The results are in. . .
This upcoming week, there's a conference in Berlin for all the Fulbrights in Germany. It's supposed to be a celebration of things achieved thus far - there are all sorts of talks scheduled for the people doing research to present their results, the people with musical grants are going to perform, and the teachers and teaching assistants are supposed to deliver warm and fuzzy classroom anecdotes. I'm not attending - most of the conference takes place while I'm at school, and I already work so little that I would feel bad about asking for more time off - but I did go to a party yesterday that another TA in Berlin threw.
It was interesting; I saw people I'd met briefly at orientation in September but hadn't kept in touch with, and got to take the temperature of people's attitudes toward the job and life in Germany. In general, the sort of things people were saying are probably not going to be coming out at official conference events. It was no small relief to find that other people have the same complaints that I do, and that I'm not just a whiner and bitcher (or maybe we're all just whiners and bitchers. I suppose it's much the same). The gist of the conversation was that we're unhappy about signing up to work twelve hours a week and maybe working between five and ten for teachers who are already under a lot of pressure and don't really know what to do with us. We don't like feeling so useless, or realizing that we commute more than we work. We're disillusioned with the Germans; we feel like we came over excited about living abroad and adapting to a new culture and getting to know people, only to find the natives - even people our own age - prickly and difficult to approach. I told a friend of mine, who's a TA in Hamburg, that I felt a little bad about having joined what the director of studies abroad at Holy Cross refered to as "the American ghetto" - that my friends are overwhelmingly Americans or English speakers - a very interesting group of ex-pats, but not the people I'm supposed to be interacting with. He shook his head sympathetically and said, "It's okay, Katie, so have we all." I was talking to another TA at the party last night who said that he'd been told by some teachers at his school, pretty bluntly, that since he was only going to be in his post for ten months, Germans weren't going to make the effort to get to know him.
(That reminds me. I need to warn my friends and readers that in sixty years, give or take some, I'll probably be dead, in which case you'll have wasted a lot of time getting to know someone who's not around anymore. Best not to make the effort).
So, anyway, there was a lot of complaining going on. And conversations like those last night can help breed mutual discontent, but they can also make you realize how lucky you are. I may have expected to get more out of the work I'm supposed to be doing, but at least I'm in Berlin, which isn't a bad place to have a lot of leisure time. My German has gotten better - not as much as I'd hoped, but I'm a lot more comfortable ordering food and asking for information than I used to be. It is strange that my ostensible purpose here - assistant teaching - is kind of marginal to what I actually find important these days. I mean, I try to prepare interesting lessons and be as helpful as I can, but the time it takes to do those things is no comparison to life in college, where my whole day was basically structured around getting all my reading, writing and translating done, and time for fun meant going out with friends once a week and the occasional movie, or putting off going to sleep for fifteen minutes in order to read part of a novel. And I can probably look forward to more of that in grad school next year, and for the rest of my life. So I can appreciate the interlude aspect to these ten months.
I was talking to my mother on the phone a few weeks ago - my family members, bless them, have a tendency to think I'll work myself into the ground given half a chance, which is not really true - and she said, "Well, for someone who's so used to pushing herself as you are, I imagine that the adjustment to having so much free time must be difficult for you."
I thought about it for a few seconds. "No," I said, "I think I'm handling it."
It was interesting; I saw people I'd met briefly at orientation in September but hadn't kept in touch with, and got to take the temperature of people's attitudes toward the job and life in Germany. In general, the sort of things people were saying are probably not going to be coming out at official conference events. It was no small relief to find that other people have the same complaints that I do, and that I'm not just a whiner and bitcher (or maybe we're all just whiners and bitchers. I suppose it's much the same). The gist of the conversation was that we're unhappy about signing up to work twelve hours a week and maybe working between five and ten for teachers who are already under a lot of pressure and don't really know what to do with us. We don't like feeling so useless, or realizing that we commute more than we work. We're disillusioned with the Germans; we feel like we came over excited about living abroad and adapting to a new culture and getting to know people, only to find the natives - even people our own age - prickly and difficult to approach. I told a friend of mine, who's a TA in Hamburg, that I felt a little bad about having joined what the director of studies abroad at Holy Cross refered to as "the American ghetto" - that my friends are overwhelmingly Americans or English speakers - a very interesting group of ex-pats, but not the people I'm supposed to be interacting with. He shook his head sympathetically and said, "It's okay, Katie, so have we all." I was talking to another TA at the party last night who said that he'd been told by some teachers at his school, pretty bluntly, that since he was only going to be in his post for ten months, Germans weren't going to make the effort to get to know him.
(That reminds me. I need to warn my friends and readers that in sixty years, give or take some, I'll probably be dead, in which case you'll have wasted a lot of time getting to know someone who's not around anymore. Best not to make the effort).
So, anyway, there was a lot of complaining going on. And conversations like those last night can help breed mutual discontent, but they can also make you realize how lucky you are. I may have expected to get more out of the work I'm supposed to be doing, but at least I'm in Berlin, which isn't a bad place to have a lot of leisure time. My German has gotten better - not as much as I'd hoped, but I'm a lot more comfortable ordering food and asking for information than I used to be. It is strange that my ostensible purpose here - assistant teaching - is kind of marginal to what I actually find important these days. I mean, I try to prepare interesting lessons and be as helpful as I can, but the time it takes to do those things is no comparison to life in college, where my whole day was basically structured around getting all my reading, writing and translating done, and time for fun meant going out with friends once a week and the occasional movie, or putting off going to sleep for fifteen minutes in order to read part of a novel. And I can probably look forward to more of that in grad school next year, and for the rest of my life. So I can appreciate the interlude aspect to these ten months.
I was talking to my mother on the phone a few weeks ago - my family members, bless them, have a tendency to think I'll work myself into the ground given half a chance, which is not really true - and she said, "Well, for someone who's so used to pushing herself as you are, I imagine that the adjustment to having so much free time must be difficult for you."
I thought about it for a few seconds. "No," I said, "I think I'm handling it."
posted by Q at
12:04 PM
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