I am sorry I couldn’t get online earlier. I thought we would have Internet access at the guesthouse we were staying at, but we didn’t and you all know how much they charge at Internet cafés :(
Anyway, I had a blast!
We arrived early Saturday morning last week, had breakfast and then we spent the afternoon walking around and checking out the area. There was so much snow! Some of the students started a snowball fight – I didn’t get involved, but it was fun watching *lol*
On Sunday morning, we started with the skiing lessons. The students were awesome – I had a group of ten students, three very sweet boys and seven very nice girls – all beginners :)
We played Plumssack to warm up -[I found the game Rag Tag in English and hope it’ s kind of the same game that I am referring to] and then I showed them some easy warm up practices on skis.
I picked out one of the easy beginner’s slopes and we did our first few swings – they acquitted themselves very well :) and it was so much fun to see them make progress!
The daily routine looked like this:
7 a.m. get up
7:30 a.m. breakfast
8:10 a.m. bus takes us to the gondola
9:00 a.m. morning lessons start
12:15 p.m. lunch
1:45 p.m. afternoon lessons
3:15 p.m. lessons end and students go back to the guesthouse by bus
6:30 p.m. dinner
8 p.m. meet with all students in the basement lounge
Ususally my Dad, the other teachers and I would meet for lunch and talk about the progess of our groups. By the end of the week, all my students were able to get down one of the “black” slopes [there are four levels from easy to difficult: green-blue-red-black]. They were beaming with pride :)
On Friday, our last day, we had organized a scavenger hunt for the students. My Dad, Monika (another teacher) and I had put teams together the night before which had to go to certain places in the skiing area, find questionnaires and return with them to the mountain station and then together work on the tasks and questions.
It was fun and the students were all for it – they had to turn in the questionnaires before dinner and then my Dad and I determined the winner team, which was honored in the evening. Every team got some kind of reward though, since my Dad had organized a whole bunch of free gifts from a bank.
Then my group came up to me and gave me some chocolate and a card to thank me for my engagement and let me know how much fun they had during the week :) It’s was heart-warming!
I really enjoy teaching students. It’s not surprising that I actually got my degree in teaching, but then decided that I didn’t want to be in a classroom for the rest of my life -¦ nevertheless, teaching is a very rewarding experience and I always enjoy it [when it’s outside of a school building ;)].
I must say that even though we were dealing with a bunch of 15/16 year-olds, the students in my group were fun and there wasn’t any drama at all. Of course, we did have some trouble during the week – some students had alcohol in their rooms, which wasn’t allowed, but which is oh-so normal on a class trip like that ;)
The other, not-so funny incident was that some students was stolen money from and that there was a lot of suspicion on who could have done this going on. The result was that the students were in low spirits for the rest of the week and it was sad to see that someone would ruin it for everyone like that. Luckily, in the end this someone confessed to his class teacher.
The bus picked us up at 7 a.m. yesterday morning to take us back home. We were quite concerned about the weather conditions after hearing about the snow chaos in Bavaria. Luckily, we didn’t have any trouble on our way home and streets were clear. We got home at 6:30 p.m. and some of the students came over to say goodbye – I felt a little bit melancholy that it was all over already. After this one week, we had just warmed up to each other and I would have liked to stay for another week and ski some more with my group! Oh well. That’s how it goes – I hope my Dad will take me on a skiing trip again one of these days. I could clearly tell that he was really happy that I could come along.
