Schöne Stadtroda

Hello again, everyone.

I've been in Stadtroda now for...oh, a bit over a week. I can really hardly believe it; it seems like just a little while ago I was hearing about my placement and sending my first e-mails to my mentor teacher. Now I've moved into the dorm, met my suitemate, taught a few lessons, and had a few adventures, albeit of a very different sort than those that dominated my summer. I was going to try to do a sort of play-by-play introduction, but now 1) over a week has passed and that's just disgraceful and 2) there would be way too much of "then I took a nap" or "then I Internetted for a few hours", so I'm just going to ramble about this place for a bit, if that's okay with everyone.

So, if you weren't paying attention before, I'm in Stadtroda, a small, quiet town just southeast of Jena in the German state of Thuringia ("Thüringen", if you'd like to try for that high front rounded vowel followed by the German "r". No? Didn't think so.) This means I'm in eastern Germany--former GDR territory--and in the countryside. Neither of these things are by any means bad, just...not quite the same as last time, when I was in a good-sized university city just an hour from Frankfurt in Hessen, which is in the West.

I'm living in the Studentenwohnheim (student dormitory) owned by the Fachschule (technical school) where I work. Like the dorm in Marburg, the Fachschule is stark, white, and echo-y, usually oddly quiet and sparsely populated--at least it feels that way, because you rarely actually seen anyone. As I usually do when presented with an empty room with blank white walls, I went a little crazy and stuck posters, postcards, patches and pictures all over the place and dumped stuff everywhere so it now looks lived in. Normally, this Jenniferizing process takes weeks or months, and the collages are added to gradually over the duration of my stay, so I'm rather pleased that I've put all of the major and most of the minor stuff up in a week. It looks pretty awesome, if I may say so. This is, of course, a frantic effort to combat the echo-y starkness of the dorm in general. Living in a place like this would drive anyone mad in short order without getting to know some fellow humans relatively quickly, Batman posters or no, so thankfully I've been blessed with a suitemate.

My room shares a bathroom and a short hallway connecting to the main hallway with another room, wherein dwelleth my new friend Bethany. Bethany comes from England--from north Yorkshire, she would probably like me to say--which of course means we have plenty to talk/laugh/argue about, since she's a fun, friendly, cheerful, optimistic person and I'm a snarky, eternally curious Anglophile. We've spent a lot of time together over the past week, in large part because we quite enjoy each other's company, but also in small part because there isn't really anyone else to hang out with.

That brings me on to my students, with whom I share the dorm. They are mostly between 19 and 24 (with a few older outliers, up to one 51-year-old) and are studying agriculture and household management in order to do stuff like farm management and hospitality services. So far, they've been generally civil and polite but not overly welcoming or friendly. This is not to say they're unfriendly, just...reserved. Many of them go home for the weekends, and during the week, they're shut up in their rooms, out working, or in class. Anyone who may remember my Fulbright application will know what I mean about the closed-door policy, which is common in Germany but signals "I don't want to talk to you" to me and, apparently, to Bethany as well. In response, we've made cookies. I'll let you know how that turns out.

The school is a lot like a specialized community college, and is apparently well-known, at least in Thüringen. The students are separated in different English classes by their area of study and not by English proficiency, which means that in the same class I have a couple upper intermediates, some mid and lower intermediates, a few mid to very low beginners, and maybe even one low advanced. This makes teaching complicated, since on any given task, either the beginners will be bored, the upper intermediates and advanceds will be bored, or both. Whew. Good thing we spent so much time in TESOL class talking about mixed classrooms; now I get to see how it works firsthand. In any case, I won't be using the books I've been reading to teach these students, since they're not nearly that advanced, but I'm still glad I've been reading them, because that's had the unexpected effect of getting me addicted to reading and making me a compulsive book-buyer. My total book count at the end of this summer is somewhere around 20. I started with one.

