Friday 11th July 2008

Today was the last day of teaching. We had reached the end of our 2 one-week-intensive English courses. Angelika (one of the students) brought in beautiful pink flowers for both me and Heidi which she had picked from her garden. Heidi was working until the afternoon so it was just me, Angelika, Claudia and Karin for coffee and lunch. It was quite sad that it was the last day of teaching. I’ve really enjoyed it. More so this week than last, I think because I was fully in control of everything the students were learning this week whereas last week the students had two teachers. We’ve covered so much – there is/are, there was/were, the present continuous, the present perfect contrasted with the past simple and then ‘going to’ for taking about future plans. We looked at countable and uncountable nouns and quantifiers. I set homework and lots of it – grammar exercises, a reading comprehension and a writing task. It was great. And because I taught them 3 hours a day and had mid-morning coffee and then lunch with them I felt like I got to know them all. It was more than just teaching, there was a definite social side to the course too which, in many ways, was equally as important as the actual learning. At lunch Karin gave both me and Heidi a ceramic green leaf necklace. We then gave a tour of the Jesus Haus as it had been something the students had particularly requested. After the tour we all said goodbye and the students left. Heidi asked me whether I’d like to go to Oybin – a village in the mountains. I said I would so we decided to go. We were both wearing jeans and shoes but as the sun was shining and it was hot we changed into cropped trousers, t-shirts and flip flops…