English at the Georg-August University in Göttingen and a Business English course plus an intermediate English course at Uni-Kassel. This is a big step up from last semester's one course, and the commute to Göttingen makes for some long Wednesday's so far, but I'm adjusting, even getting into it.

Two of my classes are pretty big (24 students) and one is mercifully smaller (14 students). For the most part, the students are good, with a couple dingbats thrown in just to keep it lively.

I think sometimes that it suits me. Other times I feel like I'm dancing as fast as I can. I'm getting better at preparing for each class, so that it stays interesting, so the students don't do too much of one thing, so I can balance reading and writing and speaking and listening in every lesson. All three of my classes are three and a half hours long, so there's a lot of time to do a lot of things. It's also long enough that I come home pretty thrashed after a class.

One thing that makes me uncomfortable is that the whole thing feels somewhat like a performance, that I am trying to shuck around until these kids like English, or at least respond. I think eventually I'll learn to do more with less energy, but so far I'm trying to keep things from getting boring by peppering them with questions and making them respond on the spot.

My students must think I'm a freak.

There are a couple other teachers from Kassel who also teach up in Göttingen, so I'm making friends with them on the ten minute walk between the language center and the train station: an Arabic and French teacher named Amar, who's pretty cool, and a Khazakstani-born Russian who also makes the Wednesday commute.

Maybe it's somewhat cliché, but I keep coming back to this poem in my head when I'm teaching, and I kinda wish I could share it with the students, but I know it wouldn't make a lick of sense to them. I guess I get to keep that to myself.