Week 13

This week I had the chance to Frau Krumrück's 11th grade English class and talk about various topics in relation to the United States.  Some of the topics were pretty serious, so I was a little nervous going into those class periods, but overall everything went well.

On Tuesday I went in and talked about abortion in the United States.  With all of these lessons the students first explained what they knew about the topic in Germany or Poland, so I was able to learn a bit myself, and then I jumped in and gave my input about the United States.  After reading a short text about abortion in the UK, that's how this class went.  I gave some information and statistics I had looked up the night before and I talked about about seeing displays and protests on campus.  Students then filled out a chart that asked them to imagine the consequences for various people involved (would-be father, grandparents, etc.) if a woman had an abortion or not.  Students then split up according to their beliefs and had a debate.  This was the one part of the class that was a bit uncomfortable, since there were only two students on the anti-abortion side.  However, I feel that these two students argued more convincingly than the others.  If I were doing a debate in my classroom though, I would have assigned students sides.

I visited the same class on Wednesday and talked about AIDS in the United States, sharing some statistics I looked up.  Since World AIDS Day was on December 1, I was also able to explain Obama's pledge to commit up to 5 billion dollars to the Global Fund if all other countries pledge 10 billion and the allocation of an additional 100 million dollars in the federal budget to AIDS research.  In this class period, students also listened to an interview with a teenage girl with AIDS and answered questions about the text.

Finally on Thursday I went to the lesson on gays and lesbians in society.  In this lesson, students first wrote down what they know about various subtopics (acceptance, gay marriage, adoption, etc.) and their country.  Students then shared what they wrote down.  I then explained what I knew about the situation in the United States.  Most of the information I had looked up was about same-sex marriage, but I was also able to speak a bit from personal experience.  There was some tension during this class; one student was speaking out as being non-accepting of homosexuals, and his peers who sat around him, the ones who were the most outspoken overall, were arguing with him.  It made for an interesting discussion, and it never got too out of hand, but I was worried it would.  We tackled some tough subjects this week.

Backtracking a bit, on Tuesday I also went to Frau Krumrück's 12th grade class and talked a bit about the role of the media in the United States.  I shared some statistics I found about TV, radio, newspaper, and internet use, as well as my personal experience with each type of media.  Students seemed to respond well to this conversation, and once again I got to learn a bit about Germany and Poland and how my students spend their time.  Our experiences were pretty similar, and Frau Krumrück was even surprised by how much her own students watch TV.

- Amy