A Day in the Life of an Exchange Student in Germany

This post by timeenough is one of this ed's favorite A Day in the Life posts! —Sparkitor

I go to a public school. It’s high school, but not really. That’s because I am an exchange student in Germany, and Germany has a different school system than North America: Children are separated into three different levels based on ability after their fourth year of school. I attend a “gymnasium,” which is a school that gives the necessary diploma to attend university and includes the most years of schooling. Nearly all exchange students in Germany attend gymnasium. Mine has about 1500 students. It may sound like a lot, but Gymnasium begins in 5th grade and continues through the 13th and final year, so each grade doesn’t have that many students. I'm in 12th grade.

My school operates on a two-week schedule, with different classes in different orders within those two weeks. It sounds confusing, and it is. That is why every single person carries around a copy of their Stundenplan—the schedule—at all times. In the younger grades, the students stay together with their class all day, but after the 10th, we switch classrooms and classmates for every lesson like in typical North American schools. If a teacher is ill or will be away, we simply don’t have class.

First, I’ll describe a sample day. Then I will describe a really awesome day.

Normal day:
6:35: Alarm! If I don’t get in the bathroom now, I won’t get in it at all, so I hop out of bed, ignoring the voice in my head saying, “Just skip first class! It’s no big deal!” (This voice has gotten louder and louder as the year goes by.)

7:25: Head out the door, clean and fed, iPod playing whatever my latest music addiction is. My town has about 50,000 people, but it is split up into many little sub-towns, if you will, generally separated from each other by a few kilometers of fields. My Dorf has about 3,000 people in it. We have a post office, a small grocery store, and a pharmacy (which has just medicine, not hairbrushes and makeup or anything like that). We also have hourly buses that stop at 19:35 (7:35 pm). Hourly buses are lots of fun, especially when you miss them by two minutes. The bus stop takes about two minutes to walk to, and the bus is nearly always on time (this is Germany, after all), but I make sure to give myself five extra minutes just in case it's early.

7:31: While riding the bus past my house, I remember that I have forgotten both my snack and my water bottle. Again. The bus ride is about ten minutes long. It’s a city bus, so I then have to walk from the center of town to my school, which takes about fifteen minutes. There is an actual school bus, which is really just a city bus with a special route to pick up kids and take them directly to school, but it gets me to school forty minutes before class begins. I value my sleep, so I ride the normal bus like a lot of the other older students.

8:01: First class. I am one minute late. Wait. Where are they? Are they already inside the room with the door closed? I knock. Are they busy and making me wait to come in, or did they not hear me? I knock again. Nothing. I check the Mensa (school cafeteria where everyone goes when class is canceled), but I don’t see anyone there. I check the TV screen that tells us when classes have been canceled. Nothing. I see a classmate; I ask him if we have class. He looks confused, says he thinks so, and knocks on the door. Nothing. We make confused faces at each other. We are hesitant to go home because class doesn’t appear to officially be canceled, but we aren’t really sure what to do.

8:06: Two kids from in our class find us and lead us up the stairs. Apparently, class is being held in an upstairs classroom, which is the classroom marked on my time sheet but in which we have never ever not once had class in. My class is studying three dimensional geometry, and I am terrified of it. They use different symbols than we did in class back in Canada, too, which took a little getting used to. For example, they use commas where we use decimals, and decimals where we use commas. So one million twenty seven thousand one hundred three and four tenths is written as 1.027.103,4 here. Looks weird, eh? This means, of course, that points on a plane cannot be separated with commas, so what we would write as (4,3) becomes (4|3). (Now you finally know what that bar on your keyboard is there for!)

Prices are often written as €3,—which is three Euro, zero cents. And the tax is included, which I love. However, the Pfand—bottle deposit—is not, so you think you are buying a bottle of Fanta for €2,—but really, you have to go searching through your change pocket for extra five-and-twenty-cent pieces when you get to the Kasse, the checkout. But now we are off-topic.

8:45: Each class is composed of two 45-minute periods with a five-minute break in between. We’re allowed to leave during the break to use the washroom (it’s really rare for anyone to ask to go to toilet during class), buy food, fill up our water bottles, or simply stand in the hall talking. The Mensa has a water machine with both bubbly water and plain water, because this is Germany, and heaven forbid we go without carbonated dihydrogen monoxide all day.

9:35 – 10:50: Break time! My friends and I stand in the hallway and talk. Teachers guard the stairwells; we have to stay on the ground floor during breaks. My friend asks me about Canadian schools; she wants to know if we call our teachers "du" or "Sie" (informal or formal "you"). I point out that in Canada, I generally spoke English to my teachers.

