Long live improvisation!

It was not the first time this had happened to her:

At the beginning of the new term, she had made all those resolutions – this term she was going to read all the obligatory texts, she was going to prepare each lesson, this time she was going to be a good student.

But, soon things went the way they always do:

The book she had ordered did not arrive on time. She had to prepare a presentation, which she should have started two days earlier. The copy machine had not been working when she wanted to copy the text. She got drunk at a party on Monday; she had had a hang-over on Tuesday. On Wednesday, she had been sitting in a café all day long instead of studying.

Excuses, excuses, excuses...

The result was that, by the fourth week of the term, she had not read the play they were discussing in her class. She had not prepared the secondary literature either.

But she had made it to the class, at least.

She was definitely not the only one who was hanging on like that.

That day, the professor decided to test his students. So, he randomly called up students, asking them to analyse parts of the play. She tried to hide between her neighbours. She wanted to be see-through.

But the professor had no mercy with her. He called on her to interpret one song from the play. Hastily, she read the first few lines in her neighbour’s copy of the book.

Ancient Celtic goddess –fairies - music – folk song – the few words she noticed.

“I think, this song highlights the importance of folklore traditions for the author. It mentions the old religion and tales – therefore, it mourns the loss of those in the present. It is, therefore, a criticism of colonialism, where native cultures are made to disappear, therefore, it calls for the independence of Ireland ....I think.”

Her voice was weak at the end of the statement. Was that too farfetched? Was that even in the play? She had no clue what the play was about, actually.

The author was Irish and the play was written in the late 19^th century – this was all she remembered from the past lessons.

“Very good analysis,” the professor answered, “I see, at least one student has read the text.”

Listen to your teachers every once in a while

In dressage, Fabian and me were a great team. I had been practising with him for almost two years and I saw him almost every day.

I knew all about him: that he was afraid of dogs, that he hated walking through puddles and he did not like jumping over hurdles.
He fulfilled my commands easily: when I wanted him to trot, when I wanted him to gallop, when I wanted him to stop. There were not many disagreements between us.
Only, when I wanted him to jump over hurdles or cross some water, did he give me trouble.

One day, during a jumping lesson, my horse riding instructor put the hurdle up to110 cm.
I knew Fabian would be very stubborn, even if he had to jump 60 cm. I had never done more than 80.
I told my instructor: “He’s not going to jump that high. He is not going to do it.”

“Oh, come on, just give it a try.”

“I can try, but he won’t do it.”

“Come on, it’s your turn now.”

I galloped towards the hurdle in the usual way. I was sitting very stiffly on the horse, expecting him to brake all the sudden or gallop past the hurdle.
But then a miracle took place. Fabian jumped - as if he had done nothing else all his life.
The people outside the paddock were cheering and my instructor gave me that I-told-you-so-look, but I had the honour of being the first to make that horse jump 110 cm.

Building up a family myth

When I was a child in the 1980s, my parents told me bits and pieces of our family history: „Your grandfather worked as a policeman in the GDR and in 1956 he fled to the West, during the night without telling anybody. Even your grandmother and her three kids – your uncle, your mother and your aunt – didn’t know. One day, they got a phone call from him in the West and he told them to come to the West, too, half a year later.” 
My grandfather, however, remained silent.

When I grew older I started to wonder why he had escaped:
“Your grandfather realized that real socialism wasn’t what he had expected it to be,” my grandmother answered me when I interviewed her for a school paper on family history in 10th grade. My grandfather remained silent.

“Your grandfather realized that he would make more money as a factory worker in the West than as a police man in the East. After all, he had to support a family of 5,” she told me at a family reunion soon after that. My grandfather remained silent.

“You grandfather probably got into trouble drinking. I think, he injured somebody in a pub brawl and that is why he had to flee,” that was what my uncle had told me when I was 19 years old, after my grandfather had threatened to cut him out of his will. My grandfather remained silent.

