First Week as a "Teacher"

Hey everybody. This past week was the first time I got to meet my new colleagues and students at the schools. Everyone has been really nice and the teachers are all very enthusiastic about me being here and getting the students to talk. I am working with eleven teachers per week (for now), and that means I have about 180 students' names to learn. That should be fun. The students that I am teaching range in age from about 17 to 20, and when I asked some classes how old they thought I was, some actually guessed as high as 25. I told them that was a compliment. Then again, I have already been mistaken for a student in the hallways more than once. Anyway, things have gone really well so far in class. I have basically only had time to introduce myself and field questions about George Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Paris Hilton, the death penalty, and whether or not I can speak German. It has been fun, and I am continually amazed with how well-behaved the students are. I suppose it helps that I am closer to their age than most teachers, not to mention that I am not even allowed to do any type of grading.

A hot topic among Austrian teachers recently has been the Education Ministry's proposed overhaul of the school system. As it stands now, all Austrian students go to a Volksschule, which is akin to an Elementary school. When the students are ten years old, their teachers determine whether to send them to a Gymnasium, after which many go on to study at universities, or to a Hauptschule, after which most students go on to start apprenticeships for mostly blue-collar careers or go to trade schools. This decision is made based on the students' performance in school up until the age of 10, and switching between the Hauptschule track and the Gymnasium track is not easy. The proposal would create Gesamtschulen, where all students, regardless of how well they did in elementary school, would go until they were at least 15 or so. I work with students and teachers within the Gymnasium side of the school system, and most of the people I have spoken to oppose the change. The proposal has yet to be voted on in Vienna. I'll let you all know what happens.

Tonight I am going up to Vienna to meet a couple new friends. We are going to the "lange Nacht der Museen" which means, as you can probably guess, the "long night of the Museums". Basically, we pay 10 Euro for the whole night and then we can go into as many of Vienna's museums as we want to until 2AM. It should be fun.

Hope all is well with everybody. I'd love to hear from you, so drop me a line when you get a chance.