School!

We have been slow in updating the blog because we have been very busy. The past two weeks I have been lecturing- 5 1.5 hour lectures on post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression and immunology. My class had about 60 second-fourth year undergraduate students. We met at 8:30 out at the Riedberg campus. That meant that I had to leave here around 7 to get out there in time. It turns out that most German students do not live on campus, so they all commuted out to Riedberg as well. I met one young woman who has a 90 minute commute and my class is her only class! Luckily the class is taught in English, so they were fairly comfortable with English, although I do have a bad habit of speaking too quickly. While I knew what I was going to lecture on before I arrived in Germany, it wasn’t until I had my first class that I could be sure about their level of knowledge and the level that I should lecture at. Consequently I spent a lot of time writing lectures! I think they went over okay. I did have a problem with talking during the lecture. I noticed this when I taught in the education department several weeks ago. During Prof. Klein’s portion of the class several students were talking. They weren’t too quiet either. I was a bit surprised, but Prof. Klein just continued speaking and they eventually stopped. Well, in my class I had two young men who talked throughout my entire third lecture. After class I went up to the office that I am sharing with a post-doc and a graduate student and who happened to be there but these two guys. They were there picking up some lab reports. I said hello, it is my two talkers! They were a little shocked, and I asked them to please refrain from talking in class, as it is distracting and not fair to the other students. They apologized and left, and when I arrived at my desk on Monday morning I found a small box of chocolates that they left as an apology. Even better, they were able to keep quiet through the last two lectures!



Our new friend Fabian is a high school biology teacher and his class won a DNA isolation kit from BioRad. The instructions and protocol were all in English, so he asked if I would be willing to come in and talk to his class about study abroad opportunities and then help them with their DNA isolation. They were a nice bunch of students and their English was excellent. Many seemed interested in studying in the states, but just as when I talked to the college students about the American education system, these guys were absolutely shocked at the cost of college in the states.