Shhhhh!

Looks like I am learning and maturing after all.

Sat through two parents' nights this week and managed not to get upset at all. The system can't really bother you if you've already decided to ignore it anyway.

Looks like Andrew's 2nd grade - and others all over Germany - will not only be learning how to write essays but will be perfecting and polishing them as well. They'll also have the multiplication tables completed and memorized. They've squeezed a 13 year curriculum into 12 years recently, allowing kids to graduate in 12th grade like other European countries and the USA but not taking into account that those countries start teaching in kindergarden, essentially making it into a 13 year program. Also not taking into account that other countries spend more hours per day at school. (They myth of the German warm meal at home will be explored in another blog.)

The second graders will also be pushed harder, compared earlier and taught about grading requirements. They have more lectures and fewer field trips since there just isn't enough time to teach all of the material required and have fun too.

It's not half as upsetting to me when I realize that the teachers and parents find it ridiculous too. I've got some rants about the German education system already written but it's nice to know that there are Germans up there willing to fight the system as well. Or at least voice their displeasure.

It's a start.

It's also helpful that Andrew isn't phased by any of this at all; sheer luck there.

And after all the worries about Ryan's math abilities - or lack thereof- it turns out that they've fired last year's math teacher and this year's teacher is appalled by how little the children have retained. Never mind that I find it ridiculous that 3rd graders are taught different subjects by different teachers, it turns out that Ryan's entire class is behind enough to allow us to have our primary teacher for German, Math AND English. What a relief! Ryan is happier in school, does her homework FAIRLY well and actually seems to understand what it is all about this year.

No grades yet, but that's not the point. She actually appears to be a fair student this year! I was about to have her tested for a learning disorder and it turns out it might have just been a bad teacher. Really amazing what a difference that makes especially in a country where one year lost - third grade - could make the difference between university or trade school.

Ryan's not a perfect student - I was embarrassed to raise my hand to ask what the heck the Reading Tree was since my daughter hasn't mentioned it, or as it turns out, participated either. ""It's a competition, Mom." she explained. "And I don't really need that." Okay - I like the attitude.

I also asked her teacher to ASSIGN the multiplication tables as homework again - since NONE of the kids seem to know them. Ryan memorized the 3s and 4s today. Two years too late is not too late. The curriculum has been whizzing by so fast the past two years that it is nice to finally slow down and LEARN something.

And it appears that I am learning something too - to keep my mouth shut and not always fight for generalities. When the teacher reconfirmed the school's no cell phone policy, I was tempted to question her about it. Does it apply to cell phones that are hidden and turned off during the day? Is it fair to expect parents NOT to send their child with a phone when the school can't assure that a child won't be left to walk home alone? Yada yada yada.

Have I given up fighting for what is right? I think maybe I have. I'd still like to see less stress on the kids, especially in the first six grades. I'd like longer school days incorporating lunch and allowing teachers to teach and children to learn in school and not at home. I'd like them to stop sorting the kids so early, to stop trying to treat everyone the same by forcing them to learn at the same pace. I'd like more money for more teachers. But I'm a protester now, not a fighter.

And I can slip the cell phone into my daughter's schoolbag without making a public debate out of it.

Guess I AM adapting to new technology after all!

Cell Phone Future

Ryan got her cell phone the other day.

It's a really old model, about twice the width and length of what most of us are carrying around nowadays; kind of like watching a rerun of an 80s sitcom and noticing these really huge phones the characters so proudly pull out of their handbags. Ryan's phone is 5 years old; Damon and I used the dual set when we first came to Germany, before we had a permanent place of residence and a home phone number. (I know, I know, those are terribly old-fashioned too; turns out I'm an old-fashioned girl after-all, in regards to technology if not to ideas.)

It was a big deal - for me and Damon anyway. The day before, Damon went out and got a third (fourth if you include the home phone) number for the family, a prepaid phone card, and instructions on the whole deal. Can you imagine the amount of phone numbers that will be attached to my family of six within a few years? I'm assuming we'll get rid of the home number at some point, but by then we'll NEED tattoos to remember which phone number goes with which kid.

It reminds me of a twin scene from Harry Potter, an exchange between the Weasley twins, Fred and George, and their mother. "Honestly Mom, can't you even tell us apart?" they tease. I imagine calling for Aidan. "Hello, Aidan?" "Honestly Mom, can't you even keep the phone numbers straight? This is Andrew...and I'm not even one of the twins." "Oh, yeah, well, sorry then, my mistake." (Befuddled, looking askance at the phone, kind of scared to just start pushing buttons, still not really sure WHERE the address book function is found.) "Would you mind sending a quick SMS to your brother, reminding him to pick up some pizza on the way home?"

Like that'll work. Looks like we'll be eating a lot of spaghetti.

