Kids now-a-days...

There are times when I love my job, and then there are times when I utterly despise it... namely when I have a class with a little bastard named Justin. Every time my Thursday afternoon classes roll around, a shiver rolls through my spine. This shiver is reminding me of the cold heart of Satan's very own spawn: the very same Justin as mentioned above. From him running around the room, to throwing legos across it, there's really nothing I can do to keep him in control... unless of course, mention soccer. Soccer, and my growing disdain for it and the German's uni-lateral support of this "one and only" sport, almost shares my wrath I feel towards this child. I must, however, leave soccer to it's own blog topic. And here too I must turn my attention away from the negatives of teaching children (Justin) to the funny things I've experience, or else I have an attack thinking about what this Thursday brings...

I think the funniest thing about the kids here in Germany, is that pretty much everything they say is in German... naturally of course, seeing as we are in GERMANY! But I guess what I find funny about it is the way in which the kids put their sentences and the words they use. For instance our first experience with a funny child phrase was early in our trip, Munich I believe, where upon hearing he couldn't get a sweet, he responded to his mother, "Wahnsinn," or for the rest of the audience, "madness." I mean, what child would say such a thing back home? Maybe one to be destined to become either Frasier or Niles Crane.

The other day in one of my youngest classes, a girl kept repeating to me, "Nase laueft, Nase laueft, Nase laueft," which means "nose is running, nose is running, nose is running." I almost started laughing right in her face, but luckily I controlled myself and gave her one of my very economically cheap tissues (seriously, you can buy like 30 travel size packages for like 1.50 euros!), which she promptly threw onto the carpet after using it.

Right now I'm actually drawing a blank on further funny things said by German kids, but there are more, I promise. Something that I found funny and disturbing at the same time, and which keeps coming back to my mind, is the response I got from a boy named Mohammed (whose parents come from Egypt). After asking him if he or anyone in his family had ever been to the US, he said, "no and I'll never go. They'll kill me there." It really bothered me at the time, and it still does a little bit even now. I tried to explain to him that it's not like that at all, and that there are even more Egyptians and arabic peoples in the US than all of Germany. I don't know if he believed me, but something tells me his parents don't believe that, or else he wouldn't be taking English...