“Your grandfather had an affair with another woman and eloped with her to the West. Then, he realized that he was lost without his wife and allowed us to follow him,” my mother came up with this version about a year ago after accusing her father of being irresponsible towards his family. My grandfather remained silent.

I always imagined my grandfather's escape in a wild romantic way, like in the movies: him as a young man running over the border strip at night, his former colleges running after him – they have dogs barking, men shouting, spotlights, some shots, but he is faster. He is cleverer. He hides in the bushed. He escapes. 

Then, he would sleep in fields and train wagons until he made it to the far West of our republic. There, he would remain in the underground for about 6 months until he thought it was safe for him to call his wife and children to follow.

But then, the young man had settled down and over the years lost his strength. A month ago, my grandfather, just skin and bones recovering from stomach cancer, broke his silence:
“I heard at work that I was to be drafted to the army. But I did not want to join the army. So, I left during lunch break. I crossed the border, as a policeman I had no problem with that. I went to the next town in the West; there they told me that they would not hire refugees from the East. Then, I called up your grandmother from a payphone, she told me to go to the place where her uncle lived. He could get me a job in the mining industry. Six months later, I had saved enough money to buy plane tickets for her and the kids to follow.”

Taking a look from the other side of the class room

We, the students, say about Prof. Dr. J. that he is the living proof that the cafeteria food cannot be bad for your health because he has been eating in that cafeteria every day for almost 50 years.

Some, however, say that the big mole on his bald forehead proves the contrary.

Indeed, Prof. Dr. J. eats in the cafeteria with us every day. He never goes to the more expensive restaurants on the campus and he always prefers spending his lunch break with his students than with his fellow professors.

We consider him more like a grandfather than a strict professor, who seems to be too arrogant to talk to his students.

He gives us the impression that he really cares about us, his students, and wants to know what is going on in our lives.

The other day, he seemed quite nervous while having lunch with us. One of his students would have her final exam the next day. I was surprised and a bit naive. Why would a professor be as nervous about an exam as the student? After all, the professor had taken thousands of exams in his life, for the student all her future career depended on it.

Yes, he told us, he was nervous, too, because as a professor you want your students to get the best marks possible. So, you spend all day long thinking how to formulate the questions.

Final exams were no routine, where you would use the same questions every time. You would consider each student and choose the questions according to them.

I wouldn’t have thought that our professors take so much time thinking about us.

In the end, the student who had the exam that day told me that the exam was really easy and that he had asked her about things she had studies ever since her first year.

It will only start to rain, if you don’t have an umbrella with you.

In Salzburg, there is a baroque castle, which is famous for its water games. In the summer, it is one of the most beautiful places to be, sitting in the castle’s park in the sun, enjoying the impressive architecture and the vivid statues of ancient mythology, watching the beautiful fountains and getting refreshed by sprinkles of water from the jeux d’eau.

My parents had found that place before I was born and spent some romantic moments there, I assume. My mother always talked about how much she liked that castle and the pretty park, so she made us return there a lot of times.

One time, there was a rain cloud in the morning, when we left for the castle. But my father said it would disappear by the time we were at the castle. So, we didn’t bring any raincoats or umbrellas.

But the rain did not stop. Instead, it increased and we also got wet from the fountains, while watching the water games. All the other people who had been to the castle that day had umbrellas and gave us the ‘look-at-those-crazy- tourists” look.

In the end, we were so soaked that my mother made us stop at a clothing store in the next village to buy new clothes, so that we would not catch a cold on the ride back.

The next years, when we returned to the castle, we always brought along our rain coats, umbrellas and an extra set of clothes. But it never rained again.

If you are interested in the castle, here’s the link:
http://www.hellbrunn.at/hellbrunn/english/start/index.asp

On the road

On the road. The road as a class-room.

