Above - the flowers I recieved to say 'thank you' for the teaching.
Above - 2 of my students, Rhinhaart and Hannaloore, from the Beginners group.
Above - lunch - (from left to right) Horst, Karin, Chrissy, Heidi, Annetta and Beata.
Above - the dining room.
Above - Jenny.
Above - Jannik and Jenny.
Above - two of my students, Karin and Karin, from the advanced class. (Both baker's wives)
And so today saw the last day of the course. It’s gone by so quickly, I can’t quite believe that I’ve been teaching for 5 days and that I’ve been here nearly a week! I wasn’t working with the beginners and advanced classes today – Tanya covered my lessons for me. She’s Ukrainian but her English is fluent and she speaks with an American accent – it’s odd. Anyway, I awoke this morning to the remnants of last night’s storm. The thunder and lightening had given way to torrential rain. I hunted out my umbrella – us Brits never travel without one, and made my way over the road. I was going to be working with Maren this morning. She’s been in the advanced group all week but she is far better than the other students in the group and was clearly finding it too easy so I did a one-to-one with her today. We looked at a reading comprehension on Mother Teresa and then got side tracked discussing charities, the homeless, broad sheets and tabloids, various grammatical points and also idioms. In English we say ‘it’s raining cats and dogs’ and in German they say, as the French do, that it’s raining cords. Slightly more logical that cats and dogs I think! At 11h there was the usual coffee and cake. There seemed to be even more cake today – two of the students are the wives of bakers and they seem to be having a competition as to who can bring in the most cake! At lunch we ate soup. Again, I had my own special version minus the meat that Jenny and Jannick had prepared for me. I could get used to having my very own chef! And then there was fruit and more cake. Heidi gave me a bunch of flowers to thank me for coming to teach. One of the students – one of the baker’s wives (confusingly both Baker’s wives are called Karin!) gave me ‘Original Herrnhuter Schwesternküsse’ and ‘Paul Bäker’ biscuits – both from her bakery.
Next week we are running the course again but I don’t think it will be as good as there are not as many students. I think next week there are only 3 or 4. I will be doing most of the teaching and, because one of the students has done the course this week, then I will have to find new material. Although I think this week I have taught the past simple and past continuous to death – maybe next week we’ll look at the future. That and when to use an auxiliary in questions.
As today is July 4th we are supposed to be having a barbeque to celebrate American Independence day but it’s been raining all morning and even though it has now stopped everywhere is wet. It’s a shame because the whole week has been so amazingly sunny and now, the one day we want to do an outdoor activity, it rains! Hopefully it will stay dry. Most of the students are coming tonight and most are also coming tomorrow on the day trip to Görlitz – a city on the German-Poland border.
