A learning curve (Placement Years)

Name: Belgian999

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Product:	Placement Years
Date:	04/12/01 (88 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: You get to live abroad, plenty of free time for travelling, you won't die from overwork ;-)

Disadvantages: It can be a bit daunting, but it's worth persevering

I spent a almost a year working as a teaching assistant in Hanover, from September 1996 to July 1997, and while I was ready to come back home by the end of my time there, it really was one of the most rewarding and challenging parts of my education, and I suppose my life in general. I’ll admit it straight up, I did not want to go abroad for a year – my German was not up to scratch, I was nervous about moving to a foreign land and leaving my friends and family behind, and I’d got into some difficulties at university in my second year which meant that I was not even sure of being accepted on the placement year scheme.

Not the most auspicious way to approach a year abroad, really, but as anyone who knows me will testify, it was (and probably still is!) fairly typical behaviour. We had to choose between taking a year abroad as a teacher and going to a German university as a student on the Erasmus scheme, and I decided to go for the teaching option – to be honest, it seemed the easier of two, and there was also a paycheque coming in every month for those who chose to be teachers, while students had to fend for themselves. We just had to write one extended essay in German on a subject of our own choosing, which didn’t count towards our final degree grade but was compulsory nonetheless – if the university didn’t mark at least one piece of work from each student in the academic year, they were not entitled to receive tuition fees from the government.

The application itself seemed to be fairly painless, there was the usual ream of paperwork to be completed, signed and sealed, but I got posted to Hanover as I had requested (as my grandparents lived there for a while), and come the start of September, I found myself on the Eurostar at Waterloo with one suitcase, very nervy, and about to say goodbye to my parents and join a whole host of other students from Scottish universities on the journey into the unknown. A long
day’s travel by train and coach finally brought us all to a monastery at Altenberg, a small place outside Cologne, which was where the introductory course was held.

Here we were divided into groups, with people who were due to be posted to the same area sharing rooms and getting to know each other, something that we were all very glad of, for although there were other people from your own university there, no-one really knew quite where they were going to end up and it was certainly handy to get a few phone numbers and be certain of some English-speaking company at some point in the future.

The course itself was fairly rudimentary – there was some teaching practice and ideas for lesson plans and so on, as well as basic information about living in Germany, registering your presence and getting a residence permit, health checks (anyone working with children has to have a certificate from a German doctor saying that they are free of TB and other such diseases) and help on applying for student travelcards as German paperwork can be a bit daunting for the uninitiated.

From what friends have told me, much of the information provided at the Altenberg course did come in handy, but I wouldn’t know really, as the school I was sent to displayed an amazing lack of interest in making use of an English native speaker to help out in classes. Only 3 of the teachers in the English department were at all enthusiastic, so the hours I worked were very restricted, often slipping down to 4 or 5 classes a week – the rest of my time was spent chatting to other teachers in the staff room and drinking coffee, or trying to get my extended essay written. In the privacy of the staff room, German was the only language to be spoken, while I was always told to speak English in the classroom, as the pupils would never ask me anything in English if they thought I could speak their language.

I did most of my actual classroom work with the Ab
itur (A Level) classes, which involved helping them to understand Shakespearean English, and plenty of conversation work – the teacher would split the class and I would take half of the pupils to another room and just get them to talk, the subject not being as important as the fact that they were speaking English. I also spent some time with younger pupils from Class 7 (aged 11-12), and these were easily the most enthusiastic ones – I managed to teach them the basics of cricket, and they seemed to enjoy it! The most difficult hours to prepare for were the occasions when I taught some Russian children on a one-to-one basis, as their German was poor and their English worse (while my Russian is non-existent!), making it very difficult to explain any grammar problems.

Thinking about it, grammar is the one point where teaching assistants are often caught out – English is the mother tongue, you don’t learn rules as such (and in any case English seems to have more exceptions than rules, which is why it can be so difficult to learn), and so when pupils asked me why I had picked them up on a certain mistake, or why I thought something was wrong, I could sometimes only reply that ‘It just is!’... which made for a couple of embarrassing moments, as the class teacher would then step in with a perfect grammatical explanation!

Although you are not supposed to get involved in marking pupils’ work, I was often bribed with beer and food by a couple of teachers to cast an eye over submitted work! This was a welcome diversion from classroom work, and an interesting insight into the amount of work teachers have left over when they leave the school grounds, as quite often we would sit for hours at a time marking work – and this is just one of the aspects of teaching that convinced me I was not cut out for a life in front of the blackboard.

However, while the work in my year was not as fulfilling as it might have
been, the social side of life was excellent – I got to know some of the Abitur students pretty well, going out at weekends and going to watch Hanover 96 in the Regionalliga Nord (as they were then), and I played in the staff 5-a-side team in various tournaments around Hanover and Lower Saxony. Living in a city the size of Hanover was also an advantage, as it meant there were other students there doing the same as me, all of whom were just a tram ride away – so if you were at a loose end, or at the end of your tether, there was always someone to talk to, over a beer of course.

Having so few working hours in the week also meant that I was able to shuffle my teaching time around to give me extended weekends for travelling, to visit friends in other parts of Germany, or just to see new places. In my year abroad, I managed to get to Hamburg, Copenhagen, Berlin, and Prague (as well as some of the less salubrious parts of the former East Germany), and I feel that this is certainly one of the best things about living abroad – you are already on the Continent, you’ve got plenty of free time and you can always get cheap tickets and cheap accommodation, so it would be positively rude not to take advantage of that!

All in all, my year in Hanover must have been fun because 2 years later, I came back out to Germany to work here full-time as a translator. When I started work in Walldorf in 1999, I was convinced that I would only stay for 18 months, but that was a long time ago – I’ve settled right back into the German way of life and it looks like I’ll be staying here for the foreseeable future. Without having spent that year teaching and living in Hanover, I doubt very much that I would have moved out here later on – my German improved immeasurably, simply due to speaking it on a daily basis and absorbing the language from newspapers and TV, and it did my confidence the power of good, as I had no-one else to help m
e out. A few people do have bad experiences, but that is something that cannot be avoided, and the vast majority of students thoroughly enjoy the placement year. It’s daunting, and most people are wary of moving abroad for a year, but it’s an experience I would recommend without reservation.

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