My Job as a Hamburger

I’ve been promising to write about my new school and what I actually do here, so I figured it was time to talk about my position as an English Teaching Assistant. The role of teaching assistant really does vary from school to school, for example they expected something entirely different from me at my first school (G2, where, as I have mentioned before, the students were at a very low level of English) than they do at my current school (H18, where the students are at a much higher English level).

(typical questions that I get asked)

At G2 I started out observing classes, from English classes with two different teachers, to classes where they were discussing current events (such as the train strikes in Hamburg) in German, to classes of international students learning both English and German.

Once I started helping out I did everything from giving a presentation on how to use Power Point in English, to making a quiz about global warming and the English vocabulary needed for that subject, to introducing them to the concept of American Thanksgiving via “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving” and clips from “Friends” (the episode where Joey eats an entire turkey by himself was met with much amusement). I got to have fun and play Scrabble and Rory’s Story Cubes with them, and then sometimes had to do more boring work like creating a template for a maintenance contract. Overall one of the teachers made sure to take advantage of my presence and gave me the opportunity to “team-teach” and help out as much as possible, while my other teacher didn't quite have the same idea, so with her I mostly observed and then occasionally she would throw me into a class or a project with no warning whatsoever.

Comparatively speaking at my new school I have been able to help out a lot more. While I do still observe classes, it is more out of necessity since the students are required to give a lot of presentations. These presentations are still interesting for me though, since they are mostly tourism/travel students giving presentations on either towns and cities in Germany or cities worldwide, and in return I have been giving a presentation about Boston (sorry Pennsylvania people, maybe someday I’ll give a presentation on Lancaster, but for the time being I haven’t been given the time to discuss the whole “Amish” subject).

Aside from that I have mostly been helping with grammar related things, since as I said these students have a much higher level of English, and that is truly what they need help with. I have given a presentation on word order in sentences (subject/place/time, etc. Funny story: my voice gave out halfway through said presentation so a good chunk of it was just me croaking at the class) and a presentation on prepositions (wanted desperately to show them the School House Rock video about prepositions, but decided that if I did so they would probably think that all Americans are on drugs).

I also had to create a handout about when to use the word “the” (kept making puns about “The” Handout…yup, still funny). And I am currently helping some of my tourism students with correcting their homework and business complaint or apology letters (much like what I did as a tutor at Suffolk), checking their grammar, spelling, etc.

There are cons to my job, even at my fancy new school. I definitely feel that I’m not given the chance to help out as much as I would like to. This comes partially from the fact that it seems as though a few of the teachers don’t believe that I can teach/help out because I’m so young/haven’t had a million years of teacher training like German teachers have, and partially from the fact that since I work at a vocational/business school their schedule is often set in stone, and they don’t always have the time to deviate from the plan to do “fun” English things. Most of the time I am just there as an available resource or “living dictionary” if you will. This is a constant source of frustration for me, since there is nothing I dislike more than sitting around doing nothing, which is often what I end up doing in class. As an overachieving workaholic I would love to be active in every single class, but that’s just not how this works and I’ve had to make peace with that.

But aside from that, my new school is definitely one big pro. I love it when I feel like I am actually helping (or getting through) to the students, I love seeing them get excited to see me in class, and I love that I get to learn about a subject that I am interested in as well. My new teachers are all pretty cool, I only have about 14 full weeks of teaching left (!), and also as of Saturday I am on vacation for three weeks and am going to the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, so life is good.

(More typical questions. They really do think that we Americans are all fat, know tons of movie stars, and eat nothing but fast food)