School and a field trip

Elias headed off this morning for a two-night field trip to the Landschulheim ("country school home") in Bonndorf (in the Schwarzwald) with his 3rd-grade class. This trip highlights all sorts of ways school here is different from school in the U.S.

Consider:

* Third graders here go for extended overnight field trips, without parent chaperones. The 24 students will be supervised by their teacher and four trained teaching assistants. The kids will go hiking, play games outside, build kites, and learn how to safely whittle with pocket knives. Parents are advised to chill out and trust their kids are in good hands.

* We first heard about the trip two and a half weeks ago, when Elias's teacher sent home a xeroxed hand-written note: "In the flurry of school starting up, I forgot to tell you the class will be taking a two-night trip to Bonndorf Oct. 13-15. Details to follow at the parents' meeting later this week."

* Instead of weeks of permission slip requests and reminders and final warnings, a permission slip came home a week ago, along with a finalized list of things to bring (sheets, hiking boots, warm clothes, a flashlight) and not to bring (iPods, Handys, Gameboys), and instructions for paying the 70 Euro fee by Ueberweisung (bank money transfer). Asking parents to pay 70 Euros for a field trip is possible here because most of the kids live in Herdern, a relatively well off neighborhood. The government will subsidize the trip for families who need financial assistance.

* Meals will be provided, and vegetarians will be accommodated. Elias said that when his teacher asked the class who else besides him doesn't eat meat, everyone raised their hands; when she asked who else can't eat meat, all but one of the hands went down.

Field trip aside, there are other observable differences between school here and school back home in Durham, NC.

Elias attends 22.5 hours of school per week here; at home, 32.5 hours per week (or if you subtract lunch, 30.5 hours per week). He claims that kids at home are much better behaved, but that he's learning more here.

At the parents meeting, the teacher described the class as "almost completely homogenous"--meaning almost all of the kids are performing at the same academic level.

Several people told us kids don't learn multiplication here until after third grade. It turns out that "multiplication" in Germany means "multiplying numbers greater than 11." Kids learn "Das kleine Einmaleins"--"the small one-times-ones," a.k.a. multiplication from 0-10--in second grade. Third grade covers addition and subtraction of numbers up to 1,000.

Religion--a choice between Katholisch and Evangelisch Christianity--is taught at school twice a week. Children can opt out of these lessons, although no other lessons are provided during that time. Elias is hanging with the Protestants, but it continues to grate on my U.S. sensibilities that in a country where millions of people not so long ago were slaughtered for their religion, government-run institutions are asking children to self-identify as being outside the mainstream. The folks I've talked with here about this have reassured me, saying that even Christian kids are opting out more often these days. Hmm.

"Sport" is taught three times a week. Kids bring and change into gym clothes on those days. After they get all sweaty, the kids either change clothes again or go for the layered look and put their regular school clothes on on top.

Children bring slippers or houseshoes to wear in the classroom. Street shoes stay outside by the door.

In Grundschule, the same group of kids typically has the same teacher from the first day of first grade through last day of fourth grade. Each classroom operates as an independent entity: while Elias's class mingles with the other third grade classes during recess, they don't mingle academically.

Kids practice spelling and handwriting with regular "Diktat" (dictation) exercises. As in the U.S., when German kids compose their own texts, the pedagogical emphasis is on expression rather than spelling and grammar.

German kids are just as reticent as U.S. kids when their parents grill them about what they did at school on any given day. The one-word highlight of the school day in here is virtually identical to the one-word highlight of the school day in the U.S.: "Pause" ("recess").