It was a one-liner story which I paused upon today.....the school authorities in Duisburg (a German city to the far north)....that only 8.2 percent of the first grade kids fluently speak German.
Focus, the news magazine, laid out this story.
So you step one step down to the kids who have some issues and problems with German, and the school authorities admit that roughly 30-percent of the first graders are in this group.
Then you come to the bottom level....roughly 30 percent don't speak German, period. You can imagine the German teachers standing there, with a class of twenty kids....only two of them are completely capable of speaking and grasping German. Even if you had a ton of patience as a teacher....imagine stepping into this class each morning, and you are spending the greater part of the day trying to get thirty-odd words and phrases across, and to keep the whole group motivated to 'learn'.
The kids mostly from Iraq or Syria? No. That's the other amusing thing to the story. When you go and discuss Duisburg.....it's mostly Romanians an Bulgarians who moved there over the past five years.
What'll happen? The journalists didn't want to take that subject and ask about the future. My guess is that a turnover of teachers will start next summer.....as some teachers just admit that this whole first grade mess is going to require several years to work out, and kids in the system will fall behind. For German kids....it's a miserable mess as you sit there and observe the teacher wasting 90-percent of the class-time covering a topic that isn't a problem for you.
Did the school authorities create a long-term mess? You would think that they would have realized what was going on, and demanded a six-month pre-program for these kids to attend prior to the first grade. I'm guessing a fair number of Germans will become disgruntled and find some kind of private school to take their kid into....at least for the next couple of years, and avoid the language issue in the public school.
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