Where are we going? It depends on the country! Our columnist only took school trips to the dentist.
Photo: dpa/Monika Skolimowska
Howdy from Texas, dear readers,
Do you still know the saying “Buy yourself a bag of German”? With this I was welcomed in Germany in 1996 as a Russian immigrant child. The first year of migration was difficult for me as the only foreigner in the class in a small town in Hesse; but maybe the language acquisition wasn’t as hard as the fact that I looked so different from the other kids. Despite all the odds, I’m still loyal to the Russian look with tights, leather pumps and a dress thirty years later. My daughter is also an immigrant child, albeit a hipper one, with a cap and Disney merch. When it comes to migrant popularity, the reputation of the country of origin counts just as much as the flexibility of the destination country. Coming from Russia in Germany is very different than coming from Germany in America. Are you still coming with us?
When it comes to English, my daughter is in a similar situation to what I once was. I didn’t speak German when I arrived fresh from Russia; My daughter was born in the USA, but still struggles with English – because we speak German at home and she attended German kindergarten for two years. This school year she switched to the American preschool and I was astonished: unlike me back then, she now has a range of offers that are intended to support her in her language acquisition, such as a weekly ESL course (“English as Second Language”) Learning app and an entire free summer camp for “bilingual” children. The word “migration background” is not even used here because it is pejorative. If she wasn’t my child, I would be pretty jealous!
In general, the US school is a completely different matter than the German one. On the one hand there is constant fun and teasing, but on the other hand there are excessively high demands. The fun program this school year included a field trip and a field day (more on the differences later), a rodeo, movie watching with popcorn in the classroom, a 100 days of school celebration, a Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter and a foam party ( the clubbing of the noughties is making a comeback), a box of toys that you can help yourself to every week, several ceremonies at which certificates are awarded for all sorts of (pseudo) successes, two picnics and a parade.
One of the exaggerated intellectual demands is, for example, the expectation that even preschool children, i.e. five-year-olds, can read and write fluently. There are also tasks like “Write a joke!” or “Paint the earth and write down how you can help it!” – “Use less plastic stuff” came to mind straight away after I saw that at the parties Bags of handicrafts are thrown away at school every day – and the serious question about the intention of the authors of the children’s books that the children read. “In the mood for money” was the first answer that came to mind, but the teacher assured me that it was about either convincing (persuasion), informing (information) or entertaining (entertainment). The children were also asked to write down what they would do as president of this country. The White House is apparently already so desperate that it is looking to preschools for guidance.
On the field trip to an amusement park, a mother asked me if my childhood was similar to my daughter’s. I laughed out loud. In Russia there was at most one school trip to the dentist, who yelled at me not to cry before he put a Soviet gray filling in me – without anesthesia, of course. In Germany, on the other hand, we went on a real field trip, but only to the sewage treatment plant. And the German counterpart to the fun, American Field Day was the frightening, traumatic Federal Youth Games, which, thank God, are finally going to be softer, i.e. more American.
I often wonder whether too many positive experiences will turn children into weak, narcissistic consumerists who will be either grossly conceited or excessively insecure, depending on whether or not they meet the high performance standards. “No worries, mom,” says my daughter, who has recently started speaking Denglise. It’s high time to visit a sewage treatment plant in Germany.
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