Belgium, the Vikings and other stories

As I mentioned before on this blog, I am working two part time jobs this year. One of them is giving private classes, teaching mainly German, but other subjects as well (which include Maths, Physics, English, French, History, Geography, and lately, Latin.) To be very honest, I took up this job because it was good money. I had quite a cynical opinion on this, felt like parents were employing me to pretend they were concerned about their kids when what they really cared about was their careers. I didn't expect a minute that I would actually enjoy this job. But I do.

I have 5 pupils between 11 and 16 years old, and they're all different, so I don't see them at the same frequency. First there's Au, 12. Very good student, doesn't really need my help, but his parents seem happy about my work so I'm still there. He's the one who trusts me so blindly he even asked me to correct his Latin homework. Haha. So first he had to re-teach me Latin so I could correct him.

Then there's N, his older sister. She's 13 and she's a really fun teen. She's clever, but she omits to think before giving answers and ends up saying nonsense, or funny things.
me: "post" means "after". So every word that starts with "post" means "after something". Can you think of an example?
N: The posterior!

There's M, my only real challenge. About a month ago he didn't know anything about German. Trouble is that he's in a new school, in a class where the level in German is quite high, and so his grades were catastrophic. His mother is counting on me to teach him everything he doesn't know in a short period of time. When I took up the challenge I didn't think that M might be very lazy and wouldn't do any of the homework I gave him... Still, his first grade was a 0/20, a few weeks after we started our classes he got a 4/20. Victory shall be mine!

Thanks to me, M can introduce himself, speak about his family, his pets, his hobbies (tennis and swimming), he can conjugate verbs in the present and the preterit tenses, and we've started studying the accusative and the datvie. I asked him to show me the test for which he got a 4. The test consisted in listening to a text and write what he understood. M wrote a few lines only but the sentences made sense. The first half of his text was about a couple arguing about moving to a new city. And the second part was about how the man has a dog, two horses and loves to swim and play tennis.
me: That's some coincidence here... Did the text really mention animals, playing tennis and stuff?
M: No. But I know how to say these things in German so I wrote them!

There's Ad, 16, not much to say about him. Good student, he wouldn't really need my help but he feels better when I give him an English or a German class every once in a while, when I'm done with his little brother.

And last but not least, Al, the little brother with ADD. And teaching German to a kid with ADD, now That is fun. He's clever, he understands everything, the only challenge is to keep him focused for an entire hour. I always have to make sure he's actually listening when I'm speaking, about 5 times an hour I need to remind me that I'm here, to remind him what we're talking about, ask him to stop playing with his pencils if it's distracting him too much and so on. And in the middle of the class I allow him to speak about something else for a few minutes. So he tells me about his school, about his drawings (I even got to keep one, yay) and sometimes it's really worth listening to.
me: Do you know where Bavaria is?
Al: Yes, there's an amusement park there.
me: Well, I don't know, maybe.
Al: Yes there is! PHANTASIELAND! Oh and this is Belgium. *pointing at the map.* Belgium will soon belong to France.
me: Oh, really?
Al: Yes. Once King Albert dies, Belgium will belong to France. Not all of Belgium though, only the French-speaking part.
me: Woaw I didn't lose my Saturday morning coming here, I'm learning a lot! Now let's go back to-
Al: Yes but you know, it won't make much of a difference for France, it will just add one or two more departments.
me: Sure. What about our grammar exercise here?
Al: And you know, we won't stop here. China will soon belong to France too. When the king dies, China will belong to France. Germany will also belong to France.
me: Oh, of course. As soon as the German king dies, right?
Al: Noooo. There's no king in Germany.
me: That's correct.
Al: There's no king, there's a dictator.
me: *choking*
Al: Yes, Germany only creates dictators.
(that kid is ELEVEN. Seriously.)
Al: You know, the French are the best anyway, we came first everywhere. We were the first to discover America!
me: ... And I thought it was the Vikings.
Al: Well, yeah, the Vikings, but they didn't stay. It wasn't cold enough for them, they didn't like it, so they left. The Vikings are useless anyway.

At that point my numerous attempts to get back to work finally succeeded. Almost.
me: so, do you know what "das Land" means?
Al: AMUSEMENT PARK!

Ah, really, teaching German to Al brightens up my life. By the way, do you know what ADD stands for?
Attention Deficit LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!

Comments

[Pistachette]

Merci les filles pour votre support ! Et bravo Shakespeare :)
Je suis payée tout à fait honnêtement et en plus ça me plait donc tout va bien. J'envisage même de devenir prof ... Enfin on verra bien ce que la vie me réserve !

[Chloé]

Hey ziva ge te lage dé coms
ge te kife trau malgrai ke mon englais né pô teribl
a bieto
bisous

[Lili]

hahahaha!
Ca me rappelle certains cours que je donnais il y a qq années...
"William Shakespeare? non connais pas!
-Ben tu connais Roméo et Juliette? C'est lui qui l'a écrit.
-Ah ouais... il était à la star ac' avant, non?"

Bon courage en tous cas. J'espère que t'es bien payée ^^