(upbeat music)
- Guten Morgen, my name is Claire,
and I'll be taking over the ITA Instagram today
to show you a bit around Bann, Germany,
and tell you what it's like to live and teach here.
I'm originally from Montana, and I took ITA's TEFL
course online and moved to Bann in September of last year.
So I've been here about 10 months.
So I can give you guys a quick tour of my apartment.
This is my balcony where I have my tea in the morning.
And then we go into the kitchen here.
Got our washing machine going at the minute.
And then the bathroom is in here.
Got a nice shower.
And then the living room.
And then my roommate's room
and my room is down this hallway.
All right, so I'm at work,
and getting some lesson planning done for today's class,
which is a group of ten adult students for general English.
I teach for three different language schools,
and they usually are business English
and general English courses.
Though for one of the schools,
it's for young learners so that is more tutoring
and consolidating information
that they're learning in school.
Hey guys, so I just got done with work
and I am walking back to Inlingua
to turn in my ped card for the day,
and then I will go home
and have a chance to answer your questions.
Okay, so a lot of you asked for the visa process,
and this is kind of hard to answer
because it does vary from city to city,
so I can only speak to my experience in Bann.
And I also did hire Expat Launcher to help me.
If you're feeling stressed about the visa process,
then I definitely recommend having
Expat Launcher help you or getting in contact with them.
And they just sort of can set you on the right track
and tell you what your city foreigner's
office is expecting from you.
So in Bann, they definitely wanted me to have a rental
agreement and a registered address here in the city,
and then I had to have two letters of intent from language
schools saying that they are going to employ me.
And then there was some other
information like bank statements.
I moved here with about $3,000,
and I would actually recommend having five to 7,000
because you probably will not be working
for a couple of months, as they are processing.
So moved here in September,
and then it took about a month for me
to get all of my paperwork in order,
and then I had my visa appointment
at the beginning of October,
and then I didn't hear back from them
that it was approved until November 22nd.
So all in all, from landing in Germany
to my visa getting approved was about 3 months.
So I found my jobs by googling
language schools in Bann, Germany
or language schools in Germany in general.
And then I also found the Facebook group
for ITA alumni living in Germany to be very helpful.
A lot of people have asked the same.
I chose to live in Germany because
I have a good friend who lives here
and I thought it would be easier
to integrate into the culture that way,
and that's also how I ended up
in Bann because she lives in Bann.
She's originally from a town outside of Dusseldorf,
but goes to school here.
I didn't know any German before coming here,
but I decided to take a language course
with volksschule because they were pretty cheap.
A course with them ran from February
to just this past Monday actually.
And it was about 200 Euros,
and it was twice a week for ninety minutes.
And it was an A2 level course,
and I found that really helpful
to motivate in learning German.
Something that I really appreciate about the Germans
is that it is very easy to practice German with people,
even though a lot of people do speak English.
If you are at a restaurant and you order in German,
they will tell that you are English,
and they might try to speak to you in English,
but if you continue to try to speak in German,
they will work with you and sometimes
they will even help correct you
and everyone is just really excited that you're learning.
And I think it's also just really respectful
'cause you're in Germany, you might as well speak German.
I do primarily teach adults
because that is kind of the name of the game here.
Business English is sort of what
language schools are looking for.
With one of my schools,
I do, as I mentioned before, do more of tutoring,
and that is with ages, well they start from pre-school
and they go all the way to 18,
but I usually do like 13 to 18-year-olds.
But I have to say that I was really intimidated
by the thought of teaching adults,
and they have actually ended up being some of my favorites
because everyone is always very motivated to learn,
whereas with the kids sometimes
they aren't as excited about learning English.
Okay, and that is the end of my Instagram takeover.
Thank you so much for joining me today.
I hope I was able to answer some of your questions.
And good luck with all of you
who are looking to travel and teach abroad.
Tschüss.
(upbeat music)