Teaching English, Re-learning German

For the next couple of weeks, I am pretending to be a primary school ESL teacher. I've got kids from first to fifth grade, but only in small groups. I had the fifth graders working on mad libs today, and the verbs they kept picking for their stories were all forms of "to poop". There's a first grade girl who keeps talking to me in Japanese, and I made a couple of third grade boys sit in opposite corners of the room and do their work facing the wall. It's been a good week, considering I don't really know what I'm doing.

Learning English as a kid is not so different from learning German as an adult. You learn by topics - family, transportation, work, school, foods, holidays, etc. You spell things wrong, try to answer in as few words as possible, ask why complex grammar rules make no sense, and say 'I don't know' a lot. The more these kids are in school, the more English they are exposed to. The more I am in this school, the more English I am exposed to and the less German I use.

I can definitely tell that I lost a little of my German language skill over the summer. I heard myself order food at a restaurant last night and it sounded pretty bad. I half believed that I'd do some studying on my own while we were in the U.S., but that never happened. I guess I am not the most dedicated student in school. The words are in my brain somewhere, it's just the grammar rules that I might need to learn again.

I have not given up; I've just gotten distracted for a while. My class starts again in a couple of weeks, and hopefully all of us will need some extra review. Helga and I are planning to meet again to practice conversation soon, and my German over cocktails group meets next week. So I should get back on track pretty soon. In the meantime, I might research all verb forms of  'to poop' in German. That's one I haven't learned yet.