As nervous as I was while preparing mentally to translate two entire lessons to the Czech, I believe it was a still very important experience to my growth.
I waited together with 6 other classmates at 9:00 in the morning, we were reviewing the names of the teachers we were going to translate and their subjects.
At 9:30 the Czech came and greeted us, we greeted back and headed for the big class where we stayed for half an hour. During that time we asked them to describe their school and the difference between theirs and ours.
At 10.00 we headed to the class. It was a science class and they showed us some experiments with dry ice, tea, candles and other things. They were studying matter and its transformations. As soon as the lesson ended we went back to the big class where we stayed before.
At 11:00 we spectated our classmates singing something for the Czech, one of them was moved by their performance so much that she almost broke out into tears.
We started the next lesson at 12:00 and headed to the math class. To be fair, we didn’t translate much, as the other students wanted to translate the lesson themselves, we just helped them in case they made some mistakes. An hour passed pretty slowly just like any average math class, also it was explained in such a weird way that I myself got confused in a second years math lesson.
At 13 we ended the class and went back for the last time to the big class. We were supposed to stay there for the rest of the 6th our but suddenly (for reasons unknown to us as no explanation was given) we had to go back to our classes, without even the chance to say goodbye.
It was a good way of showing us how the role of interpreter worked and the things we learned from them are important as the school works differently not only in the Czech Republic but in the entirety of Europe as well. We also learned new vocabulary with this experience, the only thing I didn’t like about it is the fact that I had to improvise the entire science class (math too but that’s due to the fact that my classmate wanted to change group with me so that I had to translate a different class from what I was supposed to), if the science teacher would have explained us at least the topic of the lesson we would have had an easier time, but we had to improvise everything (luckily we could use our cell phone, so we searched all the words we didn’t know how to translate).
Despite all this, I still believe that this experience has been quite interesting and if ever someone had the chance to do it, I’d definitely recommend it.