Emily Lately

Here's are some things I've been doing lately:

1) Enjoying teaching. It's difficult to get up on Monday morning at 6 AM to be at school in time to teach the first lesson, but I really do like it. There are only two classes I dread going to, and I only have to go to each every two weeks.

I look forward to going to all the other classes. Most of the students are really nice and already speak pretty good English (even if it does sometimes still sound like nails scratching across a chalkboard when I hear my name pronounced "Ay-mee-lee"). Classes usually go pretty well because of this, but every once in a while I'll happen to teach about something they're really, really interested in and a lesson will go especially well. This happened when taught about Michael Jackson, defining terrorism, and last week, places with funny names.

I told them class 5c about American places like Idiotville, Oregon and then used an article from BBC about British towns and streets with names like "Crapstone" and "Butt Hole Road." It was an excellent vocabulary lesson and the students asked if they could have extra copies of the articles afterwards. If appealing to the tween-age sense of potty humor is what it takes for me to teach these kids an English word or two, then so be it.

And because I know Andrew at least is wondering where to find this article, here's the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/world/europe/23crapstone.html?scp=1&sq=that%20road%20sign%20means%20something%20else&st=cse

There are two girls at the Gymnasium that are really, really sweet and invited me to go see Alice im Wunderland (yep, that's Alice in Wonderland auf Deutsch) with them. I've heard no-so-good things about it in English, but I think because I saw it in German and therefore wasn't paying as much attention to the dialogue as I was to the visuals that I enjoyed it more.


2) Giving private English lessons and making BANK.

I tutor the son of one of the teachers at the Fashion School who is 14. He has a rock band called "Metal of Wood" and a voice that cracks every other word. I also tutor a student from the Fashion School who gives Tupperware parties on the weekends to finance her singing lessons. And I give Business English lessons to a man named Helmut (he's the neighbor of a teacher at my roommate Zach's school and Zach didn't want to give lessons). I was a little nervous about doing Business English, but I just assign him articles from the New York Times, BBC, CNN, etc. to read every week and then we discuss them. He seems to be happy with the lessons because he and his wife have given me my OWN pair of houseshoes at their apartment and have invited me to go to the south of Styria, which is wine country, with them and a group of friends in a few weeks.


3) Taking courses at the university. I'm doing a German course (long over-due), a course about Vienna around 1900, Intercultural Communication, and the Political System of Austria in the Context of Europe. The German course is mostly conversation, so I'm slowly regaining some of the social skills I lost in the depths of winter.

4) Opening my windows. It's spring and it's WARM! Open windows are a luxury I'm trying to enjoy before I go back to the 406 (likewise I'm enjoying the facts that the TV and the hair dryer can be on at the same time and that multiple police cars aren't parked outside the apartment complex across the street every weekend).


5) Alternately counting down the days until I finish teaching (65) and making frantic lists of all the thing I want to do before I leave while panicking that I won't be able to do them. At the top of the short-list is taking a trip down to the Dalmatian coast in Croatia.

In the spirit all this panicking, for the past two weekends I've done some sight-seeing in Graz. I went to the Armory, which was surprisingly informative and interesting It was built in the 16th century and STILL houses 32,000 weapons and pieces of armor, including this suit for a horse, that were used to outfit Styrian militias. Graz's claim to fame is that this is the largest historical armory in the world (I've lived in very important places- A League of Their Own was filmed in Evansville). I also went to the Volkskunde Museum (like a museum of regional culture) and the Kunsthaus (the art museum, which is called the "friendly alien" because it looks like a spaceship and had an exhibit on capturing speed in art).
Today I took a walk around the old town and saw this guy, apparently a Turkish soldier, sticking out from under an awning. This was the highlight of my day.