Elternabend

I was talking to a friend the other day, one with school-aged children, who has lived here for several years. She was telling me about other ex-patriots she knew, and their experiences with enrolling their English-speaking children in the Swiss schools.  She didn't know anyone who had attempted it with a child as old as Ella, but she's seen several kids enter as Kindergartners. Apparently, a common phenomenon is children learning to speak German at school, but absolutely refusing to speak it at home. They apparently compartmentalize their worlds in some way, and for them, German just has no place in their house.

Vaguely, I've been wondering if this is what is happening with Alex. Every once in a while he'll tell me about a conversation he had with his teacher, and I'll ask him if he said it in English or German, and he'll tell me it was German. But if I ask him to tell me exactly what he said to his teacher, he can't, or won't, do it. "No, mom, it's too hard." But every once in a while he slip in a word or a phrase that he learned in school.

More often than not, Ella will correct him: "No, Alex, you say it this way," and I have to remind her that he's learning a completely different kind of language than she. More and more, I'm beginning to pick up on how very different Swiss and High German are.

Although he won't speak, he will sing his little German songs at home, sometimes softly, while he's playing with his toys, or sometimes a little more joyfully.  Here's one that he just learned and asked me to tape: he likes it because it's in Swiss German (maybe?--I don't speak the language) and English both: he says they sing it when they play a chasing game at school.

Whether or not he's learning the language, he's having a ton of fun. I haven't seen any lingering nervousness from those first days of school: he's really happy, now, to head out the door.


Ella, too, seems joyful lately.  Today she had an especially good day.  When she came home at lunch, she told me that her teacher had asked her to go back to school at 1:00 for German tutoring.  I found this was a little odd: not only was that before the lunch hour ended, but also, Thursday afternoon is supposed to be her afternoon off from school.  I guess I showed some kind of surprise or annoyance, because she was quick to comfort me: "Don't worry! It's fine, Mom!"

So I packed her back to school a little before 1:00; at about 1:30, she came back. "Well, that was a huge mistake. But I wouldn't trade that time for a whole bag of gold!"

While she was waiting for her teacher to let her into her school, she ran into her old nemesis, Erzhan, who was also waiting for a tutor. Ella still has class with him, and she still does everything she can to make him like her.  We were at the pool the other night, and he was there with his friends.  Ella treaded water in his orbit, smiling hopefully, but I don't think he even glanced her way.  A few days ago, she told me that she outright asked him if she could play with him and the other boys at recess, and he told her no.  She was incredibly frustrated: "All the girls want to do is sit around and talk. About boys, usually.  Only the boys play interesting games, and they won't let me play with them."


But apparently, when it was just the two of them, Erzhan couldn't ignore her, or wasn't so worried about impressing his friends, or something. Ella said that they'd played chase and tag and dared each other to do things on the playground equipment and just talked.

But when her teacher finally opened the door, it turned out that Ella had misunderstood her, and had to come back home.  She told me, instead, that she was supposed to go back after school, at 3:30.

And so she did, and came back again, ten minutes later.  "I got it wrong again! I was supposed to go back after lunch. Mom, I'm really sorry that I missed my tutoring session! I know school is important. Please don't be too mad at me..." Huh. I didn't realize I was that much of a hard-ass about school. I told her I'd forgive her. But just this once!

This evening, Ella's teacher's were holding their back-to-school meeting with the parents, or Elternabend. I nominated Dennis to attend: I would have been hopeless, trying to understand what was going on.  But Dennis's German is so strong: he said he could follow everything that the teachers said, and about half of what the parents said, in their Swiss German. Maybe we should have sent Alex along, too, to interpret.

Dennis said that the parents were very concerned about the German curriculum in school, which apparently has been very challenging for the kids. Remember that the rest of Ella's class has only been learning high German for a year: they spend a lot of time reading and writing, and the teachers, each night, make the kids correct every single spelling and grammatical error on their classwork and homework.  Ella's not the only one who finds it difficult.  But the teacher stressed that the kids' German has to be flawless, and soon. Their fourth grade teachers will expect perfection.

But their math curriculum for this year looks pretty simple; now that they know their multiplication and division tables, they're returning to simpler things: for example, little puzzles: "How can you make 1.60 CHF using exactly four coins?" That's sort of an interesting problem, though, because Swiss money is in different denominations than ours: they have 20-Rappen coins instead of our 25-cent pieces.  Luckily, mercenary as she is, Ella is keenly aware of the different denominations of the Swiss Franc.

But Dennis put it a different way.  There's always a lot of talk, he noticed, about SATs and other standardized tests being culturally biased. But the same thing is certainly true here. Another sample math question that the teacher gave was "If Jonas works his standard 8 1/2 hour day, and he works from 8:15 to 5:45, then how long was his Mittagspause?" His what?


Dennis said that one of Ella's teacher grabbed him just before he left, to tell him that Ella was doing really well in class.  She was surprised at how much Ella's German had improved over the summer.  So I really must tip my hat to Dennis, for all of the reading he did with Ella each night. I think Ella's little system of bribes is working well, too: each day she comes home, enumerating all of the different conversations she had with her classmates and teachers. Proud of her.