10:50 – 11:25: German. I take this class with the 6th class. We work on grammar, punctuation, and capitalization in far more depth than I did in Canada. In Germany, the highest grade is a one and the lowest is a six. For in-class assignments done without the help of textbooks, I consider a five very acceptable and a four good. A three is amazing. A one means I am very confused about my location and am actually in English class. I bond with my classmates over, “How many mistakes did you make on the dictation?” and who we think will win Germany’s Next Top Model.

11:25 – 11:40: Second break. I beg for water, and someone shares. I beg for food. My friend gives me a bite of her sandwich. “Hey!” she protests when I accidentally steal her whole tomato slice. She loves tomatoes. I apologize. I hate tomatoes. I go buy an overpriced croissant and offer her some as a peace offering. While paying—a whole Euro! Ridiculous!—I swear to remember food next time. An 11-year-old runs into me, followed by her pursuer; I briefly wonder who ever thought having nine grades in one school was a good idea.

11:40 – 13:15: Biology. I love this class and pay attention as much as I can. We spend classes testing what colors look like at the very limit of our peripheral vision. We go on rants about the German school system. We discuss shrooms and morphine. Herr Krüger asks if anyone has been given morphine before. I am more interested in who has tried mushrooms, but he doesn’t ask.

We turn off the lights and in the absence of light, we see black, which we conclude is therefore nothing. (Is this why I can’t find my black cardigan? Does it secretly not exist?) Then we start discussion how the eye actually works. The specific scientific terms and large words required to explain the process are way above my ability level in German, so I start doodling eyes on the back of the paper we have just been given. I can’t work out how to make the eyelashes look normal.

13:15: School’s over! Once a week, I have class in the afternoon, which means I stay at school for the hour lunch break and have class from 14:15 until 15:50. That is only fifty minutes longer than my school day in Canada lasted, but when I am used to leaving early enough to eat lunch at home, it feels like an endless day. I know that there is a P.E. class that meets from 16:00 until 17:35. I have a really difficult time believing anyone actually bothers to show up for that class.

13:45: I arrive home and eat bread. I love the buns here. My host family thinks I am crazy because I eat my buns with just butter on them: no cheese, no jam, no meat, no Nutella. This is because, as Germans, they cannot appreciate how good their butter is because they don’t know anything else. Sometimes there is no bread that I like left, and when that happens I have no idea what to do.

And now, this is how my Fantastic Fridays go:
9:30: Wake up. I have not only the first block free, but also the second. This means I don’t have class at all until 11:40. However, I need to catch the bus at 10:35 or I will be late.

10:45: I get off the bus in the center of town. I don’t have class for nearly an hour, so I use the extra time to pop into the drug store. I buy new heads for my toothbrush, some delicious-smelling body wash, and €15 for my cell phone before heading to school. I find friends in the Mensa—their class was canceled because their teacher is taking a group of students from 10th grade on a trip.

11:40: I go to English. I spend the next 95 minutes smiling at my classmate’s cute accents, finishing my assignments in a third of the time it takes the others, helping people with their assignments (if you think your English class has trouble understanding Shakespeare, you should look at the faces of my German classmates when we start reading), and wondering if I should tell the teacher that "mischief" does not rhyme with "round beef" and that the sentence, “Please explain the constellation of your role-play groups,” does not make much sense. I can never figure out how to tell her she’s making a mistake without showing her up in front of the class or seeming rudely nit-picky, so I let her occasional little errors go. “Okay,” she asks us now, “who likes to read question three to the class?”

13:15: I head home after my long, grueling day, hoping to recover enough from the exhaustion of spending an hour and thirty-five minutes at school speaking my native language to be able to go out and do something fun in the evening. Shall we go to the usual pub?* Shall we go clubbing in Köln?* Maybe take it easy, cook up some delicious pasta and watch dumb movies that are ridiculous in German, like Euro Trip? It’s the weekend!

And that is how it goes in the wonderful, beautiful, sexy country that is Deutschland.

* Germany’s drinking age is staggered: 16 for beer and wine, 18 for everything else. Certain clubs (also known as discos, but that doesn’t sound nearly as cool) will allow 16-year-olds inside, but only until midnight, at which time all under-18s are kicked out. Sometimes I’m not allowed into discos because they don’t trust my foreign ID to be legitimate. Unlike North Americans, who tend to use their driver’s licences as their primary ID, Germans have separate, government-issued identification cards, and in some cases, they won’t let you in without one.

This ed wants to go to high school in Germany RIGHT NOW. Who else?

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