Weitering my Bildung

A quick Thanksgiving Update before moving on to the rest of my post: I was able to Skype with my sister in the evening (I was getting ready to go to dinner and she had just woken up...I swear I'll never ever get used to this time difference!) 

I was invited Thanksgiving morning to a Thanksgiving dinner by one of the daughters and son-in-law of my host parents. The hosts of the dinner had lived in the US for 6 years, and two of their children were born in the US. The kids said they wanted a real Thanksgiving dinner, so the family planned it and invited all of their friends. All of the traditional foods were there--Turkey, salad, bread, mashed potatoes, beans, corn, and sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top. For desert there was pumpkin pie and some chocolate cake. I LOVED that they had all the traditional stuff! Everyone was so surprised about the sweet potatoes & marshmallows and thought it was both weird sounding and weird that it was not a part of the desserts! I think everyone liked it though--I know I did :-)

This weekend we had a Weiterbildung (Professional Development) Symposium in Biel.

We drove by car to the Symposium, which took a little bit less than two hours. For me, as an American, this was nothing. Driving home from Grand Rapids took longer than that! But for the Swiss, that is a long car ride. By the time we got to Biel, my fellow car travelers were saying how glad they were to get out of the car and that they needed to go for a walk or something because that was such a long ride. I was trying not to laugh. It feels like Switzerland is so much bigger than it is because of how Swiss people refer to how far away things are. Switzerland is approximately six times smaller than Michigan, but it feels as if I'm living in a state as big as California ;-)

Biel is in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, so (lucky for me!) everyone spoke in Hochdeutsch instead of Swiss German. Although I am understanding Swiss German more and more, it's definitely not enough to listen to lectures for two straight days. There were also French translators for the French speakers.

The main lecturer of the Symposium was a British man named Trevor Cooling. In his lecture, I found out that he's worked a lot with one of my professors from Calvin and my contact through which I got this job, David Smith. Professor Smith has done a LOT of work in the Christian Education field, and I have always found him fascinating and impressive, but never did I think he was so famous. People who found out that I studied at Calvin and under Professor Smith were so impressed and jealous, and thought I was so impressive. It was quite strange! His presentation on Christian teaching was really interesting (www.whatiflearning.co.uk if you're interested). Friday night, after his presentation, we went back to our lodge (hostel-esque) and had a couple of drinks in the lounge/restaurant area before heading to bed. It was really nice to spend time with the teachers that evening, out of school and mostly not talking about school. That was part of my motivation for wanting to go to the Symposium (since I'm not hired as a teacher, I was not required to go)--getting to know my fellow teachers better. The other part, of course, was wanting to learn more, since I will (hopefully) soon have a real class of my own.

On Saturday, we had another lecture from Trevor Cooling and then three workshops, where we could pick three from several options. I found the three I went to (one from Trevor Cooling, one about creativity in the classroom, and one from my school principal talking about what he learned about Christian schooling in the US) to be very interesting and I learned some new things that I can hopefully use in my classes in the future.

The only downside to having a Professional Development seminar on the weekend, is that there's not much time to relax before the next school week starts...oh well!