Making Enemies in German Class.

In my feeble attempt to become more Deutsch (and you know, be able to actually live here and read my mail etc.), I have now started my third different Deutschkurs. - the in-house one that I was promised months ago. As a result of this discontinuous learning, my language knowledge is understandably hodge-podge to the extent that I could apparently know complex things such as where the conjugated verb is supposed to be in a side clause, but not know how to do *simple* things like tell the time. 


This has manifested itself in funny ways. For example in one class, the teacher asked me which were the Summer months. I proceeded to say, "Von Dezember bis Februar" much to everyone's surprise. I then clarified by saying "Oh, ich komme aus Australien!" The teacher then said something along the line of, "O rly? What is Summer like in Australia?" which then set me off on a spiel saying it depended on where you were because it varies. When I finished talking, I saw my classmates had a WTF look on their faces. Clearly it doesn't matter if we're all phds and postdocs - if someone is smarter than you in class, you hate them :(


This happened again recently except this time Asia was in class with me. This time, we were doing possessive pronouns for the different cases and our teacher wanted us to write a description of a family member outlining things like age, hair colour, personality etc. I proceeded to write something about Pooey (hai Pooey!) and then the teacher said "You can do this for homework - except Mooey, you can do it now as an example." Err, okay. I then read out what I had written down and when I finished, the class - including Asia - had that hating look on their face again.