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I’ve just had my first full day at my new school and it’s looking pretty rosy I have to admit, I only took one lesson today and sat at the back of another two as organising my timetable took long enough.

It’s tough being popular and it’s certainly seems that I am in demand here and whilst I no longer have a long weekend, as Friday has gone from being free to being my busiest day, I do have Tuesdays off.  This means I can go to the quiz on a Monday and not have to get up four hours later for school!  Indeed I now only have two early starts a week so from that perspective my timetable is much improved.

My classes are across the board although I am tending toward the extremes but I don’t mind that as the young ones are lots of fun and the older ones are able to hold a decent conversation with me.

The teachers themselves are a really great bunch and seemed quite laid back about my arrival, the teachers from the Käthe Kollwitz obviously haven’t told them what they have in store.  That said it certainly looks like I will be operating by a different set of rules here, but time will tell on that one and I am sure I will have my wicked way somehow or other with the students, especially as it sounds like I will be doing some of my favourite Shakespeare plays with a couple of classes.

I wound up discussing Shakespeare with a couple of the teachers, as they wanted to find out which plays I favour (The Tempest, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet, if you get rid of the love story!) They laughed at my suggestion of how to improve Romeo and Juliet, but it’s true – I believe it’s a perfectly good play ruined by a love story in the same way that Pearl Harbour is a pretty good film if you get rid of the last hour (which is the mushy love shite part.)

What can I say? I am not a romantic person, which funny enough was an accusation laid at me by my last girlfriend.

…When nothing seems to go right? I’ve been having a day like that today.  The only thing that has been good about it has that it has been a day off from school, as my new school doesn’t start back until tomorrow.

It all started by me oversleeping, I really didn’t want to get out of bed today and more so than usual.  I was warm and comfy and getting out of that warm cocoon seemed like far too much effort to contemplate so my 5 minutes became more like 2 hours.

Although it was a day off I had arranged to go into my old school to meet some of my (now former) students for a bit of Monday morning poker.  What can I say except as the pay cheque arrived today and the idea of losing 60 cents didn’t seem that bad.  Unfortunately due to school stuff the students weren’t there to take my money when I arrived and rather than waste the walk into the school I decided to commandeer a computer in the computer room and check my e-mails.  A while later one of them shows up and as his English is great we have a bit of a chat and I start to teach him how to play Cribbage, a game I haven’t played for years.

Skip forward several hours and it’s the weekly quiz in the Irish Pub and I am being a right moody bastard and whilst a few of team members probably enjoyed the break from me singing falsetto even I know I am lousy company when I am like this, combine that with making stupid mistakes like confusing philanthropist with numismatist and I felt a right pillock, about the only thing right I did do was stop drinking after the vodka caramels we bought with last weeks winnings.  Despite my teammates having me as a handicap, we managed to come second though so it wasn’t all bad and I did know who and what Fenris was for the picture round so at least I managed to get something right.

Last night I attended the leaving “party” for the Headteacher at Käthe Kollwitz as like me he was leaving today although in his case it is for retirement rather than another school.

I have to admit I understood next to nothing during the evening, indeed I even got the idea of what the evening was going to be like wrong thanks to a mistranslation so I am in smart jeans and a shirt and everyone else was in a suit.

Then there was the sit down meal type of thing we had – I hadn’t expected food so I had eaten prior to coming out, so whilst people were eating I felt a bit of an idiot sat there with an empty plate in front of me.  Still at least there was a nice red wine and I understood that and my understanding of it as the night went on increased as it kept me company whilst speeches featuring in-jokes and obscure Prussian dialect went on.  I understood a couple of things, but the biggest one was how I still have a shitload to learn before I can be considered anywhere near fluent in listening.

Over the course of the evening I gravitated towards one of the English teachers and although to start with we started with German, where I was just about able to hold my own after a while and an additional bottle of wine between us we switched to English and walked back to his place to listen to some of his records.

Now this part of the evening I understood and I have to admit he has great taste in music, rooting through his music collection was a delight as he had so many gems and so we dotted around from the Beatles to Billy Bragg and then onto the Three Degrees and like Sister Sledge we got ‘Lost in Music’ until we noticed the time and as it was 5am I thought I had better head home.

After my performance on Tuesday I found myself dressed up once again for my last lesson at the school, although this time I cut out the necrophilia jokes from the act as it was for a class of 11 year olds.

