My German wife brought up this story.....from her office. A co-worker lives across the river (into the Hessen region)....from an industrialized town (I won't say the name). It's a town of 60,000 to 65,000.
Typically, elementary schools exist in German with the general idea of the first-grade to the fifth grade. You normally will have a small operation....a director....maybe one to two classes for each level.....to a max of ten teachers (in a typical operation).
So, this community has around four of these elementary operations.
This year, one of the elementary operations was drawn upon and told (because they had the extra space) to accommodate more kids. So the first-grade opened up around six weeks ago with roughly nearly 300 kids....meaning a dozen classes now exist for the first grade. On top of that....only 25 of those 300-odd kids....are German. The rest are all immigrant kids.
I sat there in some disbelief. It's an industrialized area and has drawn a fair number of people for jobs in the local area. That would make sense. But you just sit there and imagine teachers having 22 immigrant kids with varying German skills....and maybe two German kids...out of the whole class, and just shake your head.
My humble bet is that by spring of next year....the twenty-five-odd German parents in this situation will have found some other living arrangements and moved out of this town. As for the future? It would be curious what happens in six to eight years and how this group makes it. You'd also have to wonder if the teachers and directors were smart enough to hire on some translator-temp folks.
No comments:
Post a Comment