malvasia bianca

Miranda had her first German lesson today. Which has taken me quite some time to arrange: while I’m reasonably good at getting around to trivialities, I’m not always so great at doing actual important stuff. So we’d been planning to get her foreign language lessons for a couple of years, but I hadn’t gotten around to doing much about it.

I did actually try to arrange something a year ago. At that time, she was more interested in French, so I did some googling and called a few numbers, but I didn’t find anything that seemed quite right. Not that I looked very hard – I should have followed up some of the possibilities more. Then I let it rest for a while, and when I asked her again, she’d decided that she’d rather learn German.

One of the other parents who helps out in the school library is from Germany; she gave me a few references. I didn’t do anything with them for a few months, but I eventually got around to sending some e-mails at the end of November.

We visited one potential class three weeks ago. It was a group lesson, and neither Miranda or I liked it at all, for different reasons: Miranda was quite nervous at the idea of being in a group where the teacher spoke almost entirely in German and the other kids already new something, while I didn’t like it because most of the kids apparently had no interest in paying attention and the teacher wasn’t doing much to fix that. Based on that, it seemed like individual lessons might be a better idea, so I exchanged a few more e-mails with somebody who was offering individual lessons. It took a few weeks for us to actually meet (everybody involved managed to come down with a cold), but Miranda finally had her first lesson yesterday.

Which went quite well. It was an hour-long lesson, the teacher was very friendly and sensitive to Miranda’s nervousness, and they covered a lot of stuff. And Miranda said she really enjoyed it. So early signs are good!