The parents of the children in first grade "got" to have
another parents' evening last night. I'm a bit calmer now, almost 24 hours
later, and maybe can be less negative now.
Once a few details were announced (when what event is
happening, etc.--I volunteered to be one of the parents to accompany the
children in the lantern parade next week, because ONLY the parent volunteers,
maximum of four, are allowed to walk with the children), Frau S. started with
what she had promised for this meeting when she scheduled it back in September:
to "inform the parents about the progress of their children in learning to
read." What she actually did, for 45 minutes, was explain how she teaches
reading and why, how to make letter sounds, how to blend them, and all the
little tricks ("children need tricks, you know"--direct quotation, but
translated by me) she uses. Now that the children have learned all five vowels
and two consonents (in almost nine weeks of school), they can finally make real
words. So she drew a slide on the chalkboard, put a magnetic "m" at the bottom,
and showed us how to march the magnetic "i" up the ladder and slide down, saying
"iiiiii" until it hits the "m", and, voilá, you have the word "im"!! ("In", in
German.) Okay, I got it. Cute. But after she'd marched the "i" up the ladder and
slid it down four or five times, I was ready to scream. I thought of raising my
hand and saying that if she didn't stop soon, my daughter (three-month-old
Katie, who was of course with me) would be able to read by the end of the
evening, and that would really cause problems for her six years from now if
she's to go to school. I contained myself. (Partly because I have no intention
of Katie going to school, partly because it wouldn't have helped anything, and
partly because yes, it would have been very rude and a horrible witness and I
did know better. But I did think it...)
As of three weeks ago, the children have been placed in
"Fördergruppen" (hard to translate, or at least, I don't really know how to, but
they're smaller groups to give the children more individual attention), of which
there are six--each child participates in two, and each one meets for 45 minutes
each week. (So for 90 minutes each week, the children are in groups of about
eight children, rather than the whole class of 24.) My guess is that one is for
math and one is for reading, and that there are three levels of each one. Frau
S. did admit that the children have been assigned according to their abilities,
but wouldn't say which group was which. (That didn't actually bother me, but my
husband was annoyed when I told him about it.) But she did say that after she'd
gone through sounding out 10 words or so with one of the groups that day, some
of the children were insisting that they could do it themselves, so she let them
try, and was very, very impressed that they could already sound out and write
down "Brot" (bread) and "Feder" (feather). She said that that is unusual so
early in the year. Since Jacob had had one of his groups that day and had shown
me what they'd done and showed me very proudly how he'd figured out how to write
"Brot" and "Feder" by himself, well, I guess I can be glad that Frau S. has at
least put him in the appropriate group. (That he could already do that before
school started is not only not relevant to Frau S., what's really tragic to me
is that Jacob doesn't seem to realize that he was already doing that when he was
writing letters to everyone several months ago.)
Then we glued together the lanterns that the children had
made for the parade (St. Martin's Day--maybe I'll write about that another
time), and I was very disappointed in Jacob's. He's very creative and generally
meticulous with details in anything he enjoys doing, and fast and sloppy in
anything he doesn't enjoy doing. While I agree that he should learn to be
careful even when he doesn't want to, his sloppy lantern looking like something
he would have done a couple of years ago was such a clear picture of "I'm
making this because I have to, not because I want to" that I wanted to cry. I
did cry in the car on the way home, and prayed that Jacob's creativity and
spontaneity will not be destroyed by this time he has to be in school. I also
prayed that God will pretty, pretty please help me to see SOME good reason for
the children to be in school, because just to keep me out of jail isn't seeming
like a good enough one at the moment.
After we finished gluing the children's lanterns, we made
decorations for the windows. Not only nothing creative (everything was already
pre-printed--we just had to cut it out and glue it together), but it wasn't even
complicated. Jacob could very easily have done it, and my three-year-old could
have done a lot of it. But on the other hand, I wouldn't have wanted either of
them TO do it...I'd rather preserve what creativity they have left.
And Jacob is apparently behaving fairly well at school,
which I had assumed, because his temper tantrums at home have escalated
incredibly. None of us are the kind of people that "suffer in silence", although
my husband doesn't get as loud as the rest, but all of us, when we're angry,
make sure everyone knows it. This is definitely a problem I struggle with, and
even more so now that I see how clearly all the children have inherited it. But
we've worked with Jacob, and in the last year, his tantrums had lessened
considerably both in frequency and intensity. By the end of summer, they were
almost getting rare--every couple of weeks, rather than several times a day.
Well, they're back, and they're back at the level of a year ago. One example:
just after Jacob got home from school today, while I was helping Lukas put the
light bulb into the lantern he made at playgroup (mother-child playgroup, once a
week) this morning, Jacob started talking. I asked him to wait a moment because
I hadn't heard what he'd said and wanted to be able to listen properly. He
started absolutely screaming that "I" had interrupted "him" and threw himself on
the floor, and I didn't understand the rest. I left the room after telling him
that I would be very happy to listen to him when he's ready to talk, not scream.
Once he'd calmed down, he said that he'd just wanted to tell me that Frau S. had
told them that they can take their lanterns home tomorrow if it's not raining
when school gets out. That was all. But he'd wanted to tell me that the second
he walked in the door, and couldn't handle it that I was in the middle of doing
something with Lukas (which took a total of 30 seconds, at the most), and
totally lost control.
I'm only feeling more and more negative the more I write,
so it's probably better to stop now. We'll be leaving in the middle of March
next year at the latest, but don't know yet when we'll take the children out of
school. From the point of view of the local education authorities, they have to
be in school until they're actually sitting in the airplane, leaving this
country, and not for vacation. (Taking children out of school for vacation can
incur a 1500 Euro-a-day fine!) We have a little bit of an advantage that our
children, as American citizens, can claim residency in the United States any
time they want. However, if they're physically present in Germany more than six
months in a given calendar year, they do fall under compulsory school attendance
laws. If they're here for less than six months, they can be here as tourists and
don't have to attend school. They've already been here for more than six months
in 2005, so we can't do anything before Christmas, but it seems to me that we
could unregister them from residency on January 1st and still legally have them
here...the only thing is, that although we'd be fulfilling the LETTER of the
law, it would of course be going against the INTENTION of the law. Because we're
already known as trouble-makers, unregistering our children is not going to go
un-noticed, even if we do it the day we're leaving and do have proof of why
we're leaving, and the local education authorities could easily make trouble for
us if we unregistered the children but remained physically in Germany. At this
point, we're just planning to wait and watch. The children say that they're
happy in school, and if we're still managing to handle things at home, it would
probably be best to leave them there until we do actually leave. Wisdom,
wisdom--we need a lot of wisdom. And patience. And trust that God really does
know what He's doing. I know it, but I need to believe it...
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