Intensive German Course, Stuttgart: Part 2

Like my cat Samui, I too often want to hide from the world after my Intensive German Course, Stuttgart

I have made it through one week of my Intensive German Course in Stuttgart.  My head is spinning with how to conjugate verbs properly and trying to memorize the appropriate article for the noun but I am doing OK.  I'm actually doing better than OK since unlike some of my classmates; I had taken some German prior to this intensive German course.  Our teacher speaks very little English to us, and we are expected to look up any words we don't know in the dictionary - difficult to do when you are literally looking up every word she says and she talks fast.  This is not sitting well with some of the students.  

Two students called to complain that the Intensive German Course was too fast and not suitable for beginners even though this was a beginner's class.  But another, Russian student, felt it was too slow, so he refused to respond with the basic questions and answers we were given, i.e. "Backst du gern?"  (Do you like to bake?) and insisted on his own much more complicated version much to our teacher's chagrin.  She said this was not acceptable so he responded by also calling and complaining about our Intensive German Course.

The next day was an interesting one.  Clearly, the school administration had passed on the feedback to our Intensive German Course instructor who did not hide her frustration.  She said (all in German of course, so at least to the best of my understanding) we were already going more slowly than the normal pace and that if we went even more slowly we would all be in trouble for our test coming up in October.  She then said but it really didn't matter to her though how we did on our tests so we could go more slowly but some students were just being lazy and she didn't appreciate laziness in her classroom.   She further illustrated her point by giving us a record five pages of homework which took me a couple of hours to finish.

I think our Intensive German Course instructor's frustration is still lingering.  While I have only gotten a tap on my fingers and a disappointed head shake when I mistakenly put an extra "e" in my conjugated verbs, the 17 year old Mexican student today got read the riot act (in German of course).  It went something like "I don't think that you're unintelligent, but you need to concentrate and not be so lazy."  He didn't understand a word she said so her point was lost on him.  In addition to learning German, we are also learning a thing or two about German teachers when they are not happy – they can be downright scary. Despite this, I actually like our teacher (so long as her frustration is not directed at me) and can respect the difficult position she is in having worked in education for over ten years. Our teacher is definitely earning her money with our class. 

Intensive German Course, Stuttgart:  Part 3
Intensive German Course, Stuttgart:  Part 1
German Vocab That Makes My Life Easier