Oma is for grandma

Michael and I have discovered the wonderful world of LibriVox.

They provide hundreds of free audio books for you to download! Isn’t that fantastic? It certainly is quite a thrill for me and my book fetish.

LibriVox takes out-of-copyright books (books that are in the Public Domain) and record them for you to enjoy … but I don’t really need to repeat it all over again as Michael has already posted about it. So why don’t you just read his post here?

And if you love reading as much as I do, you can also contribute by reading a chapter or two yourself.

Aldona left the following comment on my post “Would I go there?”

… I did see a huge difference between the two sides. A HUGE difference! I also found that the teachers from the East were more interested in their pupils than the West. In the West you became a teacher so you could become a Beamte, and then you had it ‘made in the shade’.

It reminded me of this very interesting interview I saw on the television a few weeks back. Maybe I only liked it cause I agreed with it but to me it seemed like a very well balanced perspective on the differences between life in “the East” and life in “the West” as well as the losses and gains of an “East-German” family.

This is one of those cheerful and proud moments in the life of often helpless parents, who try to make sense of the way their children (and in particular babys) behave. Often these little people that can’t express themselves and yet have so much that they want to tell you can only resort to crying and squeeling when it all gets too much for them.

Our little E has gained another way of letting us know what’s bothering her: she started signing. In a previous post on this I wrote how we taught our first daughter to sign and that it’s been an incredibly worthwhile thing to do (there are some links to more information in the post too, if you’re interested). But that it actually ‘works’ is something that I can never quite get my head around until they’re doing it. So when I started realising that E was using her hand consistenly in exactly the same way to signal when she wants a drink I was just blown away.

Now we can start to teach her a new word and expand her signing vocabulary a little, to make our life with a baby dying to express herselve a little easier still.

Whoever came up with the idea of teaching babys to sign must have been an incredibly smart person, who I’m forever thankful to.

I’ve been meaning to write an update of our family language situation ever since the last post in which I said that Michael was speaking English with the children now.

I think, it was a good decision, because M is not picking up Michael’s mistakes when speaking German, and her English has really taken off since then. She’s very comfortable holding a conversation in English now and can translate brilliantly from one to the other.

Unfortunately that means, that English has somehow become her more comfortable language and she’ll use English when talking to herself or even to her sister (which worries me a bit), but she’ll only speak German to me. So I suppose that only means, that she’s understood the contexts of the two languages now “The world is English and mummy is the only weirdo, who I’ve got to speak German with”. Oh well, we’ll see what’ll happen.

But the competition is certainly on now, as everything Michael teaches her he does in English. So when I “caught” them counting to 20 and beyond the other day I thought to myself, right she’ll need to learn how to count to 20 in German too. And I also catch myself repeating lots of things that Michael says to her in German just to be on equal footing.

The funny thing is that Michael seems to live in a postgerman era and still uses German occasionally with the kids, usually when he’s not concentrating but just wanting to say something really quickly. So now he tells them off in German and explains in English. Wonder what that does for their language development??

Thank you all for your comments on the previous post (Is it really this bad?) … lots of food for thought!

I wanted to summarize what I come away with and how my understanding is shaping in reply to your comments, which might be a rather lenghthy reply. So I thought a new post might be better than a totally oversized comment.

I can see why my experience of the German education system has been a rather positive one until now and why I couldn’t understand the majority of criticism of the system. I grew up in Land Brandenburg, former East Germany, in a medium size town. When the east took on the West German education system Brandenburg was one of the only Laender that refused to start High School in year 5. Instead they decided to start High School in year 7, which is a much more reasonable age.

Also my hometown Luckenwalde never opened a Hauptschule. Instead we got a Realschule, a Gesamtschule mit gymnasialer Obertstufe and a Gymnasium and doing a Google search I couldn’t find a single Hauptschule in Land Brandenburg but quite a few Gesamtschulen all of which offer the Abitur. Which makes me think that the east must have been quite aware of the problems associated with these strong divisions and strived to be more progressive and inclusive. This quote from an article which Christina sent to me from the Economist.com describes it quite well:

Education has always been a battleground of ideas, particularly since the first Gesamtschulen (comprehensive schools) opened in the mid-1960s. Many on the left saw this type of school as a silver bullet to ensure equal opportunities for all. The right, for its part, made “Save the Gymnasium” its rallying cry. It seems to have won: only about 700 out of over 19,000 secondary schools are now Gesamtschulen.

Being a rather small town, Luckenwalde never had a great immigrant population (if any at all) which also minimizes integration problems like the ones at the Ruetli Hauptschule in Berlin or gang related crime, which is much more common in bigger cities. And I never had to face the problems of disadvantaged minority groups, cause they just weren’t around.

So my view is probably a rather sheltered one. And not having experienced a lot of what the criticism is all about, it probably makes it a bit harder for me to see the problems.

I can see that dividing and therefore labelling children so early in life can have big implications. I have to agree that the three-tiered system seems very elitist in terms of separating high achievers from low achievers, so that the “smart” kids can learn undisturbed, I suppose (don’t know why else that should be a very helpful thing to do).

Yet, from my own experience (and I do admit that this might be a very isolated case) I wouldn’t agree that children are totally stuck once divided. At the end of primary school my brother wasn’t really the studious type so he went to the Realschule. Yet within his 4 years there he really picked up and developed an interest (so did most of the other kids in his class) and hence the majority of his class, him included, went on to do their Abitur at the Gesamtschule. And he’s now doing incredibly well at Uni. So going to the Realschule has actually been quite good for him and has absolutely not limited him in his options for the future. But I do admit that I don’t know the problems associated with big city Hauptschulen and children that are forced to go to the Hauptschule especially when they might not be from a very supportive home where education isn’t valued.

I have to agree with you, Cathy, the home environment seems to have the most influence on a child’s learning and development and maybe that’s where children of immigrant or “working class” families are so severely disadvantaged in particular if they’re not given the option of learning together with children from privileged homes. Which made me think that this is really what it all comes down to: failure to properly integrate children from all backgrounds into one society and education system rather than separating them into two or even three classes.

Primary schools seem to be OK. because the separation doesn’t start until High School. That’s certainly the case in Germany and in Australia many people are happy enough with the public Primary Schools but start sending their children to Private Schools once they start High School. And I do remember that it was quite common in England (I lived there for 7 months) to send children to Private Schools right from the start, which might explain the poor public education even in Primary School. Would you agree with that, Mr. Haddock?

Yet, in High School the problems start as children are divided into a class society. In Australia the privileged kids tend to go to the private schools and in Germany it’s the Gymnasium. What you’re left with are plenty of children from underpriviledged families not being able to mix with and learn together with children who are better off.

Hopefully, with the criticism of the PISA study Gesamtschulen will be on the increase assisting the integration of all students into one society.

Sorry, now it’s turned from an oversized comment into an oversized post but I need to ramble before I work something out, so if I’ve bored you to death I’m very sorry but at least I’m a bit more certain now of what I’m thinking. And if you haven’t fallen of your chair by now, thanks for bearing with me.