It's all about the Bengt

It's all about the Bengt

bengt

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Stepped off the edge of the earth?	[Oct. 28th, 2007\|12:27 pm] bengt
In a word, no. I didn't check when the last time I actually posted to LJ was, but i know it has been quite awhile. I've been quite the busy fellow the last few weeks. I had a week that I was in Italy, where they have the internet, just not where I was. Shortly thereafter, Monica, a fellow German major from Lawrence and now assistant teacher like me, came up to visit. And after that, I came down to visit her in the Rheingau region of Germany. In addition to that, I've been working about the double amount of hours at school. In other words, with everything (and that fact that I don't and probably wont have internet at home this year) I haven't gotten to posting, emailing or anything much internetty for awhile. In any event, things are going pretty well here in the Germanic world. A few mean people taking me on because of that country that I come from. Lazy students, a lot of them. Yes. All this and more in coming posts. The next few weeks should be a bit quieter. Also, can someone please do me a favor: Get Colbert 08 in the Illinois Primary!
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Italy	[Oct. 6th, 2007\|02:39 pm] bengt
I just remembered that I didn't tell you that I am in fact going to Italy with that 10th grade class. I mentioned that a few weeks ago and it worked out. We leave tomorrow evening and will be in Tuscany for about a week. I guess I will see Florence, Pisa, the Mediterranian Sea and other fun things.
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Briefing you all about everything	[Oct. 6th, 2007\|02:05 pm] bengt
So a lot has happened in the last couple of weeks since I last posted. I have been pretty busy at school and trying to get myself all set up here. There were also two weeks of special activities at school. The first week was the school week, where students did projects relating to the main theme. The Theme was Wizardry and Magic in School. By the way, this would be impossible as a theme in American schools (although, a private school like this one could possibly get away with it). The next week was Europa Woche, Europe Week, which brought with it fewer classes and yet more projects. I almost got drafted into playing piano with some students, but I was so out of practice and never learned anything about that style of music anyway. So I got out of that. Last weekend, I met some of the other assistants from the area, the bulk of whom are from Britain (including a girl from Northern Ireland with the coolest accent I've heard in my life!). I slept on one of their floors in Rostock and was really stiff thereafter. However, I didn't even notice how my shoulder or neck felt until the next day sitting in school. This week in school was much shorter, because it was Tag der Deutschen Einheit (Day of German Unity). The main celebration for Germany was here in Schwerin, and it was PACKED. There was a presentation about the Bundestag, the national parliament, which was cool. The 'Speaker of the House' and the Governor of this state were both there to speak to us a little bit, as well as some conservative legislator who isn't well known. The legislator and the Governor gave little speeches proclaiming their support for a ban on the extreme rightist parties and for better health care, etc etc. Then we all were asked to vote as to whether the government should be in charge of the national education system. It was a nonsense question and the only person to vote against it was one of my students from 10th grade, who was dorking around about it. Otherwise, there were a lot of different booths, with different foods and information about various things. For example, there was a tent with information about how one could get their files from the Stasi era (the Stasi is the 'Staatsicherheit' people, or State Security Department in East Germany, which kept files on many people, from major political opponents to regular people who may have said something vaguely against the state). There were booths from different governmental departments, different vendors of food. And each German state had its own section. I bought some real cheese from some Swiss vendor and some real sausage from a Hessian place. I also bought some local honey somewhere. There were many stages with music or children's programs. All this went from Tuesday afternoon to Wednesday evening, when there was a HUGE fireworks/music show at the castle. It was really cool, because they had the Schwerin castle lit up, laser lighting and spewing smoke and everything. The music was exactly what we'd expect from German musical performances: despite it being the main national holiday, I didn't hear the national anthem once, but instead kitschy 80s music. This included the first song during the light show, where the singer was on a platform that is raised and lowered hydraulically, and hanging under that platform was a giant disco ball. He himself was wearing all white and his gestures must've been gigantic, because I could see him clearly from across a river and down on the ground. Anyway, it was a fun big festival. According to the People's Newspaper (Schweriner Volkszeitung), there were at least 250,000 people at the festival. Since the total population of this city is about 90,000, this place was packed, and it's kind of nice to have the place back to normal now.
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...and then I found five euros!

