The other side of the desk

Short P.S. to last night’s entry: Today I managed to open the door twice (with the new key), once after about a minute of coaxing, and once on the very first try, thank goodness.

So, I said yesterday that my supervising teacher had asked me to prepare some words relating to the theater for his class today. I thought about it last night and this morning (I didn’t have class until 12:30) and I came up with some terms. He hadn’t been specific about what sort of terms he was looking for, and I didn’t know what the class had been doing otherwise or whether this was part of an entire unit on English drama, so I just made a list of some general things – protagonist, monolog, stage, those sorts of things. I wasn’t exactly sure why he wanted them; I thought he and the class might be talking about the play more generally and that he would refer to me for vocabulary or pronunciation practice.

I got to the school at about 12:10 and sat in the teachers’ lounge (to which I have a key, which feels really strange) until the teacher came to fetch me. We got to class just after the bell had rung, and the students were already there. Then, to my no small surprise, the teacher sat down with the students, waved me toward his desk, and said, “Okay! You’re the teacher now. Go ahead.”

I had a brief moment of panic, since all I had was a list of words in a notebook and no particular lesson plan. After taking a deep breath, I asked the students to introduce themselves, which gave me a minute to think. Then I asked them what play by Shakespeare they were going to see, and it turned out to be The Taming of the Shrew. And from there, I somehow managed to fill the next forty minutes by asking them various questions about what they knew about Shakespeare and what sort of plays they’d been to and what they knew about putting on plays. I also told them a little bit about Shakespeare’s era and what the theaters were like back then, and tried to work some of the terms in there.

And after I got over my initial feeling of “yikes, hang on,” I started to enjoy it, even though flying by the seat of my pants has never really been my thing. I walked around, I sat on the desk, I wrote on the board and made exaggerated gestures to clarify various words and concepts. The students were actually very good; all of them listened and most of them participated and answered questions. They even laughed when I told them about how Shakespearean audiences would boo loudly and throw things at the actors if they didn’t like the play. I’m sure they wondered what the point of the lesson was, as did I, but I don’t think any of them really hate me.

So, I feel like I’ve learned a few things. One, standing up and teaching isn’t all that bad, and I’m sure I’ll enjoy it even more when I’m better organized. Two, I need to be better organized. My supervising teacher is very nice, but also somewhat vague and, I think, prone to assume that I know more than I do, so I need to be better about asking him for clarification when I need it.

In more important news, there was an election in Berlin yesterday for regional office. I never took a comparative politics class, so I don’t know a whole lot about the German government, but I’m trying to pick things up by reading the newspapers. The governing mayor, Klaus Wowereit (who’s openly gay, which doesn’t seem to be much of an issue here, as far as I can tell – I love this city) was re-elected, but otherwise most of the news seems to be about how few people voted (the turnout was under 60 percent) and how many of them voted for non-mainstream parties.