Weary Blues

Today I had the unfortunate task of trying to convince my German 2 students to practice that most-dreaded of subjects, Adjective Endings.

If you've ever dipped a toe into the turbid lake of German grammar, you know to shudder when you hear those two words.

Adjective Endings are a sadistic combination of arbitrary memorization, complicated grammatical concepts, and logic. If you're short on skills or knowledge in any of those areas, you are just out of luck. The only way to really learn German adjective endings is by speaking to and listening to lots of native German speakers--in other words, living in Germany long enough to just know how they feel.

I spent much of my evening yesterday searching for ways to simplify and demystify the subject, but alas... I found myself minutes into the lesson, already standing in a sea of blank stares, and even glares. There was a sense of hopelessness in the classroom. How had I dared, I wondered, to spring such an obnoxious grammatical surprise on them so late in the year?

The pressure was compounded by the frustration of those who had gotten the concept the first time, and are eager to move on. It is hard not to count my failures at this time when I'm looking around trying to gauge the effects I have had this year. This is the failure I regret above all: I have failed to find ways for my advanced students to progress at their own speed, because I am kept so busy trying to find ways to trick the other students into accidentally learning some German.

And then I looked around again and couldn't figure out which blank stares were because of boredom, and which blank stares were because of confusion. I didn't know who to help, who to encourage, and who to lecture. And then I looked at the door and wanted to walk through it, and not come back.

I'm trying to keep perspective--I can look around and see that I am not the only teacher in a slump at this point in the year. With less than 10 sessions left in each class, the challenge is to try to finish strong at the very time when you just feel like throwing your hands in the air. The end of the year can't come soon enough, and yet there is so much I was supposed to have done before the end of the year that I am constantly both panicked and impatient.

And frustrated--with myself, my students, my own limited knowledge, my commute, my heavy bag of books that accompanies me everywhere I go but never seems to contain all of the paperwork that I need at any given moment.

Well, I'm going to put it to rest for the weekend and hope that a couples days' break will give me the rest I need to energetically and enthusiastically execute my last few lessons of the school year.