[Sep. 19th, 2007|06:12 pm]

bengt

[	Current Location	\|	Computer number 10, internet cafe	]
[	music	\|	lots and lots of typing people	]

Yesterday was an odd day, I have to admit. Things were good, but also kind of annoying. The teacher that I work with most was just in one of her moods. I guess she gets them more and more now. She's nice enough much of the time. But she's at the very end of her time teaching, and it's getting more and more obvious. Not that she's lazy about it, but she just has her way of doing things and it's too late to change the system. Anyway, she snapped at about everyone possible over the course of the day and basically grumbled the rest of the time. There's this wrong and that wrong. It's basically what I've been annoyed about in German people for a long time, times twelve. This isn't right, that isn't good enough, why do things have to change, things were so much better before the reunification, why can't I have my own room/stuff/laptop?, and on and on it goes. For whatever reason, though, I can communicate with her despite all that and we get along quite well.
Anyway, I went shopping yesterday, got a whole lot of food, so I can eat like a human again. I hadn't had a chance to go grocery shopping for more than a week, since I didn't really have a weekend. I mean, I had sunday, but that sure doesn't count, since nothing was open except the kiosk, where I got my 4-week TV guide. And then I decided to make myself a salad. There hadn't been any dressing at the store, so I decided to be rustic and make dressing by mixing vinegar and olive oil. Well, I guess I got the propotions all wrong because it was the second most acidic salad I've ever had (the first being three years ago, also in Germany, also the last time I tried such a foolish thing as making salad dressing this way). So I burned my mouth a little bit, it is surely unpleasant, but I don't think anyone's noticing the little welts on my lips...
Anyway, today started out that one of the other teachers is organising a Klassenfahrt, class trip, and I guess the other teacher had to bow out of helping out. So she was desperate and my teacher suggested that I could go along and this teacher (the one who I'd visited last weekend, actually) was quite pleased with this solution. So, pending the 'ok' of the principal, I could well be going to Italy for a week in October with some students for a nice price.
So that set a nice tone for today. My classes were fine. In the 8th grade, a class of 6 girls, they were writing little essays about the USA. I get along with two of them especially well, because they are very hard working and interested to learn new things. (they also helped me out of a jam yesterday: I was walking across the playground and a couple of my students were playing basketball. They said 'Hey Ben, these guys wanted to meet you' and over came two little kids. I asked which grade they're in and it was 3rd grade, and it was immediately clear to me that my older students had just pawned off the annoying little kids on me. Anyway, the topic of the conversation was 'are you REALLY a teacher?' and I said, yes, of course. And they didn't believe a word of it. So I looked around to find someone to prove me right, all the while realizing how silly it is to justify myself to 9 year olds. After showing them my drivers license didn't work ('Hey, it says that he's 84 years old!!!') I turned to the building and there were these two girls sitting in the 2nd floor window and said to ask them. At first they decided to be mean and say 'no, he's a pupil too' but finally they relented. That didn't work really either, so I got a teacher to tell them. Then I went to tai chi.) Anyway, they were writing some amazing sentences and coming up with some really good ideas, which is really great to see.
This afternoon, my teacher and I went into town and met up with a guy from LISA, which is connected to the Education Ministry and chatted for awhile. The guy is British, so we could speak a lot in English and he's very smart indeed. He showed us some interesting things, like this test that they'd tried out on some classes and he showed us a graph of how each of the questions varied. For example, it would show how many percent of the students got a question right comparing one school with a more general sized group (the state or city or something) and when both those numbers were low, then the question was bad. And then he showed us the questions and we guessed what was wrong with it. It was fun. After lunch, he gave me a general outline of a verbal comprehension test and I was to tape it. So I wrote down some notes and away I went. I'm not gonna post the actual task here, because it may be used for the 6th graders' class tests in March. But it was very interesting, as I was not to actually write out what I was going to say, but to have some points to hit and thus make it more natural. I thought it was gonna be a big pain in the neck to do, but actually it was pretty easy. When I was finished, both he and my teacher said that I am very good at this. I think doing theater in high school, and various speech groups, has given me a bit of an idea how it works. By no means am I profi-level, but good enough for their purposes, I guess. I think they'll use me again, which is fine, because I enjoyed doing it. A little improv here or there, in the classroom or out, doesn't hurt.
And then, to top things off, I went to the 'mall' and saw a couple of my fav students, bought a black dress shirt for the Schulball and found the specialty tea place.  Man, I oughta just go to bed now before something goes bad!

