Mars by 2035 or bust

I was very disappointed by the cancellation of a US return to the moon. No one has been to the moon in my lifetime and I am approaching 40! Today Obama announced a budget increase for NASA with a plan for a manned mission to an asteroid, followed by orbiting mars and returning, then a manned mission to land on mars in 25 years! I hope very much this plan works and I will be able to see humans land on another planet in my lifetime.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8623691.stm

Paris

It is April and we are in Europe so where else would I take my eight year old daughter on a trip. We went to Paris this week, left early on Monday and came back on Thursday. I planned ahead and actually bought the tickets and booked the hotel last year, then back in February I reserved boat and Eiffel tower tickets. M was very excited about the trip, was constantly looking forward to it and looked up all kinds of things about Paris that we could see while there. She had her bag packed days ahead of when we were leaving and kept reminding me of when we needed to go. I had never been to France before so it was new for me as well. Also, M was studying some French words with V, oui, non, bonjour, merci, ... to help prepare. So on Monday morning we walked to the train station, took the train to the airport in Hamburg, then flew to Charles de Gaulle airport outside of Paris (which I had transited through once before), found the train stop in the airport, got tickets to Paris (they had instructions in English for buying tickets from the machines) found the platform and train and hopped on. To get into the platform area they had turn styles that you fed the ticket into and grabbed again like the metro system in DC. Paris is a big city, we traveled into it for quite a while. We made two transfers onto different lines, following the metro map, and then emerged almost in front of our hotel with the Eiffel tower in view just across the river.





In many ways Paris "felt" more like a city in the US compared to Germany (people jaywalked, there were more minorities around, cars went over pedestrian crossings between pedestrians, streets were messier). It was almost like being in Washington DC with the tourist sights and museums along the National Mall and Potomac (here Champs-Elysees and Seine) with large marble buildings around.

After seeing the Seine and the way the walkways, steps and roads were arranged around it I recognized scenes in movies I had seen that were along it (and thus in Paris) but I had not realized before how characteristic it was. M also said, it was just like in Ratatouille.

We checked in and dropped our stuff of at the hotel and then a little later went for supper at a French restaurant with a view of the Eiffel tower. Then it was getting dark and walking back we saw them light up the tower like a Christmas tree, with blinking lights and search lights on top.

The next morning (Tuesday) all the museums were closed so we walked up to the Arc de Triomphe, then got a croissant breakfast at a cafe, and headed to the Eiffel tower. I had tickets to go up in the tower at noon. (Also, a friend of M's in the US sent her a cutout drawing of herself to take pictures of in Europe and send back. It's part of a school project [see the Flat Stanley Project]. M is planning to surprise her with pictures of Paris.)





... will add more ...

School/Spring Updates

Several things have happened over the last couple weeks and as usual I have been swamped, so I will go over some updates on the highlights.

First of all the weather, right on cue, on the first day of spring it was warm(er) and sunny, the day before large cracks in the ice on the lake started to appear, on the equinox the cracks widened considerably throughout the day, every few hours they seemed to have doubled. M was excited about all the non-frozen water on the lake. By the end of the day the ice was drifting with only the edges of the lake still immobile and 99% of the snow was melted. Today the ice and snow seem like a distant memory. This far north it is like a switch is flipped, spring comes so suddenly. Now the sun is up for a long time, fields are turning green, and crocuses and Schneeglockchen (little snow bells) are up everywhere. The Winterlinger are already fading. (And I learned the German word for pansy flowers from a neighbor that was planting them earlier this week, Stiefmuetterchen, literally "little step mother") The trees are still sticks however.

OK, now about the school. We went to the emergency parents meeting. Actually the headmaster, who has barely spoke to us much at all before, suggested that we attend and pointed it out to V. In true form (for us) we went to the school, waited, and no one was there. Then V made some calls and found out the meeting was in a different town completely, so we drove there as quickly as we could but of course we were late. It was at one of the parents house and the adults were crowded around a dining room table while the kids all played together in apparent chaos. We learned along the way that this was a subset of parents that wanted to keep the current teachers (and our families made up half the kids in the school), it was a "by invitation only" meeting and were meeting to see what to do. Apparently, people had joined the school "club" that did not even have kids in the school and were now trying to shut it down. Out of respect for their privacy, because what is said here could get back to the people involved, I will not go into many details about what they discussed. However, I suspect they were suspicious of us at first (being Americans and all the stereotypes that entails, individualistic unilateral corporate military authority ...) and asked if we wanted to say anything. I told them that what was important to us was our kids, and having this school available was one of the main reasons we were able to stay and live and work in Germany; we had a horrible experience with the public school before, and that the headmaster and teachers have done a wonderful job helping our kids adjust to living here and couldn't be thanked enough for their work, and that we were very concerned about what our options would be now that they are trying to take over the school and convert it to more like a German public school. The group really brightened up when I said this and they saw that we were on their side.

