Farewell to MLS

When I first stepped into Martin Luther College Preparatory School, the first German school in which I would teach, I was stunned at how empty it seemed. In the classrooms there were no posters about how to eat a healthy diet, no maps of Europe, and needless to say, no German flags. Only a few rooms even had curtains on the windows. There was just a long, uninterrupted series of grey desks, grey walls, and grey chalk boards, stretching across four buildings.

By the end of the year I had forgotten I ever thought the school was bland, because I came to appreciate the buzz of creativity, insight, and - in most cases - hard work that lay just under the surface and characterized the everyday school environment. Students in the 11th and 12th grades were reading the classic English literature that I read in high school: Othello, Fahrenheit 451, Catcher in the Rye, analyzing the work on the same level that we did as native speakers. A group of upperclassmen also put on a more captivating stage production than my high school theatre club - in English. In the club I led, where advanced students could teach English at the local primary school, there were more qualified takers than the parnter school could accommodate.

Even though all students at MLS were capable learners and most put in effort in most courses (even if they didn't admit it), they got the full range of grades, like most students in Germany. There is not much I need to say in comparison about my own high school experience, because grade inflation is basically accepted as a necessary evil in the US. Now I understand why the only professor I had in College who kept a "C" in the middle of the bell curve happened to be a German expatriate.

The only thing that my students at MLS took more seriously than grades was getting a driver's license. Though they fretted nonstop about school exams, consensus was, it mattered most of all to have a friendly examiner (netten Prüfer) when they were sitting behind the wheel. That is because getting a driver's license in Germany entails about 35 hours of driving lessons and 2,000 €.

With such smart students, you'd think I couldn't help but learn a lot myself from being at Martin Luther. In one sense, that's true, for example, my German vocabulary expanded to include things like von wegen (get real), and saugeil (way cool, far out). On the other hand, my English, most notably in spelling, got steadily worse.