Reflections: Ostern Presentation

Reserved for the first post in the "Reflections" series.

----------------------------

Very few people are quite as attached to high school as I am. I can't quite explain how I feel about it. The best I can do is explain some of the most memorable experiences I've had here. Hopefully my love for TJ will become apparent in a way that I don't have the ability to straight up write about.

It was through this line of thinking that the "Reflections" series idea was born. I'm going to detail some of the best and worst (but in retrospect hilarious) things that have happened to me during my 4 years here.

I hit upon this particular topic while talking to Renjie. I was going to do this about all of German, but that's way too broad. German, despite being a class that I only took because of requirements, was actually a fun experience. I might end up writing more about my experiences in German class during this series, but here I'd like to stick to just one shining moment in my Deutsch career: our Ostern (Easter) Presentation.

A bit of background: at the beginning of the year, we were all required to pick a German holiday to give a presentation on. We (Jacob D, Eric, Renjie, and I) quickly formed a group and picked Easter. I think our justification was that it was the only holiday we recognized. Clearly we were such good german students.

Of course, we didn't even think about it until the week before it was due. Somehow we remembered that we were supposed to do something. I really have no idea how. We called an emergency meeting at my house. Sadly, Jacob didn't feel like showing up. It was me, Renjie, and Eric. That day, Eric far exceeded us in productivitiy. I think he managed to do 2 webassign problems.

So the night before the presentation we realize that we're in a spot of trouble. We have a sheet to translate, a german site to read, a quiz, and our presentation, just for the next day in German. None of us have started any of them. So begins a long and painful night.

Now, let me make this clear. I love Jacob, but he's not very good at German. His job was to bring in food. Of course, we have no idea what food is German easter food. We asked him what he brought and he says:
Jacob: my mom went shopping
and got
mini crullers
doughnut holes
mini chocolate eggs
and pepsi and ginger ale
and cups and plates
did i miss anything
We were so excited! Crullers! It sounded German! Surely our presentation was shaping up to be the stuff of legends.

The only obstacle that remained was ... well the actual presentation. Well, you know how these group projects go with 3 slackers. No one does anything in hopes that the other people will take care of it. It was unfortunate. I lost the patience war and sort of coerced Renjie into doing work as well, leaving Eric as the winner of the slacker competition.

I just read the conversation we (Renjie and I) had. It started at 5:47 and lasted until 1:47 the following morning. I laughed quite a bit.

Anyway, the research began in a familiar place - wikipedia. However, we were audacious students. We went to the german wikipedia! After failing to understand the first 3 words we quickly realized our mistake and reverted to English.

The rest of the stuff was pretty standard bs'ing material, so I guess I'll skip striaght to the final product.

Here is our opening slide. I tried to take slight revenge on Jacob for not doing anything.

I am such a mature person

Well, Renjie actually made me change this. But you have no idea how funny it seemed at 2 in the morning.

As we progress to out second slide, we come to Eric's sole contribution in this project. We were looking for a picture of the Easter Bunny, one that wasn't on the Wikipedia Article. Fate was with us that day, because Eric provided us with the following excellent picture:

Renjie: We'll say it's asian if anyone asks.

In my opinion this picture exemplifies the quality of our presentation. And yes, Renjie did actually let me keep this one.

Further excellent and insightful information can be found a few slides later. It is titled "How do the people celebrate?" You might think you would find unique German customs that are not common knowledge to Americans on this slide. But no! Instead you would find absolutely useless information. Here's the translation:

-People decorate eggs
-Sometimes people dress up like a rabit
-People find the decorated eggs
-People go outside

Yes. Easter in a nutshell indeed.

Actually, on the previous slide, which is titled "Where [Easter is celebrated]?" We manage to point out that Easter is celebrated everywhere in Germany by all Christians, and that every city has its own traditions. Clearly we did an excellent job of specifiying the traditions unique to specific places in Germany.

You might think that a completely unrehearsed presentation so chock full of valuable material might be difficult to pull off. Well, you would be correct. However, that is exactly what we attempted to do the next day. In my extremely humble opinion, we proceeded to ace it. Our lack of material presented a slight problem though. We were done roughly 10 minutes early. Probably because we had absolutely nothing to say.

We did however, have a ton of small chocolate eggs that Jacob had brought. Frau Vaden suggested that we go outside and hide them for a real easter egg hunt! We tried to pretend that this was actualy our idea, but we had balked at the idea of disturbing the other classes. So Eric and I ran outside and threw the chocolate eggs all over the front lawn while Jacob and Renjie kept the rest of the class busy, and they came out and looked for them. Unfortunately we had managed to throw about half the eggs down the gutter, so a large chunk of the class gathered around the drain and stared longingly downwards. Not like we cared, we were too busy cracking up at how we had "salvaged" our presentation.

Sigh. German.

There's one more thing that stood out to me in this whole experience. Allow for a quick background:

In 8th grade I loved to argue about stupid stuff with Eric and Nashoba. One day after school, while we were wandering aimlessly through the halls, we were arguing which numbers were better - large or small. Eric claimed larger numbers were "dominant." When I asked him why, his astonishingly witty comeback was that should one ever engage in an egg fight, you would want a larger number of eggs as opposed to a smaller number.

I never missed an opportunity to ridicule him for that one. For the next 3 years at every possibly opportunity I'd bring up his stupid egg fight argument.

So when we ran outside to hide the eggs for our presentation, it didn't take us long to realize there are no actual hiding places. Instead, we started throwing them around. Eventually instead of throwing them randomly, we started throwing them at each other.

We finally realized that 3 years after that day in middle school, we were having an egg fight.