Neue Stifte, neues Maeppchen: new German school thread

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Am starting in positive manner as we're 7 weeks into the new school year and all 3 of mine are settled and happy.
Well, d won't be if she does have head lice and has to stay off because she loves school so much.
S1 is in the second year of secondary & still thriving. Is class prefect for the first time which was a great ego boost.
S2 is in Y4 & has been doing better in class but his test results are still lousy (unfortunate choice of phrase if we are lice-ridden) and his teacher is convinced it's the language issue. He's trying harder which is a good sign. He lost the prefect election by 1 vote to his best friend and was chuffed to bits to be his "deputy" and that so many voted for him.

Had forgotten how wonderful the "erste Klasse" is.

I cant remember, have you tried Kumon maths, admylin?
A little girl I know was also trailing in maths, started on this course that you get sent in the post, fill in the answers, send them back, then they send you more, depending on how you did, there are rewards for finishing each level I think. anyway, apparently it worked wonders, she became really motivated.

I so recognise the child who can do all their homework, yet consistently appears with low marks

Wow taipo when you hear things like that it makes me wonder what I'mup against. We have no hope of getting through to people like that. The more I talk to German friends about this subject the more I find out that they also didn't have a great time at school either. That's why they maybe all just accept it as the norm.

No never tried Kumon Nighbynight. Is it in German?

I've got 2 good books from India in English with the maths up to grade 4 and it's really well explained but dd doesn't like it in English as she then has to translate it in her head to use in school. My dc have alsways been like that, total Trennung of the 2 languages and only now have I managed to get ds to consider doing stuff in English too. Got him some great expanations for geometry online.

yes, its a German company that is doing it.

I sometimes think that it doesnt reflect too well on the teachers if they have to push several of the children down the year as well. In ds's class, 2 have already slipped back, and she says that ds may have to repeat the 4th class (worst nightmare!!). IMO, this is just a reflection that she is not a very good teacher. But nobody seems to see it like this - the only people who are blamed and punished are the children who have a year of their lives stolen.

I must admit - I only ever skim read my childrens reports. They are overwhelmingly negative, but usually manage to put some positive comments in.

Kumon in Ihre Nahe: www.kumon.de/kumon/main.php?cat=2&sub=3

We were in Texas this summer and my niece is a primary school scince teacher and she was working half of the summer holiday , preparing lessons and having meetings. And she told me that they get big trouble from their education authority if so and so many pupils fail (can't remember how many but it wasn't a high percentage) and the school gets into trouble and can even have some of the funding reduced so they all have the incentive to not fail many kids.

Obviously here it has something to do with the Beamtenstatus, once your in your safe so after a while you just start to coast along, turn in to work and get it over with sort of thing.

Oops, science teacher, not some new American subject study of scince!

Here's a good website by the way for extra school work it's physics but ds is doing time and measuruing time in history so and we found this site which is quite good.

OMG physics. We had the maddest hatter for physics. He looked like Joe 90 (anyone remember him?)

Can't rmeember ever having had an experiment work. He was totally baffled by us i think. We'd always do what he said (I think) and then have to call him over, "Mr X, why didn't it work?". After such time elapsed, he just got into the habit of coming straight over to us, "OK girls let's see why it didn't work this time".

To this day I have no idea what physics is supposed to be about really

maybe you can post the link on the thread of horros too admylin. (Not that many people other than us weirdos go there I think)

oh sorry this IS the thread

Lol!

It's a good site and I hope ds will 'get' physics because I didn't! I remember we had a realyly strict physics teacher, old school style , would have loved to cane us but it wasn't allowed so he just terrorised us with lessons and he looked like Hitler. When he started explaining electricity and the plus and minus I just switched off so that was fairly early on in the first year!

I was in love with an absolute dreamboat called Matthew at the time which didn't help I think, I was in a daydream most of the time

In fact if I'd had a boy , I owuld have called him Matthew. What a knock out that lad was. Gorgeous

Shame we didn't have any boys worth daydreaming about in our early secondary years! Now, the 6th form lads were worth it.

well he's marriedto a girl I was at school with. I called her mum once when I was back home and she said, "Oh ZZZen, don't know if you know but X has married Matthew G (who lived next door to her). Back when you girls were young, she probably wouldn't have touched him with a barge pole!"

Ha! She would have touched him with anything at all, including a barge pole if necessary. EVERYONE was in love with Matthew . EVERYONE. Even the boys probably. He was very aloof though. Rughby player, tall, muscular, very superior, but stunning, utterly stunning. Scandal has it he was bonking some girl 4 years older than him at the time who was going out with his team captain. So maybe he wasn't such a great catch

Sigh, the ones we let get away eh! I'd be living in a big farm house in a beautiful village in the south of France, with loads of family around and loads of dc and a few dogs if.. if.. if...

Well tbh I didn't let him get away, I never had a look in!

I had to search for a long time for ds's name as I couldn't bear to call him after any of the wimps I went to school with!

I think if I were to have another dc (extremely unlikely given the circumstances), I would choose a very plain name, in particular for a boy. All the babyname threads I've read on MN over the past couple of years have killed off any desire for fancy names tbh

Lol at Matthew. Seems such a waste somehow that he married the girl next door.

I wonder if there are any normal physics teachers around. Ours was a total lech (and very unattractive). Rumour had it that he had a 'thing' going with the headgirl

Any Physics students I've met here in Germany at the university have been a bit strange too. Don't you have to be strange to understand all that stuff? Isn't Angela Mekel a Physics graduate? She was so wierd before she became Kanzlerin, only now that she has a hundred advisors to tell her how to behave, she seems slightly normal.

She comes across very strange, doesn't she?

Yes, but she was worse before she was elected. I always used to think surely she should have been on some sort of communcation and get in control of your facial expressions course before entering that end of politics!