Der Sturm wird immer stärker. Das macht nichts, ich auch! The outbreak of the pandemic, followed by harsh lockdowns, found me at a new work position as the coordinator of the Latin courses as part of the General Education at the University of Bonn. Without any specific template handy, all courses had to be reorganized to go online, depending merely on the experience and disposal of each lecturer. Afterward, I had plenty of time to observe the effects of mainly asynchronous teaching on both an immense number of students and their teachers. In a survey I ran for personal research purposes at the end of that first COVID-19 semester, the following points became clear: Students expect individual feedback, constructive interaction, and engaging content. The students’ responses were in many cases a direct plea for communication and socialization with their peers and teachers. At that point, I recalled Michel Serres’ Thumbelina, wittily translated into German as a “love confession to the networked generation.” In his work, the French philosopher discusses the necessity of considering the fact that transition to e-learning is also a matter of education policy rather than a matter of technological advance, because we need to educate our students to act in a new space of open, inventive thought, to match not only the transformation of technologies but rather the forms of knowledge and social organization they need to manage (Serres, 2012, 2014). A few months later and parallel to my coordination tasks at the University of Bonn, I started in a new role as a lecturer in German of intensive language courses for international students at the University of Bielefeld. Of course, our students were residing in their home-countries (e.g., Mexico, Brazil, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Australia, Greece, and France) at that time. So, one of our main concerns was to bring as much authentic input (e.g., original texts, videos recorded in our university building and on campus) as possible into the course. In the case of our German courses, interaction was in balance with asynchronous learning activities, following a flipped-classroom model which proved to be effective and fun for both students and lecturers, based on their feedback on instructional sequences and their exam results. However, although my students looked satisfied in class in September 2020, I observed how this started to gradually change in the subsequent courses. A reasonable explanation maybe the fact that virtual interaction was no longer the exception but rather had become the norm. Thus, the initial fun started to abate. After the first lockdown, evaluations run at the University College of Teacher Education Lower Austria (PH Niederösterreich) regarding distance learning from the point of view both of teachers and students showed comparable evidence: On one hand, the workload of the courses was rated as appropriate and the frequency of the occasions for self-reflection as quite fair. On the other hand, although the statements on cooperation and a good working atmosphere—important factors for building resilience—were evaluated in a positive manner, there were still references to a latent feeling of loneliness (Weinzettl & Koglbauer, 2021, pp. 7–8). It was in April 2021, when I also ran my health literacy project DaF zum Wohl! for the first time, that I came to realize that the students were ready to address in a direct way crucial questions and issues regarding their own fragile resilience (Kolovou, 2022). The history of resilience as a psychological quality is the outcome of a chain of interdisciplinary transfer processes (Hellige, 2019, pp. 30–51). The term literally means the capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compression. In terms of psychology, resilience is the ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change. A comprehensible definition, which I favor, is that resilience is the immune system of our psyche (Heller, 2013, p. 9), which in turn needs adequate regeneration and preservation. In that regard, and as a then newly minted prevention and health counselor, I felt it was my duty to sketch a resilience-focused curriculum, when I had been asked to teach two 1-week intensive courses for international scholarship holders online in Summer 2021. The approximately 30 students were still residing in their home-countries (e.g., Spain, Poland, Russia, Mongolia, China, Serbia, Egypt, Georgia, Iran, and Hungary). Therefore, social networking as well as immediate and interactive communication was one crucial area, while planning the course, also because language production at the B2/C1 levels was a goal. In this context and bearing in mind the health benefits of narratives in learning and education (Grüber, 2022; Pennebaker & Smyth, 2016), I set the goal to train my students in written text production and speaking only through social and emotional learning, in order to boost their mental resources. In relation to various older as well as recently updated studies on resilience, there have been suggested different factors, pillars, areas, and skills which construct resilience as a dynamic process. These elements which contribute to effective stress and crisis management are flexible and can be learned. The terms for them vary in the literature; I attempt to summarize them for the purposes of this article as follows: (a) mindfulness, self-care, and self-reflection (b) self-awareness and acceptance (c) optimism (d) responsibility and decision making (e) positive network and commitment (f) solution orientation (g) future plans (for a critical