We are getting to the end of the quarter and like the students, I am going to recycle some stuff. This is a post from our first German exchange talking about the school.
Our next big adventure was to attend school with the students. It was fun to watch their presentations and listen to the great questions they had for us. We got into discussions about everything from the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, to personal responsibility for school work, to have different tracks for University-bound students, to the Kyoto Protocol. Discussions that were on par with any I have had in my classes. The students also spoke about the changing system of moving to 12 years of schooling prior to University rather than the 13 they now have. The mandate has come down but it sounded like they will still have to cover the same amount of stuff, just in a shorter time. The country is phasing it in over several years. They also have a system at this school where all students from grade 5 to grade 13 are together. So they have students who are 11 and 12 walking the halls with 19-year-old students and as I watched I saw nothing but great interactions with the different ages. In the area of personal responsibility, I saw something that was a pleasure to witness. When lunch was done for the 1800 students we watched the cafeteria start to shut down and it only took a couple of minutes for the staff to clean the cafeteria. I walked around and tried to find trash on the floor and I found half of one small candy wrapper. The service was with plates, glasses, and silverware so that there was very little trash, and was very environmentally friendly. It is a lesson that schools everywhere can learn from. The students put their plates away, put the glasses in a rack, and all of this with no supervision other than the three ladies behind the counter.