I think that a lot of learning takes place while travelling. Imagine yourself a family in a car. The father is driving, the mother in the passanger seat and two children in the back. The father behind the wheel wears leisure-wear and  looks relaxed putting his elbow on the car's window.
The two children, sitting on their legs looking out of the window, seem quite excited. The mother, whose wears a summer dress and sun glasses, turns around to the children telling them something about the things that they see on the road.

The family in this picture might go to an unknown place. They might meet new people, see a new landscape or visit some relatives in a different town. But even then, they might learn something new: their relatives will tell them about the things that they experienced in the meantime since the family’s last visit.

On the road, they will see many cars, maybe with different license plates and if it’s a long trip they will stop at a restaurant and try new food. So, the two children will come home with lots of different impressions.

From this trip, they will have learned that there are people living in a different manner from their own. They will have experienced that the world is bigger than their surroundings. They will have learned to adapt to a new place and to get along without their toys, which they could not bring, or without their friends, who did not come along. They will have heard people speak in different dialects, different languages even. Maybe, they will bring something home from the trip, a new dish that they have tried, a new word that they have learned or a new toy.

So, hopefully, that trip was a lesson for them in tolerance and open-mindedness, seeing that people are not the same everywhere.

Parents' dedication

I'm one of the few students in Germany, who managed to go to university without having an academinc background (that means my parents never went to university).
Since there is a lot of debate about how to get children of non-academinc background to go to universityright now, researchers might see me as a good example - or a guinea-pig...

Of course, things were not always easy, but on the other hand, things were not always as hard as one reads in the media. The reason for that was that my parents were really dedicated to offer me all opportunities they could.

For example, my 7th grade geography teacher once gave the assignment to look up words such as "sub-urbanisation" in an encyclopedia at home. However, we did not have an encyclopedia at home. My grandparents had a 2 volume Brockhaus edition of 1950, which did not include those entries.

So, my mother drove to the next bookstore and bought me a one-volume student encyclopedia, which helped me for that homework and for many other things. But two years later, my parents thought that it would be outdated and got me a bigger one for christmas.

I probably wanted something else, but in the end, I'm really thankful for the encyclopedia, the atlas and the dictionaries they gave me for christmas on several occations. In the end, they proved to be much more useful than a doll or a CD.

Learning by travelling

Before I came to the city of Osijek, I had never heard of the siege of Vukovar - an educational gap, some readers might say, other might not even know that places like Osijek and Vukovar exit - honestly, I didn't know about those places before I had been invited by some Croatian friends to come and visit their country.

Of course, I had known about the Balkan Wars before, I remember seeing thing about them on the news when I was a child. Back then, the Croatian- Serbian boarder seemed very far away...and 15 years later budget airlines make me reach that place within one hour.

We had been in Osijek for a week - already there, the fact that you could still see bullet holes in buildings impressed me, even though you can see those in some buildings in Berlin as well. But, of course I know that was from WWII, which is quite far away, and the Balkan Wars took place when I was a child and when our Croatian hosts were children.

In Osijek, we saw a movie about the siege of Vukovar, about how the Serbian army had conquered that city, killed the patients of the hospital, and forced the civilians to walk about 50 miles on foot to Osijek. The movie was quite disturbing, especially knowing that this had happened close to us, to some of our friends.

The next day, we actually went to Vukovar. We rode those 50 miles in a bus and the weather was pretty bad that day, we were told that it had been the same when the civilians where forced to go. Just looking out of the window, one could image the hardship they must have suffered.
In Vukovar, you could see the ruins from one Habsburg castle, which had survived until 1992. There were still burnt down trees standing on the Danue river, looking very sad.

Across the river, there was the border to Serbia. What struck me, was that there was no bridge connecting those two countries which had once been one and then became enemies. Our Croatian travel guides told me that there had been a bridge but that it was bombed in 1999 - a time when I had been 15, thinking about horses and boyfriends.

I think that, on that trip, I had learned more about the hardship of war and forced migration, than history books or documentary movies can ever teach me. Standing on the fields that had actually been battle grounds and talking to people who had witnessed that war erased all the distance that newpaper articles, books and movies had not managed to close.

