(Sequel to a post I wrote in October about my classes...things have definitely changed since I've learned how to speak German!)
Music -- If there's one thing I'm worse at than art, it's music. Yet every Tuesday morning I (or rather Laow-reen, which is what I am called by the teacher) find myself in the music room with the rest of my class, where we start off with a "crowd favorite", a song called "Heaven is a Wonderful Place". The entire song consists of one lyric, which goes as follows: "Heaven is a wonderful place, filled with glory and grace. I want to see my savior's face. Heaven is a wonderful place, I want to go there." Our teacher plays the piano as we sing (or rather, chant) this line over and over in "gospel style" for about fifteen minutes, and then the lesson begins. Most of the class time is spent with the teacher quizzing us about what we learned in the previous lesson, and as we're allowed to have our notes from the last lesson open right in front of us, I do pretty well in this (plus whoever owned my book before me wrote all of the answers inside, making for a nice little "Harry Potter and the Halfblood Prince" sort of situation). Afterwards we usually read music (which I have become considerably better at), learn a few new terms and concepts (mostly pertaining to "Themeeinsatz" - I still don't quite know what this means), and then we finish with some more class singing. Our song repertoire is quirky to say the least - my personal favorite is when we sing "Total Eclipse of the Heart", because everyone only knows one line of it, so we just sing the one lyric ("turn around") really loudly and then mumble random words until it's time to sing that one lyric again. Overall we stick to rather obscure, optimistic, and religious songs, but occasionally we get to sing some pop music like "Rolling in the Deep" and "Hanging Tree" and "In the Jungle", which never fails to send the class into an absolute frenzy.
Spanish -- Despite the fact I have this class twice a week, I am fairly certain my Spanish abilities have actually worsened over the course of the year. I mean, I pay attention in class, do the homework (usually ten minutes before the lesson starts...but that still counts), and study hard for the tests, yet somehow I have found it increasingly difficult to do well in Spanish -- which I'm pretty sure is due to the fact my German has improved so much, and so I am always thinking in German and getting both languages mixed up in my head, and then much to the amusement of my desk partner, I speak in sentences that are a combination of the two languages (but at least there's no English involved - that's definitely an improvement since the beginning of the year!).
English 10 -- This class is a hoot. My classmates are seriously amazing at English (most of them are fluent, I would say), but I still find it funny to hear the little mistakes they make (however, I'm not really in the position to say anything against them, as the mistakes I make with my German are far more embarrassing and frequent...). This is the only class where I have maintained a solid "1" (A+) for the year, which has actually required some effort. Whenever we have a homework assignment, the teacher always insists that I read mine aloud, so I really have to work hard to make sure my work is worthy of the whole class hearing. And also I have to make sure everything I write is in perfect English (this has become harder than what I could have ever expected - whether it's your mother tongue or not, after ten months of not really speaking a language, there are some things you forget).
Ethics - Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I think if there could be a "most improved" award for this class, I would have a good chance at winning. When I posted about my school life back in October, my comment for Ethics class was: "I literally do not even know what is happening in this class. If I ever find out, I will let you know." Well, here I am now, letting you know...Ethics class is actually super cool. We've spent most of the year studying philosophy, and on our last in-class essay I got a TWO!!!! (Similar to an A-/B+ in the U.S.) This was one of my most proud accomplishments so far this year (to give some perspective, I did not even get a grade on my first few Ethics essays. Rather, the teacher would draw a big smiley face at the end and write something like 'a nice attempt').
Geography - Up until February, I got to slept in every Friday morning. But then, when my homeroom teacher was passing out first semester report cards, he noticed that I didn't have a grade for a second elective course, and so he asked what I do every Friday morning while the rest of grade ten goes to their second elective. Somehow in the confusion of my first few school days I didn't sign up for a second elective, and apparently "I sleep in" wasn't a good enough answer for what I do Friday mornings, and so this is why I now find myself in Geography every Friday morning at 8am. It is a lecture based course, yet no one really takes notes - rather, we just listen to the teacher talk about national fishing laws, alternative energy sources, or (most often) his experiences as a young boy. The teacher is quite nice, and even brought me a map of Berlin last week (I guess I just seem like the type of person who gets lost a lot...)
