Insurrection!

On Monday the kids had their turn at the school drama. Many of the kids were very upset that the teachers are leaving. These teachers really are wonderful people that are great with kids. As far as I can tell it started with a kid that wrote some slogans on the bathroom wall with a marker protesting the vote. M copied one of them down and xeroxed the paper, then put a copy in each of the kids mailboxes by the front door. While T made some protest signs and taped them up on the walls and one on a stick as a sign to carry around. Other kids also made signs and wrote on the walls and overall they had a big protest at the school. The teachers allowed them to protest in various ways and said the kids were working out their frustration. When I went to pick them up M had a stick and was looking for tape for her sign to carry around. I think it is great (you can't get an education like this at a public school). The parents are having an emergency meeting Tuesday night and we are told that a parent needs to be present at the school each day until the end of the year (not sure why, perhaps to keep the kids from trashing the school).

School meeting

On Friday I asked B if the kids could stay at their place Saturday afternoon while we went to the meeting and he said it was no problem (they have kids the same age to play with). We dropped the kids off and drove up to the school. In the note we got we understood that the meeting was supposed to start at 3pm but when we got there it was already underway (I later found that it started at 2pm) so we had to walk in while they were discussing something and all eyes were on us as we found a place to sit down and then people asked us to sit in several different places. We finally ended up sitting next to F who helped translate for us. We filled out some paperwork for joining the group (it is legally organized as some kind of "club") and handed in the paperwork, then they announced that we were joining and held a vote to see if we could join. We passed so that meant that we could then vote. The first part of the meeting after we arrived discussed that they had just achieved some kind of status with the government and could start receiving money from the province now, and there was an audit of their finances. The next point was to vote to release the council from legal responsibility for their decisions for a year and that all members would share responsibility, at which the headmaster objected and it did not pass. They took a break and then we got on to the big issue. Six of the parents had written a letter to the province government that their kids were not learning enough in school and there was a point on the agenda to vote on that the headmaster was not doing his job correctly and a call to look for a replacement. Then there were separate points for each of the teachers. The teachers said that they agreed with the headmasters philosophy and if the first vote passed they would quit with him because they did not want to work in a school that the parents of the children were against. Then the long drawn out part of the discussion began. Essentially it was a public humiliation of the headmaster and teachers. There was a call for parents to say what they didn't like and a few volunteered, one said that he worked in a garden and if he built something and it didn't work he took it apart and rebuilt it (this would seem like a reference to the school staff but he was referring to the children) then another guy said he ran a business building/repairing ships and a team either worked well and built things quickly or were slow and need to be fired. Then a couple of parents talked about how their kids handwriting was not good enough (what is this obsession in Europe with handwriting?), and they have been worried about it for years. My opinion on this is kids are not machines to be taken apart and rebuilt, nor to be taught as quickly as possible, and it is our job as parents to also teach our kids, especially if we are concerned about something (and especially since in Germany the kids are only at school for half a school day compared to many other western countries). I have worked hard at home teaching my kids after I get home from work, why can't these other parents also do this. Furthermore, I really like the self directed teaching style the school has. Most of what I really learned I learned on my own, not at public school. If we force kids to learn a list of subjects on a given schedule then they will learn to be told what to do and not think for themselves. If we encourage pursuit of their own interests, they will learn to learn on their own. Of course their is a balance between extremes, but the public schools (in Germany and the US), in my opinion, are not anywhere near this balance. Also, as parents we all have different skills, backgrounds and training, why can't we volunteer teaching the kids at the school to help out the teachers and give more topics to be available. Anyway, they went on and on about this and then a lengthy session devoted to changing the wording in the resolution so that it was stated and restated in front of everyone how bad a job the teachers were doing (which is also a political trick done in the US media, something is repeated many times until the majority of people believe it), then there was a call for each of the parents in turn to say what they didn't like about the teachers, which fortunately did not pass. (There are plenty of German public schools around, if they want their kids trained in that manner why not send them to the public school instead of destroying this one by making it more like the public schools and removing the option for everyone. This school was a/the major factor in us being able to stay and live and work in Germany.) Finally we got to the vote, which was called to be by secret ballot then there was a big drama as they wrote the results out on a presentation board then covered them to be unveiled officially the next minute. Both V and I voted but we were in the minority and the resolution passed 38 to 14, with some abstainers. At that point the headmaster and teachers left the meeting (there was no point in their staying) and V and I walked out with them.