Reading back childhood memories

My collegue told me a neat little story:
His mother had kept all his books that he read when he was a child. Fairy tales, adventure stories - all those nice, easy books that are used to teach children how to read.
Last christmas, he went home and as he was feeling ill one day he spent all day reading those children's stories because they were easy reading, taking him back to the land of fairies, dragons and magicians.

The funny thing about the story is that the same thing happened to me once. The first time I came home for the summer after starting university, I had caught a summer flue. So, what I did was lying in my old room and reading all those stories that I had liked as a child. It was gorgeous - taking me back to my childhood in a way. I even forgot about feeling ill.

So, take one rainy afternoon, go back to your parents' place and read through your old book - it will make you laugh, cry and brings back childhood memories.
If you are a parent, keep your children's books, they might want to read them again some day.

Who put the bricks in the wall??

"We don't need no education
we don't need no thought control
no dark sarcasm in the class room
teachers leave us kids alone"

That was what the young English teacher read on the blackboard when she first entered the class room. She was known to be not the most self-confident among the teaching staff and, of course, she took it personally.

So, she started out with a ten minute speech telling her 8th graders why those few lines were offensive to all teachers, why it was necessary for kids to receive education and why they should be thankful to their teachers for trying to do their best every day etc.
The kids looked very puzzled after the speech.

When she was done, she asked in an angry voice: "So, now tell me, who wrote this on the board?"
Silence among the pupils.
She asked again: "Who did this?"

Then a shy, little girl raised her hand: "It was Mr. E., our music teacher."
"What! Why did he do that for?"
"He wants us to sing 'Another brick in the wall' at the school concert."

Home schooling

When I was in the United States, I stayed with a host family who was home schooling their daughter.

The mother told me that she was doing home schooling because she did not trust the public school system. She also thought that it would be best for her teenage daughter to pass through middle school easier because she would not be exposed to peer pressure. She was not concerned that her daughter would miss social interaction, thinking that the girl could learn all about society within the family.
She was sure that the girl also preferred to be a home schooler because this way she was more
flexible in her curriculum and could do what she liked (e.g. take piano lessons or do ice skating as a P.E. class).

The girl, however, told be that she hated to be home schooled because she did not get to see her friends anymore. She was able to meet with other people her age, but not the people she liked but the people her parents chose for her. And she wanted to join the local middle school's sports team but couldn't. She wanted to learn Spanish but her mother only knew a little bit French, so she had to learn that language.

However, there is a happy end to the story. When the girl was in 9th grade, her parents finally 'had mercy on her' and let her go to the local high school. Now, she is the star of the cross country team and happily wearing jerseys in her school colours.

Class room technology

I lately read a text about generation conflicts that distinguished between the Gutenberg generation, which optained all of its knowledge from books and the digital generation receiving all their knowledge from multimedia. My generation, which started out learning with books and then got to know multimedia in their teenage years, is probably in-between:

Here is a little anecdote, which shows that this is somehow true.
The other day, one of my professors asked me, if I could set up the beamer and the power point for her at the beginning of the class. While I did that, she told me apologinzingly: "I'm still of the old generation, where we didn't get to know the technology in school. My daughter, who is in 6th grade, - for her it's normal to give a power point presentation." Then she asked, if we had that in my school as well.

I told her that the first time somebody im school wanted to use Power Point was in 11th grade, and that was a big shock for the teachers because they didn't know how to set it up either. I think, when I was in 6th grade, there were no computers in our school to use that technology and the first time I used Power Point, was in my 6th semester of university. So, I had to be learning by doing.

Historical Narratives of Learning

Traditionally, the right to education was reserved to upper class male students. Often education was provided by the church and so learning was closely connected to religion as well.