The reason for doing it in this class is that they have called me ‘Mrs’ Hutchison since my first lesson with them way back in September and it has become a running joke with them and so I figured I’d have the last laugh on them and give them a laugh at the same time.

Some of the class didn’t quite know what to make of me in a blonde wig and pink makeup and I have to admit if I had been them I think I’d have been a little bemused by a language assistant showing up in drag to take a lesson.  Not all of them were so confused however as those that had them rapidly reached for camera phones to immortalise the moment – I can’t wait to here what happens when they show their parents those pics.

The actual content for the lesson was to be the song “Teddy Bear’s Picnic” and although we worked on it somehow my lesson took a further slide into insanity and as a consequence I now have what will probably be an abiding memory of the year after all trying to dance like a Cossack and singing “Teddy Bear’s Picnic” whilst in drag is probably something you do at most once in a lifetime and if you had more sense than me you’d never do it.

T-Shirt Hell is a proud purveyor of T-shirts that range from the hilariously funny to down right offensive all depending upon your taste.  Want a T-shirt that says I (plane) NY instead of the usual I (heart) NY? No problem, they sell it!  Or maybe you want a t-shirt for your baby that says, “They shake me” again it’s in their product line, not all of their T-shirts are quite so extreme however and a few recent favourites include:

One thing the site offers is a chance for people to submit their own suggestions for T-shirts and a couple of nights ago as well as writing a few necrophilia jokes I also came up with a few T-shirt ideas of my own which I have submitted to them including the following captions:

Now if I am lucky they’ll like one of the ideas and pick it to use and if they do I’ll pick up a nice bonus of $200 and 10 free T-shirts, the only problem is whick ten of their great t-shirts I’d pick.

Today saw me do drag at school for a lesson, I’d opted to try for pretty in pink, but I think I wound up doing hideous in pink – either way I certainly managed to make heads turn.

Yesterday I finally managed to find a source of wigs in Kiel when I was looking around the shops and this meant that as part of the planned lesson on comedy I could go the whole hog and make a fool of myself as part of it.  Still I can now claim the dubious honour of having done a few things that I imagine most language assistants would not do and they include:

1. Sending students home with explosive devices made in lessons.
2. Reducing a student to tears (it was an accident!)
3. Taught a lesson in drag.

I am not sure whether I should be proud of these feats or not…

The lesson started with me reprising my act from Altenberg and performing “Pretty in Pink”, before leading a discussion on humour and the problems it can have in translation with my providing of examples of different styles of humour to emphasise points. I had told the group the week before about this lesson and asked for other people to have a go at creating something funny and I had had a couple of volunteers who also put on a scene that they had written and it was quite good although they did explain the joke which did make it lose a little of it’s impact.

Then I was informed that the class next door apparently felt they were missing out as they could hear the laughter so me and my class went out into the corridor and they watched me as I knocked on the door and danced around a class that had never worked with me before whilst I sang “Pretty in Pink” again, I wonder if they still felt they were missing out after that performance?

I finished off the lesson with a little black humour, by using the necrophilia jokes I had written the other day and they went down pretty well with the group with a couple of people embarrassing themselves by laughing so loud.

Then at he end of the lesson I had to walk through the school in drag and I turned a lot of heads as students noticed me and worked out who I was and I was followed by wolf whistles and calls of “schick!” on the way to the staffroom.  Then just as I was about to get changed I was informed that ‘Mrs’ Hutchison was wanted by a couple of students and so I came out of the staffroom only to find myself confronted by a couple of classes worth of kids who wanted to have a laugh at me, still one of them taught me the word ‘schminken’ so I know how to say I put make up on in German.

This was planned to be my only appearance in drag, but that plan didn’t last long – I have now agreed to do drag with the class that has called me ‘Mrs’ Hutchison since I arrived and without knowing about my crossdressing past – that’ll teach them.

”, before leading a discussion on humour and the problems it can have in translation with my providing of examples of different styles of humour to emphasise points. I had told the group the week before about this lesson and asked for other people to have a go at creating something funny and I had had a couple of volunteers who also put on a scene that they had written and it was quite good although they did explain the joke which did make it lose a little of it’s impact.”, before leading a discussion on humour and the problems it can have in translation with my providing of examples of different styles of humour to emphasise points. I had told the group the week before about this lesson and asked for other people to have a go at creating something funny and I had had a couple of volunteers who also put on a scene that they had written and it was quite good although they did explain the joke which did make it lose a little of it’s impact.