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The Internet is not happy with me at the moment, and henceforth for the time being I can’t upload any photos for this post. It’s probably a good thing, because the photos I have ready to implant into this post are heinous proof of the shameful thing of which I am about to write, and I would under no circumstances post the second one on the main page of this blog at all; oh no, that is relegated to the ‘after the jump’ bit, the huge and crusty underbelly of each blog post iceberg. So the first photo is a scarf....

This week my lucky primary-schoolers (Grundschüler) get to learn the months of the year. Well, to be perfectly honest, this won’t be their first try, nor my first try to teach them. The months of the year are one of the hardest things to teach to very little kids; they don’t quite yet understand what the months are doing per se, they don’t really see the difference between the months and the seasons, and they don’t really know what the months are called in their own language let alone a foreign one. Furthermore, in a lesson jam-packed with activities, interactive...

 Hallowe’en is such a brilliant occasion. Lots of people hate it because it’s hackneyed and teaches kids to harass adults when they don’t get given sweets for free after having already harassed them. What I love about Hallowe’en is that there’s no subtext; there’s no spritual or moral message, no serious thing behind it, no history to repeat monotonously at school (I’m looking at you Guy Fawkes)…you can just dress stupidly, drink/eat a lot of fun things and at no point have to have the discussion about capitalism taking over what used to be a meaningful holiday. After all, capitalism...