Auf Wiedersehen to Göethe Institut

Tomorrow is the last day of instruction. Looks like you´re finishing up summer school at Palomar as well. I´m sorry to read of Juan´s family emergency. Have heard from several instructors via email, but apparently logging in to leave a comment is problematic for most.

Travel in Europe is certainly different now from my days as an American soldier here in the 1970s. When using facebook or email, blogging, or taking care of my bank accounts and properties via computer, I sometimes feel like I never left home. Instead of carrying travelers checks, it´s easy to use an ATM at a place that has an agreement with your US-based bank. Most of the younger students have IPads and/or cellphones, called "Handys" in German, that work here. I chose not to activate a plan that would make my phone work here, figuring correctly that a daily check of email and facebook would keep me relatively in the loop. I will, however, be out of touch from Friday the 27th until my return to the U.S. on August 10th, aside from an occasional visit to an Internet cafe.

We took the exit test yesterday, which includes a listening section, a multiple choice grammar section, and a writing sample. I got a perfect score, Number One in the class, but still don´t feel that I know much. Certainly there´s a long way to go before I´ll be anything approaching full functional proficiency in the German language.

Before feeling too good about my performance, I should remember that I probably couldn´t have maintained the intense pace I set for myself over a semester-length period, and certainly not if I were holding down a full time job. I need to remember that I once in awhile didn´t do all of the homework and ended up asking a dumb question or two about things that had already been covered. I still make mistakes with the declensions that follow all nouns, articles, and adjectives, even though we´ve reviewed the grammatical rules many times... and they don´t change from one week to the next! I still forget vocabulary items that we´ve encountered over and over again during the course.

The instructor mentioned to me once after a particularly tortured exchange that students always seem to experience a lag between learning something consciously and being able to use it with facility. I told her that my ESL students are exactly the same way!

An interesting thing that I´ve learned about language here is that it often serves as a means of establishing rapport rather than as simply a medium of communication. People will sometimes ask simple questions, or questions that they already know the answers to, as a means of being friendly or of showing that we share a common humanity despite cultural differences. I could easily do a Google search to find out how many Russian car companies there are and what kind of car is most popular there, but it is more enjoyable to ask the Russian students and have them tell the class about such things themselves.

It also seems that students universally seek the instructor´s approval, no matter how mature or worldly they regard themselves. There isn´t that much pedagogically here that will revolutionize my teaching methods, but I think I understand better now the need to provide positive feedback and encouragement when appropriate.

Just the same, the instructors here are not at all shy about marking up a student´s paper with red ink corrections that sometimes seem more numerous than the words the student has written. I remember how angry that would make me sometimes when I studied the language before as a young soldier, not at the instructor himself but at the language for being so damned complicated. Over the years as a teacher I have had students cry, quit the class, or even complain about me for marking up their papers in this way. I have to admit that it can be discouraging, but is there really any better or more efficient way to provide feedback?

My collection of marked-up writing samples sit side by side in my notebook, annoying to look at but just the same providing an impressive body of data about what I´m doing wrong and what I should have done to make it right.