One history professor told us that in Spain in the 1950s a lot of young men wanted to become priests because that was the only way to leave their village and get access to university. In the 1960s, however, when the public educational system was enlarged, so that more people from the lower classes were able to access secondary or university education, the number of young men applying for priesthood sank. This shows how religion in that time was the only way to access education back then and I am sure that a lot of young men did not opt for priesthood because of their belief but because priesthood for them was the only way to leave behind their villages and learn beyond the basics.

In Spain, even today priesthood is sometimes considered as a way to achieve a secure life, I think. The mother of a Spanish friend of mine once told him, you should become a priest. Then, the church will pay for your education, you will never be unemployed and you can have a girlfriend nevertheless.

Familiar narratives of learning

My mother and my uncle are twins. So, they always used to be in the same class. My uncle says that he thought that this was great. This way, he was always able to copy my mother's homework and didn't have to do them himself.
He says that it was great for my grandparents, too because they only needed to buy each text book once.
"They knew that your mother would be the only one using them anyway," my uncle tells me.

One day, even the teacher told him: "You don't need to give me your homework. I know that you are going to have the same as your sister."

By the way, my uncle works as a teacher now...

My mother's response to that story (05-13-2008):
My mother told me that it is true that in his adolescence my uncle was not really concerned with school but his attitude changed when he grew older and more mature.

She told me this little anecdote about a biology class when they were in 6th grade. The teacher had a model of a human skeleton and asked the pupils, which bone was which. My uncle was apparently not paying attention at all, so when it was his turn, the teacher pointed to the pelvis and asked him: "Which part of the body is that?"

My uncle, who apparently was woken up from a day dream, answered full of self-confidence: "That's the breast."

"Now you see," my mother commented mockingly "what was on your uncle's mind in those years."

Latin Narratives of Learning

This photograph somehow reminds me of my old Latin teacher. He was a rather traditional type of teacher who always wanted us to memorize facts and did not apply any modern methods of teaching in his class.

He was also a bit scary in a way, because each day he made somebody come up front and asked that person the new vocabulary. This, of course, was a rather stressful situation for the student up front because if he or she said something stupid the whole class would laugh. I think, the only positive thing about this type of oral exam is that nowadays me and my class mates wouldn’t get nervous if we were in some kind of game show on TV because we were used to public exposure in our Latin class.

After a written exam he would usually make the best student in our class come up front and write her translation on the board. One time, however, he made me come up front and write down my results. That was really surprising because normally I had Cs or Ds in Latin. But in that exam I did really well and got an A-. So, this time the public exposure of my great mark was more positive than humiliating.

Slovenian Narrative of Learning

A friend from Slovenia lately told me the following urban legend from the University of Ljubljana. He says he doesn't know if it's true or not:

There was an exam one day and four students came late to the exam. They said their car broke down and that was why they couldn't make it on time. The teacher said, no problem, you can take the exam tomorrow again.

The next day, the four students arrived on time. In the beginning of the exam, the professor told them: "The exam has two parts. The first part 
consists of several multiple choice questions. The second part is only one question and you have to explain your answer. That is 
the most important part of the exam."

The students started with the multiple choice part, which was quite easy. Then, after an hour the professor passed around the sheet for the second part. He told his students again that this was the most important part.

Then, the students read the question. It said: "Which part of the car broke down?"

Narratives of Learning I

When thinking about learning, we usually think about school, teachers, class-rooms and learning things like writing, reading, math etc.

But learning starts much earlier, even before school we learn how to speak, to walk, to eat with fork and spoon, to tie our shoe laces and so on.

After we leave school learning also continues: for example my mother started to learn how to play tennis when she was about 40, so that she would have a shared hobby with my father. Another anecdote would be that last week I explained to my boss how to use an external hard drive. So, in that situation she became the student, I became the teacher and her office became a class room.

If we consider a class room to be any space, where learning takes place, then there are many more class rooms than just in school buildings. A museum can be a class room, a forest, the Internet, even a metro can be considered a class room if we learn from the people we observe there.