O children...

Yesterday and today were really fun days at school.  I got done at noon yesterday, after teaching two lessons about Halloween to very excited 2nd form classes (6th graders).  Their English isn't very good because this is their second year learning it, but they're excited about everything, they want to talk (even if its Denglish), and they think everything is funny.  I also taught a 5th form class (9th graders) which was mostly boys who had way too much energy.  They were fun, but very loud, and hard to refocus.

After I was done with school I went for a hike up in the Kurpark again.  Eventually I'll know the park so well I'll either know exactly how to get where I want to go in it, or I'll just get more confused because I've been over it so many times in so many different directions.  I hiked up to a look out spot I hadn't been to before, checked out some of the fall colors; there aren't many yet.  I also found some nice little hang-out and picnic benches; must take a lunch, postcards & book with me up there sometime.  On my way back down I took some different paths further back on the hill and stumbled across a goat farm!  You can actually feed the goats (either bring your own snacks for them, or there was some feed from a dispenser), but they had signs up not to feed them bread.  I didn't have anything with me (including money) so I just tricked them to coming to the fence so I could take pictures and look at them.  Sounds strange, but they were cute & I just think that goats are funny.

My funny classes today were another group of 2nd formers, and the English elective course with the 7th formers (11th graders).  I was talking about Halloween again in the 2nd form, but as this was my first time in that class I also did my introductory spiel (Spiel is actually a German word meaning game, but we use it in English... and I don't know how you'd describe our definition of it).  There was one girl in there who spent the entire lesson asking me questions about my cats, Princess and Holstein.  We'd be in between activities discussing possible tricks, or costumes, and she'd come up with another question about the cats.  It was pretty funny, and I think we all know that she's going to go as a cat for Halloween. 

In that class they did a crossword with Halloween vocabulary, and one of the words was Graveyard, which most of them didn't know.  I saw some kids had put it in the wrong spot, which didn't have enough blanks (the word that was supposed to go there was Coffin), and had just written Gravey.  It made me think of gravy of course, and I about busted out laughing, not only because gravy has nothing to do with Halloween, but because it reminded me of another story.  When our friends from Leipzig came over for Christmas a few years ago we had gravy at Christmas dinner.  Marie's mom didn't know what gravy was in English, so we taught her the new word, but all through dinner she kept calling it gravery.  She also tried to offer it to my mom (the vegetarian); anyway, it was pretty funny, and hard not to bust out laughing.

A lot of the boys in the elective class (and it's almost all boys) play on the school's semi-professional handball team, and they had another big competition today, so they were pretty brain dead by the time we had class.  This lead to some pretty funny moments in class, I gave them very simple instructions, they were each supposed to read an article I gave them, they only had to read one article, and not everyone had the same article.  Then they had to answer some questions and write a short summary.  I never thought we'd get through it! There were so many guys who got so confused, the teacher and I kept looking at each other and laughing out loud.  Somehow during our discussion we ended up talking about their common mispronunciations.  Austrians tend to have a problem pronouncing a V (I have no idea why, it should be easy, it's a sound they use all the time!), and there was one article that talked about vengeance, which meant that each student who read that article talked about Wengeance.  I've also noticed it in the Halloween lessons, we talk about Wampires, sometimes it's hard not to laugh.  We also talked about the dreaded TH, which isn't in German, and they pronounce it as an F, a S, a T, or a Z.  There's one student who really struggles with that, and so then they all started doing it in a very pronounced (wrong) way: i.e. Sirty Sree Sousand, deaF (death) penalty, Tought (thought), Sink (think).  We of course talked about the ever famous Berlitz commercial if you haven't seen it please do! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMhICbFn2JI

Anyway, it's been a good week! Tomorrow when I'm done with classes I'm going to go pick up the package of warm clothes my parents send (Thanks!!!) and then I'm heading up to Vienna for the weekend!