A couple of miscellaneous thoughts 3

1) I have seen five wild hedgehogs since I have been in Germany. I don't think I have ever seen a wild hedgehog in the US.

1a) The German word "Igel" is pronounced like the English word "eagle". However, it means hedgehog, not eagle. Talk about false cognates.

2) On the other hand, I have seen almost no squirrels. Coming from the U of I campus and from Kenney Gym (which often serves as a home to confused squirrels), the apparent lack of squirrels is a kind of weird.

2a) "Squirrel" in German is "Eichhörnchen". I have been tested multiple times on my ability to say "Eichhörnchen". It's really not that bad though because "squirrel" is a really hard word for Germans to say so, after they test you, you can test them right back.

3) While at home my lovely blue TI-84 Plus is a run-of-the-mill, assumed part of high school math class, here, my math class uses scientific-ish kind of calculators. It was quite a shock after working all last year to maintain my green bar in C6 or whatever objective tools was in Calc 2/3.

4) Papers/spirals/binders/etc. are not 3-hole-punched they are 4-hole-punched and only the middle two holes are really ever used.

5) No one in my class brings their laptop to school everyday.

6) We use overhead projectors and transparencies all the time in class.

7)The math sequence here is completely different than in the US. When I started in my school, we were working with vectors and doing things I had just learned last year. Now, we are doing integrals as sums of areas of trapezoids.

8) Everyone uses these shnazzy looking pens. I don't really know what to call them but they aren't ball-point or felt-tip. Anyways, they're cool.