Turns out you can program numbers into an address file. This means you don't ever have to remember them. Although what happens when you lose the phone - or lose power, world-wide, forever, which I still fear can happen, much the same way I still don't trust power windows because what happens if the car DOES carreen off a bridge and into the water, and the electricity goes and you can't open the doors and you need to unroll the windows by hand to get all four children to safety?

You can see how I am never going to buy completely into this technology thing. I trust my hands; my actual physical being. I find it hard to trust something invisible - and at times unreliable.

So Damon and I spent the evening going over the cell phone. When I asked him to write Ryan's number down on a sheet of paper, you know, something I can tear off the grocery list and hang, tattered and torn, from the corkboard...he had the nerve to turn around and take Ryan's picture, before saving it - and the number - in the address book on my phone. Just like Troy and Gabriella. I didn't even know my phone could take pictures! Here I am thinking we're too poor to own the technology everyone else seems to have and it turns out I've had it all along. I'm just too lazy to learn how to use it. Or too stubborn to admit it exists.

I was really concerned the following morning as Damon taught Ryan to use this new technology. I mean, she had to know how to turn it on, how to find the number, how to dial......and turning it on is really really really hard. You know, you have to push the button for a really really really long time before it works. And then those endless function lists - I know I certainly don't know what they're all there for. And finding our number in the address book? She hasn't even taken algebra yet. What were we expecting?

Remember when you used to have to open the child-proof medication bottles for your grandmother when you were a kid? Turns out it's just like that.

Ryan came home after barely a little over 4 hours of owning the phone, the phone having spent most of that time in her schoolbag, off. She not only had figured out the on/off function on her way home, she had dispensed with bothering to phone home and learned instead how to get into the game menu. Game menu? I didn't even know it HAD one of those! She spent the better part of the afternoon playing games on the phone, until she decided it was time to figure out how to get the music working. Music? REALLY? My guess is it takes pictures too. Who knew?

Damon tells me that the new cell phones are coming with built in GPS systems now. This is technology I can appreciate. I swear, I heard some American military mothers the other day wondering how the heck people found their way around Europe before GPS systems. "Google Maps," I ventured to reply. "Mapquest.de?" I was too embarrassed to mention that we still had some maps in paper form. That you could go to AAA and get a detailed route of your voyage, complete with paper maps. Another mom told a story - true - about finding her way around Paris with a paper map. "Yeah, it was unbelievable, I really knew where I was going." she said, a little in awe of her own ability to master this ancient technology.

Now we never have to know where we are going anymore - until the little voice tells us that we've arrived. If only I could remember where the hell it is I want to go. Or does it matter, as long as I can take a picture of it and Twitter to all my friends that I've been there, checked it off, bought the T-shirt.

Ryan got her cell phone the other day.

Sigh.

These kids are dragging me kicking and screaming into the future.

Humor an old lady; please let me bring a paper and pencil along to document the journey.

More Than Handy

Call them what you like. The USA has cell phones, the British use mobiles and the Germans call them Handys. I just looked, it's telephone portable in French and telefono celular in Spanish.

I see kids texting and playing games with them on public transportation. Disney's "High School Musical", the first movie, has Gabriela and Troy taking eachother's pictures with them before programming in their numbers. This is technology I don't yet get. And if you don't know who Gabriela and Troy are you're in worse trouble than I am. Also I wonder, do girls still give out the wrong number if they don't really like the guy?

With all the hype about the amount of time teenagers nowadays spend online - that they interact more through typing to one another than through actual one-on-one face time - I really wasn't in a rush for my daughter to join the crowd. When she asked me for a Handy two Christmases ago I blew it off as a child's fantasy. MAYBE when she was 12. Or 13. I mean, what does she really need this for?

I'm sorry to say I've been forced to change my mind. And it's not the status quo or peer pressure this time either. It's that damn black Mercedes, popping up in Altdorf again year after year for the past three years. Not sure til now if it was just an urban myth, or suburban housewife overexaggeration, the man has now apparently attempted to physically abduct a young child at the local supermarket in nearby Holzergerlingen. He was thwarted by a grandmother who noticed the child's struggles and went over to help. But he may be the same man who has physically molested - and later released- a child in Stuttgart. And there is another child missing.

Am I hysterical? I don't know. I do know that we left the USA in part because we felt life would be safer for our kids here in Germany. Only to learn that a small boy had been found dead in neighboring Weil in Schonbuch a little over ten years ago. And then the school shooting in Winnenden, 40 minutes away.

To be honest, we have it pretty good. There are no land mines in the neighboring fields. Military planes aren't dropping bombs. There is no invading army at the border, no military dictatorship. We have food, education and freedom.

And now Ryan gets a cell phone. An old one, with no games or camera or texting capabilities and with a 10 Euro pre-pay card. Only to use in case she ends up stranded at school without someone else to walk home with her. (Andrew's crew stays together, but the girls tend to be less reliable.) Between the two evils of cell phone versus walking home alone, I choose the phone. She is to call.

I'm betting my mother will be sending her more pre-paid cards - and her phone number in the USA - within a week.