Anyway, thankfully, in addition to a fun suitemate, I've also been blessed with a great mentor teacher. Katrin met me on the train station on the first day, gave me a tour of the town, and made sure I had everything I needed to survive the first few days. She also set up appointments for me at all the different official offices and went with me to make sure that everything went well. So, with little effort or pain on my part, I'm a registered resident of Stadtroda, I've opened a bank account, and my visa is on its way.

Also, Katrin is very generous with her class time, by which I mean that half of each 90-minute class period belongs to me. This is both great--I don't have to spend (much) time handing back papers or observing when I could be teaching--and intimidating, because I'm expected to plan those 45-minute lessons on my own, making my own materials and worksheets and handling the class with little support from Katrin. Honestly, though, this is wonderful for me, since I feel fairly well-prepared for the responsibility by my training in TESOL and volunteering and working in classrooms for years now.

The first classes were somewhat frightening, though. I had to do an introductory lesson for six different classes--I did a Powerpoint about myself, introducing my state, city, family, and hobbies, then asked them to interview each other and introduce each other to me. For the first couple times, this went well; Katrin started the class, asking them some warm-up questions so I could get a feel for their English level, then she'd introduce me. But for the last few intro classes, there was no chance to hear them speak before I started, so I was going in blind, hoping they'd understand me. However, there's only one class where I've really had trouble getting them to respond--the "lame" class, as Katrin calls them.

Apparently, many of the Fachschule's students are still out working at the end of summer jobs or internships, since it's still the end of the agricultural season. After the break in October, they'll all come back to start classes, and our six-classes-a-week schedule will get a lot more complicated. Eesh. I'm glad at this point that I'm being eased into it gently! At the moment, the class schedule fluctuates each week, so although I had classes ever day but Thursday last week, this week I don't have any on Monday or Tuesday. At this point, I just shrug and show up when Katrin tells me to.

Speaking of October, although it seems a bit odd to me to have a two-week break so early in the year (especially when we get only one week for Christmas!), I'm not going to say no. I've started looking at the options, and it looks like it would be great fun to spend those two weeks exploring Spain, Portugal, and maybe even a bit of Morocco. I've never been to any of those places before. And Ryanair flies to Barcelona for cheap! I really do love living in Europe.

Right. It can't look good that I'm already daydreaming about going elsewhere when I just got here. It's just that adjusting to a new place is always daunting, and Stadtroda is so very quiet. As I mentioned, the students are difficult to get to know--with one very friendly exception, who baked cookies with me and Bethany last week--and even in the middle of the day, the streets feel deserted. The "old town" is all bright pastel buildings that look very pretty except that there is almost never anyone around; the "new town" where I live, up the hill a bit, has a few stores (a Lidl, a bakery, a Sparkasse, a couple flower shops) but, again, rarely very many people. Where is everyone?

Most likely in Jena. Unfortunately, the train station is a good 20-minute walk from the Wohnheim, but from there it's only about 12 minutes to the much bigger city of Jena, that has real shops (hooray!) crowds of people (wow!) and a university, where I shall matriculate come the beginning of October--although, with our accelerated Fachschule schedule, I doubt I'll be able to take many classes. Doesn't matter too much to me, though; my main aims are to get the Semesterticket, which gets me on all public transport in Thüringen for free for the semester, and to meet other students. I also may be able (hopefully) to join a guitar class in Stadtroda, but Jena definitely has more options. Bethany and I spent the afternoon there on Saturday, just shopping and looking around, and I may go back tomorrow or Tuesday to try to get a cell phone finally.

Hmm, I'm not sure what else to add, except my own feelings about all this stuff. Mainly, I'm still waiting to see how it all turns out. I really hope to make more connections with the students at the Fachschule, to spend more time getting to know Katrin with her family, to make friends with the university students, and just really to make a place for myself in this town. This is hard when just finding people to talk to is a challenge. I remain, however, confident that this will improve, and I feel like all the ingredients are here for a really wonderful experience, if I can just make the most of it.

Please feel free to comment if you have more questions. This is, after all, what this blog is supposed to be about!

P.S. I have pictures ready but Blogger isn't letting me insert them. It's late so I'll try again later.