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Networking and a trick	[Sep. 17th, 2007\|05:11 pm] bengt
Everything is going well. I found out last week that the Tai Chi group at my school does the same Tai Chi routine that I learned through PBS quite a few years ago, so that's exciting that I'll get to practice that a little bit more. Although the teacher does it a little bit oddly, so I'm gonna have to keep an eye out that I dont mess it up. I'm pretty tired, because it was a busy weekend. On Saturday, we had an Open House day, and it seemed to go down pretty well. I guess they had a pretty good sized line of people applying to get their children into the school, which is good. Otherwise, I talked with a few teachers, particularly Senor Träger, the Spanish teacher, who I found out should be Herr Doktor Träger, with his doctorate in Latin American History, I think. I also spoke with this one student, who is very interested in chatting with me in English. He bought me a 'hamburger', which was a sort of beef filet, with mayo and chopped tomato on a hard roll. They also charge 1 € for "hot water" at the cafeteria, which is kind of outrageous, in everyone's opinion. Anyway, I got to chat with a bunch of students. I met one on the streetcar coming to the school, although I'd already spoken to her before, and we talked about the US, Indiana where she had been an exchange student last year. Then with some friends of the student that bought me the hamburger. It was a good time to make connections, despite the fact that it was annoying to have to go to work on a Saturday. Afterwards, one teacher asked if I just wanted to come over and hang out with her family, completely spontaneous. Now, this is Germany. Who's spontaneous here? Not very many people! Maybe I just have met the wrong people, but so many people seem to like their plans so much. So anyway, I joined her and her family. We decided it would be fun to try and throw off one of the daughters by saying that I could only speak English, thereby forcing her to use her English a bit. More precisely, we just didnt tell her that I spoke German and the assumption that I couldn't followed. She was very nervous to do speak, but sort of settled into it and actually seemed pleased when I told her that she spoke well; she only sounded a bit nervous, but that's ok, I said. Then came the question: Do you speak German? I said, some. She said, 'well, what's the German word for..uhh. tree?' Pause. 'Baum?' 'OH sehr gut!' Finally, during the grillen, we decided to spring it on her. She was annoyed, but it seemed like she was used to little tricks in their family sometimes. Anyway, the news that I speak pretty well in German had been filtering through the rest of the party, so much that a couple of the people asked me to say something, to see if the teacher had been lying about my lack-of-accent. I dont know whether they were disappointed, but they seemed content at least. Anyway, this was as far as the evening went pretty much. One of the other daughters of the teacher, who is 18 or so, was also an exchange student, but in Miinnesota and they had just visited in the summer. They seemed most impressed by the coldness of Lake Superior, even when it was 95 out. Anyway, Hannes, who drove me home, invited me, more or less, to go to the Achteck, a club and hang-out place, and I planned to go. But after such a full day of talking with people and everything, I couldn't even keep awake in my uncomfortable desk chair. So sadly it didnt work. (I found out today that a couple more students were there on Saturday night as well so I would've known quite a few people there.. oh well, I would've been grumpy or something anyway). Finally, on Sunday, after church at the weird place that I go to here, I took a walk around one of the 7 lakes here. It took about an hour, but it was a nice time, and there were a lot of people around there. After that, I went home, ate something light, and then went to a museum exhibition of East German posters. There were some really good things, but not as many as I'd hoped. There were, however, two Hulot posters and that was fun to see!
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Tafelbild	[Sep. 14th, 2007\|07:02 pm] bengt
I have to share with you part of the mind map from the chalkboard this morning. The 8th grade had to come up with facts about the US and this is some of what they came up with: America People: 300 Million, GW Bush, Hispanics, Asian Americans, stars, Natives, African Americans Sights: Statue of Liberty, skyscrapers, the Old State House (Boston), White House, Walk of Fame Sports: basketball, baseball, American Football, athletics, cheerleaders, boxing Food/drink: fast food (hamburger, french fries), orange juice, Chinese, coffee to go, eggs, lemonade, pizza, cola, spaghetti, crisps, toast, T-Bone steaks, hot chocolate Other: flag, guns
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Question and Quick Update

[Sep. 12th, 2007|02:29 pm]

bengt

[	Current Location	\|	Russian internet-call shop	]
[	music	\|	streaming ami radio	]

Hello all.
First the question: Anyone have a favorite photo album website that they would recommend to me? I do want to post some pictures of this very nice city, and I made some very beautiful ones last weekend, although I nearly harmed camera doing so. I dont have internet, but I can put pictures on my Wechseldatenträger (memory stick) and then upload them from this here internet cafe. Sounds like fun, eh?

