Bundesgymnasium Rein

On all my Erasmus+ trips so far, I have noticed that there are three types of people (in my case mostly teachers) you meet while travelling:

first, there are the ones that smile at you but basically are too shy or feel too uncomfortable with their language skills to talk to you. Next, there’s the people you meet in all the schools who are skeptical – they don’t know what to do with Erasmus+ people, because they feel like it’s a program made to give them more work while taking some of their colleagues to places that they can’t go to.

Then there’s the third group of people, which will be the ones you’ll get to know on an Erasmus+ activity: the world travelers, the people who just try, the ones who are always looking for new ideas and who jump at the chance of meeting someone from a different country, a different school, someone with a different perspective but with this unique though collective understanding of a “WE” in European countries. Well, these are the ones you want to start talking to and who will inevitably drift towards you. Apart from this experience, today was filled with a tour of school ending at the international office, a meeting with one of the other Erasmus+ workers (Annick), who told me about her projects and gave me a number of ideas on how to better communicate Erasmus+ to the school community (like using screens to broadcast oncoming activities, publishing a monthly overview of all the activities on the website), an observation of a Year 12 German class with Heleen (where the kids asked me a bunch of questions and recommended I try a Belgian dish with a hat), a meeting with Ria, who’s responsible for the heritage service on campus to talk about a heritage project and a meeting with the English teachers at school to discuss the beginning of the school year and any changes to the common teaching plan that they had. It ended with me being full of new ideas, my brain already starting to work on how to implement these at my home school and a delicious dinner with the time travelers mentioned above. (Katharina Schwaiger)