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The last two weeks have been incredibly draining, both at school and in the WG.

Last week, I put in 15 hours of face time in the classroom because I was transitioning between my old and new schedules. I'm back at 12 scheduled hours now (actually, I only taught 8 hours this week due to teachers being sick), but my workload outside of school has gone up!

I think I've mentioned that I seem to be the only ETA in Germany who writes the majority of her own lesson plans and who teaches large groups by herself in most classes. Just to clarify, I do not teach entire classes by myself (I *have* taught Vertretungsstunden with another teacher as a warm body in the room); I usually take half of the class (which is still 16+ students). Other ETAs do pull-out groups and/or take half of the class, but they don't have to prep 9+ lessons/week. :) The great thing is that I'm starting to work with a lot of parallel track classes, so I can reteach a lot of my lessons. For example, beginning next week, I'll use the same lesson plan with three Leistungskurse (LK), and since I'm in all of the 10th grade classes, I'll end up repeating quite a few lessons by the end of the year.

This week was also the Fachkonferenz for English. In the past, I haven't attended these meetings-- actually, I was never invited to attend. However, I was invited to this meeting for some reason, and I decided to go. Bonus points for collegiality? I have to say, I knew that the English teachers were a relatively non-dysfunctional and cohesive group, but I didn't realize how willing they were to do tandem work with other classes. For example, they're setting up an online Lernraum with extra practice material for all LK students, and they talked about working with other classes to set up opportunities for speaking practice, writing, and grammar practice during the normal class hours. (Snaps for My Gymnasium and the teachers!) They're also a flexible group: after E mentioned that she already was splitting her LK and giving me the stronger group for speaking, HJ decided to let me try the same thing with his classes. (Unfortunately, the main reason that we're splitting the LK is because the teachers have an abnormally high number of weak students.)

Even though I didn't have a lot to say during the Fachkonferenz, I got a boost of confidence in my German skills after realizing that I understood the entire two-hour meeting. The teachers only used four words that weren't in my passive vocabulary, and I could figure them out from the context. (Snaps for me, too!) Also, I have to say that observing the power dynamics at work at the Fachkonferenz was also very entertaining. The more senior teachers joked around, teased each other, and referred to things they've tried in the past, while the younger teachers and Referendare sat there quietly.

As for life in the WG, I've been overworked and underpaid. On Monday, I had to watch Dumpling for an extra four hours on top of the normal four hours, and Mama gave me 9 Euro and two wedges of cheese. On Tuesday, I babysat for two kids for four hours, and Mama bought me cookies. This weekend, I'm dog-sitting and guinea-pig-sitting, and I probably won't get paid at all. (On the other hand, I did whine to Mama about how the dogs peed and pooped all over the apartment last night, despite my 11:30 PM and 6:30 AM potty trips...) I think I am going to become extremely busy in the evenings all of a sudden.

At least I don't have any foreign language classes until April. I got a 1,7 in my C1 German class, which was about what I had expected. The strange thing is that I scored an 85 on the placement test in October, which put me solidly in the middle of C1. I just retook the placement test, and I got a 78. Bizarre. I'm going to chalk that up to a bad test day, but I probably should ask the professor if I should retake C1 or take C2. (I have an unusually large gap between my speaking level and my oral comprehension, reading, writing, and grammar levels. I think I am about B2.2 in speaking, beziehungsweise C1 3/4 in everything else.) To make up for not having German class, I decided to read all of the Harry Potters auf Deutsch. It's a great vocabulary builder, and I hope it'll help with lexis, as well.

One last thing: someone found my blog by searching "rice crispies berlin," which is all kinds of awesome. Yay for chocolate Rice Krispie Treats!