Germany is going well. My classes are going just fine, although it's getting tiring with me standing in front of the classes, vamping on things to say and trying to elicit questions about whatever they want. And doing this in classes from 7th grade to 13th grade. It's a lot of fun to find out what they want to know and to see what they already know, or think they know. Someone told me that Americans eat Chinese food for breakfast. Another one made the interesting observation that Spongebob's last name in English, "Squarepants", is oddly the opposite of his name in German, "Schwammkopf" or "Spongehead". I think Spongebob Spongehead would be kind of silly sounding, but that's why they stay with the German name. Others asked me my political stance, as usual. They ask whether I'Ve met so-and-so famous singer, who tends to be nowhere near as famous in the US as they are here. The something Dolls? No idea. Someone asked me a question that they were afraid would be too intimate, "do they have magazines in America?" Clearly something got lost in translation. Besides, what are 7th graders asking questions like that and "do you drink/smoke?" for? and am I allowed to answer this kind of question? I mean, if teachers can get sacked for smoking and talking to a student at the same time, can we discuss this kind of thing? How am I to be a good example to the youth of a foreign country?
Anyway, it will be nice not to always be answering questions about me. I mean, I dont even have that much to say about myself..but it's nice to see that most of the classes are interested, at least with some encouragement.
Tomorrow, I'Ve got a couple periods and then I'm gonna learn how to golf with a PE class. I'm not sure why, but I might as well learn something new. And it gets me in contact with some classes and a teacher or two. They also found out that I can, at least in theory, play piano, cello and sing. Now they want me in on that, which will be fun too. It's all overwhelming, I guess. But it's just the first week of school. No problem.
Now, I'm starved. Time to work my way home and then make some food. Perhaps I'll meet my flatmates? And I'll thwap one of them, who was very loud at 1:30 last night and then again at 4 am. Hardly heard a peep out of him in a week and then on a Tuesday night he's loud. Ah well, it wasn't that bad, just kind of weird.
I hope the weather back there is warmer than here!

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Re: WeatherSTAR 4000	[Jun. 17th, 2007\|04:28 pm] bengt
Ok, these people are really loony. They mostly don't have actual recordings of the Local Forecast from 1995 or anything (which would be sad enough). They have it EMULATED on their computers. There's a commercially available emulator of the Local Forecast, and some others just create it with Macromedia or something. Who DOES that with their time? I guess they have a memory or something and they go back and reconstruct how that would look on TWC.. at once, I'm torn between saying this is really cool and saying that it's really lame...
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How I just met kindred spirits on YouTube	[Jun. 17th, 2007\|04:02 pm] bengt
So last week I heard about this "documentary" called "Loose Change" which is a conspiracy theorist's history of the September 11th attacks. First of all, I decided that I would like to be a Conspiracy Theorist when I grow up, because you can claim anything you want and anyone that disagrees with you is either lying or has been lied to. Anyway, I watched this documentary and thought it was pretty entertaining for how much BS they were putting out. A few good points, but lots of hearsay and selective hearing on their parts. Then, I looked at youtube's "Related Videos" section and found "Unfastened Coins: The Titanic Conspiracy" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saHs6J0OXVI) which is made in exactly the same style as "Loose Change" but a parody. I sent the link to my best childhood friend, Kristin, and we agreed that we TOTALLY would have made something like that when we were little. Then today, I was looking around at other YouTube things and found that there's an oddly large number of people who are The Weather Channel freaks. And not just TWC in general.. no these people know EVERYTHING about "Your Local Forecast" technology. And I mean everything. They have clips of WeatherSTAR 4000, which was in use for many years (which I remember fondly, but that makes me sound weird), WeatherSTAR XL and Junior, etc etc. Two of my personal favs were of 4000's glitches: occasionally, the computer would put up the national forecast rather than the local one, just showing you the weather in big cities all around; someone had gathered a couple instances of that and put it on the web. Then I saw this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFI7Q0anySM This guy knows who did the voiceovers saying "Forecast for your area" and such. They changed them in 2000, and so he burned the post-Y2K guy's voice onto an old clip of a pre-2000 Local Forecast. Quoth the poster: "Remember back when the WeatherSTAR 4000 and Junior had Dan Chandler's narration on The Weather Channel? Since 2000, Allen Jackson had been doing the narrations. This is what the WeatherSTAR 4000 and Junior would be like with Allen Jackson's voice" Are we all nuts? At the same time, I"m a little relieved to know that there are other odd people in the world. But does this bode well for my students, present and future?
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A Press Release of Sort

[Jun. 6th, 2007|09:32 pm]

bengt

[

mood

happy

]

My application for year 2 in Germany has been accepted!! I will be sent off to the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. I'm looking forward to it and hoping for less craziness than I had at the beginning of this year! But hopefully I get a nice school with nice students and nice colleagues. Surely I can't get everything, right?

Anyway, it's going to be fun.. but no worries, friends and families of me, I will be home for most of July and August. I get back on July 3. I hope that I get to see you!

I mean it, AT the airport. Mark your calendars... or just sometime during July and August..

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