A relevant observation that many Germans themselves agree with me on, one central point I see in German culture is an insistence on "the one right way" to do things, and anything else is wrong by default and has to be corrected. Also, in the US we are taught while growing up not to turn other people in for breaking minor rules, i.e. not to tattle-tale or snitch to the teacher, police or whoever is in authority. In Germany it is quite the reverse, people are encouraged to point out rule breaking from an early age and to "correct" others. Rather than being embarrassed they are proud to do this, even as adults and other adults encourage this behavior. It seems childish to us, but many things seem childish across cultures--because one part of cultural differences are the very things that children do spontaneously and adults are trained not to do (the other part is the things we are trained to do additionally that do not come spontaneously). To be fair, while to Americans it seems like Germans worship authority, to Germans it seems like Americans behave childishly in their distrust of authority. Also, Americans are more likely to trust the actions of private corporations but distrust the government while it is the opposite with Germans (trust the government, distrust private organizations).

So, to get back to the school, there is a compulsion from other people in the community to fix the school, because it is wrong, private and does not teach things like the public German schools do, even if their own kids do not attend. Identifying and removing dissidents is a part of any culture, but in this respect it is especially strong here and we are up against a central issue in German culture. Anyway, we are now part of the "resistance" parents. Some of them are very upset, after all they created this school for their children and went through the long struggle of getting it officially recognized and all the financial and legal battles over the last five years, only to have it taken away from them now. Several of them also had babies that they wanted to eventually attend (the headmaster has a one month old just born, before he was fired). At least one of them said they wished they could leave the country to raise their kids, actually one parent did move to Ireland a few weeks before (and these are German parents, not foreigners like us).

Aside from the obvious negative aspects and our concern over what will happen with our kids and school, there was a bright side. While driving home I felt good about something and realized, this is the first time we have really been a part of a group in the local community. For the first time it wasn't just us alone against the world, we were part of a group that shared our concerns that is against the system.

So the next day we took our kids to drop them off at the school. There was a huge work truck double parked in the drop off area and sure enough, "the gardener" was sitting in the truck, smoking a cigarette, and watching the school ominously. The "occupation" had arrived. I took our "resistance" kids into the school, later when picking them up the gardener was standing outside the building watching the place. Sometimes it almost feels like I am in a movie.

The mid-week V flew back to the US for a week and I had the kids on my own. Easter break is coming up and the last night of school there is an overnight sleepover at the school that the kids are looking forward to. The kids are still sad the teachers are all leaving but we are just trying to keep everything going as is until something becomes resolved. Things are going OK. One afternoon I have a nice chat with the headmaster and we worry about what will happen to the kids that attend the school. He points out a pile of cardboard boxes that was dumped on one of the walkways around the school rather than being cleaned up (the parents have rotating responsibility to clean the school) and said it was symptomatic of the problems occurring. Over the weekend I take the kids to a park and they play for a long time and do really well. It feels good to get outside for so long and let them run around. Then on Monday I go to drop them off at the school and something is wrong. There are hardly any cars there and some strange people are standing around staring at us as we walk in. Most of all, "goatee," who appeared to be a ringleader of the opposition during the school meeting where the teachers were fired (and does not have kids that attend), was standing in the road talking to the headmaster. I went in and talked to F. It turns out the opposition took some kind of additional action, and rather than the headmaster and current teachers finishing out this school year until replacements can be hired, the headmaster is now barred from entering the school, school is closed for the rest of the week, and the overnight before Easter is canceled. They are sending the kids back home with their parents. I am stuck in a bad situation because I have a job and the kids on my own until V gets back. Legally the kids can not go to work with me and we have an absolutely required, once yearly safety briefing the next day. Plus we have a neighbor that can create problems and it is not legal for the kids to be home alone... F said not to worry about it, he would volunteer and watch the kids at the school unofficially for me and a couple other parents. It is too bad that he is being fired.

V returned from the US on Wednesday and we drove to the Hamburg airport to pick her up (no more spending all day on the trains to get back and forth to the airport!). She brought back some food that we can't get here: black beans, collard greens, black-eyed peas, okra (which unfortunately was canned, you can't transport fresh vegetables), canned sweet corn!!! I stared at the labels on the cans for a while. It looked really strange to see everything, down to the tiny writing on the ingredients, written in English (and Spanish in some cases). I have been here for over two years, with only a few days back in the US at a meeting over a year ago, and now not seeing German on labels looks very strange to me.

OK, so now Easter break has started. It is not clear what will happen when school is supposed to start back up, or if it will be closed for some time. Anyway, T and I have a trip together later in the summer (part of my promise last fall to do more traveling with the kids while we lived here), but first I have a trip with M this break, we leave on Monday, she is very excited, and I will write more about that next.

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.