The Visitors

Sebastian-Münster-Gymnasium has several exchange partner schools in other countries. Right now, a group of 16 students from the partner school in the United States is visiting for two weeks. The students are hosted by the families of various SMG students and travel as a group to see various sights in Germany.

Wednesday, the students visited various English classes and gave presentations about American culture. Two of them visited Frau Mikutta's 11th grade class. These students gave a hands-on presentation on baseball. Their PowerPoint presentation wasn't working, but the American students had brought along a baseball bats and some tennis balls, so the majority of the class time was spent letting the SMG students take turns pitching and batting. Some of the students were amazingly good at it. Too bad baseball isn't a major sport over here! I, by the way, was probably the absolute worst batter in the group. Go figure.

Even the class's teacher, Frau Mikutta, took a turn at batting.

A Favorite Lesson

One of my favorite things about being a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant is that I frequently am called upon to talk about Alabama and the South. Recently, I've had the opportunity to teach about topics ranging from Haper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" to life in the Bible Belt to Alabama's climate. This is both interesting and challenging because many (if not most) of my students knew nothing Alabama before I became their teaching assistant.

Perhaps my favorite of these is a lesson I taught to a ninth grade class around Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. As you can probably guess, I gave them a short biography to read and a worksheet to do for homework, and I also had them listen to his "I Have a Dream" speech. The next week, their teacher and I gave them a list of vocabulary words such as 'freedom' and 'equality' that were found in the speech. Then, we split them into groups and instructed them to pretend that they were leaders of the civil rights movement following in Dr. King's footsteps after his death and write a speech of their own. One person from each group had to give the speech their group had written in front of the entire class. They did an amazing job on the speeches, and they really seemed to enjoying listening to each other speak. It was obvious that they truly understood both the importance of the Civil Rights Movement and the ideals of Dr. King.

Warsaw Historical Museum

We were supposed leave Warsaw for Prague at noon yesterday, and we had our hostel accommodations for the upcoming night arranged. We knew that we wouldn't have much time for sightseeing that morning, but since we had a few hours and had heard that the Warsaw Historical Museum was worth visiting, we decided to take a quick look around. We knew that we probably wouldn't make it through the entire museum, but since it cost less than $2 per person, we figured that whatever we did get to see would be worth it.

We got to the museum, checked our bags in the cloakroom, and then began exploring the museum. When we were almost out of time, we headed for the exit.

As soon as a museum employee noticed us, she thrust herself between us and the doorway and pointed towards the next room. We tried to explain that we had a train to catch and needed to leave, but she insisted that we proceed to the next room.

The next room contained a set of stairs with an exit sign over them, so Will and I quickly made our way towards them. No sooner had we reached them, though, than an employee began yelling at us that we had to go to the next room. We tried hard to explain that we really needed to leave, but this employee was no less adamant than the previous one.

Each room that we came to had another employee who insisted we continue despite our objections. They didn't make us stop and look at anthing, but we were required to visit every room in order! about thirty minutes later, we'd covered all 50-something rooms- including one showing a film in Polish- and were finally allowed to collect our bags and exit the museum.

We made it to the train station about ten minutes after our train had departed, and were amazed to learn that although Prague and Warsaw are only about 300 miles apart, it is impossible to get from Warsaw to Prague after noon. Thus, we had to stay in Warsaw an extra night. We returned to the Oki Doki Hostel and reserved a room for another night, emailed our hostel in Prague and asked them to re-book our reservation for the next night, and changed our train ticket back to Germany for a day later than we'd originally planned. It didn't turn out to be much of a problem, but I still can't believe our trip had to be extended for an entire day just because the employees of a Polish museum wanted us to see every room of it!