Balancing Life and School

Academics and university life is much different in Germany than in America. I am currently taking two classes from MLC and two from FU-BEST. The ones I am taking here are Intensive German B2/B3 and Art and Dictatorship. There are not many classes targeted towards teaching because many of the students are going into Economics, Law, Political Science, or Art. Even though I am not taking any teaching theory classes, I hope to be able to learn something from how the teachers here teach. You are not allowed to use your computer for notes in class unless you have a learning disability. I never use my computer at school, and I only use it for homework. For German, all my homework and notes are on paper. For my Art class, all of my notes are on paper, and my assignments are online.
We have Art and Dictatorship only once a week for three hours. On the first day of class, I learned something that really stressed me out at first. Our teacher makes our assignments very open-ended, in the sense that we don’t have a rubric or any specific requirements besides formatting. For reading responses, he lets us write whatever we want and for our presentations as long as it fits under the topic title. I am doing my first presentation tonight (2/22/22). The teachers do not like just having us stand up front and talk; they like us to have interactive elements, which makes it much more enjoyable for the audience and the presenter.
My German class is very intense. We meet four days a week for three hours each day. All of the class is spoken in German, and we have a lot of discussions. This is especially challenging for me because I’m not great at speaking German, but it is definitely helping me grow. We have to write a paper and do two presentations in German. My first one is this Thursday (2/24/22). I am hoping to come out of this class as a more well-rounded German speaker.
Classes here also have a lot of days when we spend the class period at a historic site or a museum. I have gone on an excursion to the Musée Futurium for my German class. I have an excursion to the Jewish Museum in Berlin and Topography of Terror next week for my Art and Dictatorship class. It also may seem that three hours is a long time to have class, but we get a fifteen-minute break halfway through German, and we get a ten-minute break every thirty minutes for my Art and Dictatorship class. During these breaks, we open the windows, talk, walk around outside; many people smoke or get coffee from a vending machine or the cafeteria (Mensa). After classes, no one hangs around campus. One of the directors of FU-BEST told us the general attitude towards school is more like going to work and leaving rather than hanging around and living on campus. The library closes at 4 pm every day, so my friends and I study on Tuesdays in between classes there. After classes, there is nothing really to do on campus, so we either go to a coffee shop to study or head back to our apartments. It is nice to go home at 12 almost every day. I have started going to bakeries to pick up something for my lunch on my way to my apartment. I have to study for a few hours, and then I’m done with my school stuff for the day. It feels like I am barely in school here, which makes it easy to be flexible with my days. I definitely feel very free with how I balance my life and school.