The kids were very sad when we told them the outcome. Two of them have been wonderful with T helping him adjust to living here, after the first year with the public school and M is very fond of one of the teachers. They will stay to work until the end of the year but then all new teachers and a headmaster will have to be hired for the next school year.

More school developments

We had a parent-teacher meeting last Thursday. I was a bit apprehensive after our experience with the public school before, but it went really well. They told us how the kids were doing at school, and areas that they needed to work on. We told them areas we were working on at home (for example I have been spending a few hours each week with each of the kids to work on math, and V has been working on reading and writing). They told us their concerns (for example, T made an embarrassing WWII reference during a fight he had with another kid) and we told them ours. I mentioned that is was very frustrating to not have communication about special activities and days the school was closed and asked if there could be an email list to announce these kinds of things. One of the teachers left and came back with a list of special holidays that are not in the official regional schedule and said they would discuss setting up a notification system. I felt like the meeting was very productive. However, the bad news came at the very end. They told us that on Saturday (two days later) there was going to be a vote from the parents about how the school should be run and it was possible that they might vote to hire new teachers. Two of the teachers get along very well with T and M is fond of one of them. After our tumultuous first year with the school system, and despite our continuing frustrations, I was very concerned to hear this. The last thing I wanted to do at this point is upset the system we have worked out for our kids with a brand new one. Furthermore, they said that some of the parents wanted the school to be set up more like a standard German school--the very thing we were trying to get away from. I asked if we could come and vote at the meeting to keep the current teachers and he said it was possible and that he would send a letter home with the kids the next day to give us more information.

melting... ?

The day after the last post, we got the kids ready, drove to school, and guess what, no one was there. The schools weren't canceled due to the weather, and it was not a regional holiday in the official list of school holidays. No, the school has its own set of additional holidays that we have not been told about. We asked the next day when we went to the school again to see if it might be open and guess what, it was. So now we have a list of these additional holidays the school decided on but didn't communicate to us, and I can't help feeling it is only a matter of time until the next surprise ("what, you didn't know we had a required school trip on Saturday..."). (This is only really a problem for us, the other parents are part of a community and talk to each other all the time so they know what is going on without even trying; it doesn't occur to them to tell us and that we wouldn't know something that is so obvious to them.)

The weather, the days have really gotten longer and it feels very nice to have sunlight around again. It warmed up a lot this last week and melted 90% of the snow away. In some places the sidewalks became long trenches of ice full of melted water and people were walking in the road while some others were out chipping away at the ice to let the water drain out of the walkways. I'm sure the animals are relieved, there are places along the drive to school where the bark has been newly stripped off of the trees (from before the snowmelt). The spring flowers (yellow Winterlinger) were blooming under the snow and revealed as it melted around them. It even rained a couple times (premelted snow was falling), which is something we haven't seen in a while. The skate-sail people have packed up and left because the ice on the lake is too thin now from the melting (V saw them packing and the license plates on their vehicles were from places like Estonia and Russia). Last weekend we drove up to the beach to see the snow and ice next to the ocean, which is still an odd sight to me that I am not used to. There were roundish blocks of greenish ice that I think is frozen seawater. The snow was blown into large ridges right up the the edge of the water in some places. In one place there was a huge, deep pile of mussel shells the gulls were picking over. I told the kids we were looking for amber because no one has been looking for a while with everything covered in snow and ice, so we walked along the narrow edge of sand looking through the shells, driftwood and seaweed. In some places the sand was washed over snow so if you stepped on what looked like a normal sandy beach your foot would sink into the snow underneath. It looked odd to scrape away brown sand and see bright white snow underneath. The fjord in Kiel was frozen over and I drove as far as the island of Fehmarn where the Baltic was frozen for a ways extending out into the sea. People were out on skis with parasails pulling them along in some of the large fields.

But, the last couple of days it has been snowing off and on again.