Excellence Center review

I arrived at the Excellence Center almost four weeks ago and the time has flown by. I’ve been very lucky to meet so many amazing people, both volunteers and students, and I have found my first teaching experience to be very rewarding. I’ve also thoroughly enjoyed living in Halle, which is a very nice size and is close to a number of other interesting cities.
I had a great introduction to the programme when I was met at the train station by Ali and then joined him and Lord for a meal on Rafat’s balcony. I then met some other volunteers that I would be living with for a few days (sleeping on the sofa) before moving to a different flat. It was a very comfortable and spacious sofa and the flat was well located, so I didn’t mind. The flat I then moved to was very comfortable and also in a great location, and Thomas was a very thoughtful and friendly host that I would recommend to anyone.
My day-to-day life at the centre was very pleasant, not least because all of my fellow volunteers were really lovely. The atmosphere around the centre was really fun and relaxed and I felt like I was a part of the group from the very beginning. Ali has his finger on the pulse in Halle and he often invited us to events or just to hang out at the park which I really appreciated! The other staff are also great – Lord, Rafat, Muaz and Radwan were always really helpful and easy to talk to. The shared breakfast was always a nice way to start the day and catch up with volunteers who you may not have been able to chat to during the busier days. The brunches and dinners were also a lot of fun and really solidified the sense of community at the centre as well as being a nice way to say goodbye to departing members of the team.
My programme included a total of twelve 45-minute German lessons. The lessons themselves were really good and quite varied, so I enjoyed them a great deal. Muaz is a great teacher and I enjoyed diving back into German after a year or so of not speaking any. All I would say is that for 300 euros per week a few more classes would have been nice, but of course I knew how many hours I was signing up for.
I was teaching 10 hours of classes per week, which was quite manageable. My students were all really nice and were a pleasure to teach and meet. I hope I can stay in touch with some of them when I go back to the UK. The “Teaching at the Excellence Center” PDFs provide some great ideas for activities, especially for bigger classes and so were a valuable resource. I have made some resources while I was here that I was quite pleased with, and I know many volunteers go to a lot of effort making teaching resources, so something that I think would be good would be a Google Drive (or physically printed resource) where volunteers can share their resources with each other and with future volunteers. Additionally, while I felt very comfortable teaching adults who are slightly more engaged and know what they want, I did feel slightly less well-equipped to teach children and some kind of quick training in this area might be good going forwards to prepare volunteers, although I appreciate arranging something like this isn’t easy. The freedom to organise my own timetable was really appreciated as it allowed me to make time for myself in the evenings or give myself a long weekend to get out of Halle and see the country. On the whole I found the teaching to be a very valuable experience for me and I hope that I was helpful for my students.
The past month has been a lot of fun for me and I’m really glad I made the decision to come to Halle. I expect that I will follow in the footsteps of some of my predecessors and find myself in town again in the future, in which case it’ll be nice to catch up with the staff here. I’d like to thank everyone at the centre for making my time in Halle so great! I’ll remember my time at the Excellence Center very fondly.