The End of Camp

In Photo: Overnight Counselors (from left) Becky, Anton, Remy, Anna, David, French guy (Remy’s friend…)

It’s hard to believe it has only been six weeks since I started camp. It seems like so much longer. However, it has been an amazing experience. The capstone (a week of teaching overnight) was awesome, exciting, tiring, rewarding, and incredibly difficult. But, watching my class stand up in front of their parents on the last night and perform their play (which we only practiced three times) and doing it without any prompting on my part was incredible. Teaching is one of those things where when you’re in the thick of it, you sometimes wonder if you’re making any difference. But when you get a chance to sit back and reflect on what they have achieved, it’s amazing and quite the ego-booster!

Now that camp is over, I have this week and next to get ready for Germany. That includes helping my parents continue to pack up the house and prepare for our tenants, as well as getting my own bags ready for the big day. I also get this time to hang out with some of my Oregon friends one last time as well as to celebrate my birthday (this Saturday, the fifth!). It’s a crazy time to live on Biegler Lane! The excitement that’s being built up towards Germany is great though, and although I’m very nervous about leaving the comfort of Smith and Oregon, I know that I can make it a good experience.

Ta da!

So I finally know where I’ll be going next year! It is (almost) official: I will be teaching at the Humboldt Gymnasium in Radeberg, Sachsen. This is about 12 km from Dresden. I have talked with the teaching assistant who was there this last year, and she has made it sound like a fun and exciting year, though not without its challenges. I look forward to getting to know yet another side of Germany and German life as well as living pretty much entirely on my own. Being so close to Dresden is exciting, as I’ll be enrolling at the technical university there (Technische Universität Dresden). Of course, with all my humanities background, I am not qualified to enroll in any of the courses they are known for, so I have enrolled in their Germanistik department. We’ll see how that goes… I am very much looking forward to being so close to a musical and cultural epicenter of Germany and hope to be able to exploit that as much as possible with my student status. :)

The summer day camp is over, and only one more week of overnight looms ahead. It’ll be great fun though, and I’m learning so much. My late neighbor across the street, Mr. Minifie, would ask me when I was an elementary school kid “What did you teach the teacher today?” and I would always laugh and say “No, she taught me!” Little did I know that children are always teaching the older ones.