By Tom Leveen

If it were up to me, Amer­i­can high school and col­lege stu­dents would spend a manda­to­ry year liv­ing abroad before a degree of any kind is con­ferred. This trip would be ful­ly fund­ed by the Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment. It’s dif­fi­cult to quan­ti­fy how expo­sure to a dif­fer­ent cul­ture can change one’s per­spec­tive for the better.

As a sopho­more (tenth grade), I had the priv­i­lege of spend­ing a week in Lon­don with sev­er­al oth­er stu­dents, dur­ing which we hit all the usu­al tourist spots and attend­ed sev­er­al musi­cals. It was a good trip, but hon­est­ly, I was too young to ful­ly appre­ci­ate the new sur­round­ings and the his­to­ry of a city so much old­er than any in the States.

The next time I trav­eled over­seas, I was 41 and brought my wife of nine years. I had become a pub­lished author with com­pa­nies like Ran­dom House, and my Ger­man-trans­la­tion pub­lish­er, Hanser, flew us to Ger­many for a ten-day book tour in coop­er­a­tion with the embassy.

There are many things to recount – amaz­ing Ger­man hos­pi­tal­i­ty, breath­tak­ing­ly intel­li­gent stu­dents, gor­geous scenery… from the moment we first arrived in Göt­tin­gen, we were entranced.

Then came our trip to the Dachau memorial.

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By Anne Grob and Crister S. Garrett

A year and a half has passed since the Teach­ing Amer­i­ca project at Leipzig University’s Amer­i­can Stud­ies Depart­ment has entered the prac­ti­cal phase, and a lot has hap­pened since. Let us fill you in on some of the great new developments.

The Teach­ing Amer­i­ca project intro­duces and strength­ens the use of new media both in the uni­ver­si­ty set­ting and in high school class­rooms, thus increas­ing the amount of U.S.-related top­ics and resources in Eng­lish high school instruc­tion in Sax­ony and beyond. This project min­i­mizes the gap between the­o­ret­i­cal uni­ver­si­ty instruc­tion and school real­i­ty by pro­vid­ing stu­dent teach­ers with the oppor­tu­ni­ty to gain teach­ing expe­ri­ence long before stu­dents enter their prac­ti­cal stu­dent teach­ing phase.

The core of the project is an inter­ac­tive online por­tal that was cre­at­ed in close con­sul­ta­tion with teach­ers. The por­tal con­tains a wide vari­ety of freely avail­able online resources for teach­ers on Amer­i­can soci­ety, pol­i­tics, cul­ture, his­to­ry, and lit­er­a­ture. And the best part is: It’s open to all inter­est­ed teach­ers and teacher trainees.

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By Alina Mansurova

Study­ing poet­ry at school or at uni­ver­si­ty often seemed bor­ing at best and sense­less at worst. Until last fall semes­ter, it had nev­er occurred to me that some poems could actu­al­ly be woven into my dai­ly life. Read more »

By Wolfram Seidl

Drop­box is awe­some. It is not only a great tool for stu­dents to orga­nize the flood of doc­u­ments that pile up while doing group work, but it is also great for teach­ers. If you are not a teacher work­ing at a tech-savvy school with extrav­a­gant IT infra­struc­ture, you can use this nifty ser­vice for many oth­er­wise annoy­ing chores. Drop­box can help you to dis­trib­ute home­work, work on and save hand­outs at home, print them at school or let stu­dents upload assign­ments. Yet these are only a few exam­ples, so grab a cup of your favorite hot bev­er­age and click here if you want to find some help­ful tips for begin­ners and for heavy users. Once installed on your lap­top or smart­phone, Drop­box nice­ly inte­grates into your work­flow and most appli­ca­tions that have some­thing to do with doc­u­ments or files that need to be synced some­where. In fact, it is so easy to use that you just might get addict­ed to Drop­box. If you are not a Drop­box user by now, you prob­a­bly feel a twitch in your fin­ger and the urge to fire up a Google search with “install Drop­box.” But wait, you should con­sid­er the following.

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By Sabrina Völz

I might be preach­ing to the choir here, but every­one knows that teach­ers are pressed for time. And I am sure you are, too. Recent­ly, I came across a use­ful web­site for those who teach Eng­lish at the A1 to B1 lev­els and are look­ing for some down­load­able work­sheets on British and Amer­i­can sea­sons and hol­i­days – some which even go beyond your typ­i­cal Hal­loween or Christ­mas top­ics. If I could erase one top­ic from Eng­lish class­es across Ger­man ele­men­tary schools beyond the first year, it would be the sea­son ‘spring.’ My daugh­ter had the top­ic in some way every year from kinder­garten to the sixth grade and was bored to tears. But I digress. If you are look­ing for a col­lec­tion of work­sheets on diverse hol­i­days and sea­sons, then you might want to try Hueber’s page.

On the above web­site, you’ll find a vari­ety of activ­i­ties deal­ing with top­ics, such as “Dress­ing Up for Car­ni­val” and “St. Valentine’s Day.” I have to admit that I couldn’t resist tak­ing a peek at the work­sheet on “Colum­bus Day,” all the while hold­ing my breath.

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By Martina Kohl and Joannis Kaliampos

Gen­er­al per­cep­tion has it that Amer­i­cans do not care about the envi­ron­ment. But did you know that accord­ing to the Gallup Poll in March 2014, 80% of Amer­i­cans between the ages of 18 to 34 favor alter­na­tive ener­gy pro­duc­tion over fos­sil fuels? And it might sur­prise you even more to find out that accord­ing to the same poll, over 60% of Amer­i­cans pre­fer pro­pos­als that would reg­u­late or lim­it fos­sil fuel emis­sions, includ­ing those set­ting high­er pol­lu­tion stan­dards for busi­ness and industry.

Between Sep­tem­ber and Decem­ber 2014, about 1,000 stu­dents and teach­ers from all over Ger­many took part in the Going Green Project, a blend­ed-learn­ing project for high school stu­dents. They explored green activ­i­ties in the USA, main­ly on the state lev­el, and were sur­prised to find out how much Amer­i­cans care about the environment.

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