discussion of the pillars of resilience see Allabauer, 2021, p. 3). With this in mind, I started with a team-building activity: inviting the students to introduce themselves in different ways, even before classes started. First, they pinned their hometown on a world map on Padlet. Then, I invited them to a forum where they shared their expectations and point of view regarding online classes. Considering their input, I compiled our learning agreement. This is how I made clear that they themselves do matter and we can only work as a team by engaging with a common purpose. Afterward, I went on to implement our 5-day syllabus with the activities described in the following subsections. As mentioned above, each voice matters. Therefore, I invited my students to share a greeting in their first language as well as to reflect on German phonetics with reference to their first language. Foregrounding the language in which they feel “at home” boosts the students’ self-esteem and self-confidence, as there is at least one thing in which they are the expert in class (Ozfidan, 2017, pp. 21–22). On that first day, students also had the opportunity to discuss their “super power.” A few of them not only focused on empathy as a positive virtue and skill, but also expressed their concerns about its harmful manifestation in a possible codependency, which creates problems in relationships and also affects self-esteem in a negative way. The fact that some students were ready to share such private details, like the fact that they do see a therapist, from the very beginning of our class was a first sign that this course had a lot more to offer to young people longing for constructive connections with others. Amidst the pandemic, travelling the world was officially “off the table,” and it was also doubtful whether our students are still able to dream at all. To boost their mindfulness and optimism, I offered them a chance to imagine a trip to “Taka-Tuka-Land” (cf. Pippi in the South Seas) and order their wishes at the “Wunder-Bar” (German for “bar of wonders” or “bar of miracles”), as suggested in a therapeutic writing task (see also Heimes, 2014, pp. 82-87). Another relevant task on that day was the creation of vision boards, an activity familiar to most of our students, who enjoyed sharing the boards with their classmates. Authentic relationships are firmly based on a well-developed emotional intelligence. In this sense, students reflected on their own emotions and mood changes on the third day. They also reflected on the concepts of luck, happiness, and laughter, by comparing their manifestations in different languages and cultures. Apart from their feedback, their enthusiastic reactions during these activities were proof that the similarities around the globe—also prevalent in this group—made them feel understood. Unforeseen crises, like a pandemic, can exacerbate the distress young people in transitional life stages are experiencing, especially when they are making decisions about their future studies or job. Similar to schools though, higher education institutions have a special opportunity, as they are sites of transition, where we can support our students at times of risk (Allen, 2014, p. 21). In this context, students spoke about their concerns regarding their prospective careers and came once again to the encouraging realization that they all share common stress factors. Together in this group, each student felt less alone. As the old saying goes, a healthy body leads to a healthy mind. Students also had the chance to discuss their subjective perception of health and illness and to reflect on factors and resources that support human health. The framework for the students to get acquainted with salutogenesis, a wholistic-approach health concept suggested by Aaron Antonovsky (Mittelmark et al., 2022) was the so-called DaF zum Wohl! health literacy project (German as a foreign language—to your health), which I had designed. Taking into account the feedback from students who experienced my resilience-focused curriculum already, it became apparent that language learning is a life-skills design process. We as language teachers, and most importantly in our role as (general) educators, can integrate a resilience first-aid toolkit in the teaching processes, to support our students in becoming self-aware, mindfully managing emotions, achieving smart goals, maintaining supportive connections, and making compassionate decisions. Here, the words of an Italian student who survived the Bergamo COVID-19 tragedy in 2020 are for me the most gratifying feedback in my teaching career so far: “In your class, I made new friends.” Motivated by the smile on everyone face, this mini resilience-focused syllabus of Summer 2021 is now part of my upcoming Salutogenius project, which also focuses on students’ health and well-being in intercultural language learning settings. Open access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. Penelope Kolovou (MA, Thessaloniki & Vienna) is a PhD candidate in Classics and Comparative Literature (Bonn) and an MSc student in Educational Psychology (Pafos). She specialized in teaching German for medical professionals and phonetics. She completed postgraduate training in special education, intercultural care, and applied health studies (prevention and health counseling). As a certified language and health coach, she is currently designing a project concerning resilience in international resident physicians. In Summer 2023 she teaches at the University of Bielefeld (Projekt Lehrkräfte PLUS) and the OWL University of Applied Sciences and Arts.