English 11 -- Despite the focus being on how to use English in business settings (which is admittedly maybe not the most exciting theme in the history of the world), I find this class really enjoyable. It's taught by one of my favorite teachers, and he always somehow finds a way to make topics like product returns or company policies very interesting, and even funny. I just started taking this class in the second semester (in order to achieve enough classroom hours to get an English credit for my American high school diploma), and even though I don't think I have much of a future in customer-service report writing, going to this class and speaking/writing/hearing/enjoying English is always a treat.
Chemistry - On our last test, the class average was a 5 (US 'D'). And I had a 5. So I guess I am pretty average when it comes to Chemistry, which I don't think is too shabby for someone who's only been speaking the language for less than a year. For the first eight months we studied the properties of alcohol, and since then we have been learning about washing detergent. Literally next week I will be writing an entire test about about laundry soap (to say the least, the curriculum is quite different from Ms. Stutzman's Honors Chem).
Biology - Fortunately, our topic of study this year in Biology has been genetics and evolution theories - both of which I learned in 9th grade Honors Biology with Ms. Maxey, so I've been pretty much set to go. It is often frustrating, though, when I know the answer to a question, but I don't know exactly the right German words to explain what I'm thinking (this goes for all of my classes). The teacher sometimes calls on me to read aloud texts, which I honestly try my best at, but there are some German biological words that my mouth simply cannot pronounce correctly. The other main challenge for me in this class is taking notes - my teacher writes in very fancy cursive, which normally I would appreciate (I'm a big fan of nice handwriting), but when you can't understand what's being written on the board and don't even have the faintest guess of what the words could possibly be, things are not so easy. (Last week we were learning about fossils, but the entire time I thought I was taking notes about families...)
History - Still my favorite class. Currently we are learning about Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, and are even going on a field trip in a few weeks! (My exchange program covers the costs of all of my school trips, which I was really excited to find out at the beginning of the year, imagining myself flying off to Austria or England with all of my classmates and not having to pay a dime. However, my grade's only trip of the year is to this museum. Which is here in Berlin. And has free admission.) During the winter/spring everyone in grade ten had to complete a huge research project, and even though exchange students weren't expected to take on the assignment, I wanted to do one, too. The topic could literally be anything you wanted, and so since I'm living here in Germany as a youth ambassador from America, I chose to do a project about the Marshall Plan and its impact on the alliance between Germany and America, as well as the history of the relationship between the two countries, and whether the past has provided a strong enough base for problems that could arise in the future. Since this was a historical themed project, my "project mentor" was my history teacher, who gave me a lot of helpful insight and ideas. (The project and its presentation ended up going really well, and I definitely learned a lot from doing it.)
Gym - How much I like Gym class really just depends on which sport unit we are doing at the moment. In January, for example, our focus was on High Jump, which I was not particularly good at, but fortunately after a few weeks we moved onto much more fun sports, like field hockey (fun fact: field hockey is not just for girls in Germany). Our current unit, however, is table tennis, which I'm not sure entirely counts as a real sport, but nevertheless we have to get completely dressed into our sports clothes, and it is taken quite seriously and actually becomes way more competitive than what one might expect in a Germany grade 10 gym class.
Trigonometry - On our very first Trigonometry test class back in the fall, I got the German equivalent of an 'A' (one of the highest scores in the class), so I was pretty convinced that I was a genius when it came to German math. However, even though my language skills have improved since then, the subject matter has become significantly more difficult, and the teacher no longer lets us exchange students skip over all of the word problems. (After receiving back my second test, which included nothing but word problems, I realized that maybe I am not actually such a genius when it comes to German math...)