Meeting on December 4th, 2020, 2.0 hours
Above you can see with which Puschkin I grew up with. Next to it you can look at a painting of the Puschkin Daria grew up with. Well, honestly I never thought about if there was a special meaning or connection behind that name. But Daria told me that Alexander Sergejewitsch Puschkin actually is one of (or even the) most famous poet(s) in Russia. Apparently, in the beginning of every school year, Russian pupils read his works and learn about his history. Daria could tell a lot about Russian literature society. What stayed in my head the most was that indeed a lot of people in that group of society died by getting shot in an official duel which happened to Puschkin as well 🤦🏼♂️
Of course we had to chat about famous German poets like Goethe and Schiller as well and then came to the Grimm brothers which are also internationally well acquainted. But by retelling different German fairytales I had to slowly realize: A lot of them are inappropriately cruel, the Struwwelpeter stories by Heinrich Hoffman for example, in which children face drastic consequences after naughty or childish behavior, e.g. “Paulinchen” who burns to death in front of her cats after playing with matches. At last (and because we were already in a dark mood :D), Daria told me about Baba Yaga, a supernatural being/witch who kidnaps (and in some stories eats) young children.
In the end, we both agreed that nowadays there are way better methods and metaphors to convey values and rules to your children.
So, unfortunately that was our last official meeting for the Each One Teach One course 2020. To sum up my experience with this course I would like to say, I really enjoyed all the meetings with Daria. I learned a lot of the Russian basics and got comfortable with the Cyrillic alphabet. Today, I am always happy when I can recognize Cyrillic anywhere and read (and hopefully understand) for example ingredients on a packaging 😀 In my opinion, even more important than that, I had the chance to learn a lot about Russian culture and peculiarities. In the beginning to be honest, I was quite skeptical about the method and the ongoing course, because Daria and I exclusively talked via Zoom or Discord. But the learning and experience output was surprisingly good! At first, I also struggled with teaching German of course, because I never taught a language before. But pretty soon we came up with a fitting system for both of us by distinguishing between vocabulary, certain grammar rules, conjugation, declination and useful phrases.
Now all that’s left for me to say is I am very looking forward to finally meeting in “real life”, spending even more time and learning further things about her home country together with Daria!
Comments