Although the school itself borders on the area, the start was actually located some distance away in the woods itself – signs led those like myself who had gone to the school instead from the gates along a trail to get there.

Once at the check-in point, the walk itself took a circuit that was about 1 km long, with the walkers being sponsored on a per-lap basis.  Over 300 people were expected to take part.

The sponsorship money raised will be put to use in a project at the Dassenberg Waldorf School in South Africa who have had a partnership with the school in Oberursel for the past 15 years.  Previous projects have included equipment providing equipment for the playground, laying grass for a sports field, and even putting up buildings for specific subjects like woodwork.  Photos of these projects were on display, so there was plenty of incentive to complete as many laps as possible.

However after the walk it is not a simple case of raising the money here and sending it to South Africa.  The sponsored walk was organised by year 12 pupils who will fly to Dassenberg at half term in the autumn to carry out the project themselves – with each pupil responsible for funding the cost of their own flight.

And the fund raising for the project itself does not end when the last walker returns home.  Donations to the project can be made at any time by using the following bank details:

Schulverein FWS Vordertaunus e.V.
Kontonummer: 16 349 102
BLZ: 430 609 67 (GLS Gemeinschaftsbank e.G.)
Kennwort: “Afrika”

See more photos in our Facebook album

Some other posts on this topic that you might like to read:

• First impressions of a Waldorf School
• The Mühlenwanderweg – walking where the mills used to be
• Additional road closures for the Hessentag Marathon

The project started two years ago when Frankfurt International School (FIS) in Oberursel held a competition to design a new sports hall.  The winning entry would have probably been the easiest to build, as it was outside the current campus and would have been located diagonally opposite the main entrance at the Waldlust, next to the Hans-Rother-Steg.

Except that this location had its opponents.  For a start there were the local residents in that road who already have to contend with the traffic that the school generates.  They collected over 900 signatures against the plan.

But there were also a number of groups who were opposed to the forest being cut down to make space for the building.

This particular area of forest is called a Schutzwald, ie. a forest that enjoys a certain level of protection because it performs a specific function, such as preventing landslides or for water management.

And so it was, that in the past months all of these groups, along with the parties from the town’s parliament, have sat down at a so-called “round table” to discuss the options available.

A number of options were on the table, and the school evaluated each of them on criteria such as security for the campus, accessibility, but also for their environmental impact and whether they could also reduce the daily traffic load that the roads around the school have cope with.

After the first two sittings the options had been narrowed down to just two, with the final sitting taking place and a compromise being reaching less than a week ago.

The sports hall itself is planned as two Zweifeldturnhallen, which put into plain English means that there will be two halves to the hall, and each of those halves can either be used as one play area or divided into two smaller areas running at 90 degrees to the main area.  The building will be 86m x 50m and 8m tall.

And its new location is set to be between the B455 road (which is still on a bridge at this point) and the sports field behind the primary school.  (Click here to see the rough location in Google Maps).

This location is mostly on FIS property and would only result in a small amount of forest being cut down – and that forest is not classed Schutzwald either.

The B455 between the two halves of the FIS campus

If only it wasn’t for the wild animals.

You see, this location is also not without its problems, because it is at this point that wild animals go under the busy B455 road.  Apparently it is the only point at which this is possible between Bad Homburger Kreuz and the Opel Zoo at Königstein.

Not only would the solution as it stood cause some degree of protest amongst the environmental groups, I am pretty sure that FIS do not really want wild boar taking a detour through their campus either.

The solution is not to build the new sports hall next to the road, but to turn it through 90 degrees and effectively place it on the end of the current sports field.  The field will then also be turned by 90 degrees to run parallel to the hall.

All of which takes the hall a lot further away from the Waldlust part of the campus than FIS would like, meaning that a connecting pathway needs to be built and some of the timetables need re-thinking.

But what of the old sports hall?

This is due to be torn down to make way for new classrooms.  FIS stress that they do not intend to increase the number of classrooms, but some of their existing rooms are not up to current international standards and a new building would remove the need for temporary classrooms.

At the same time, the Waldlust entrance will be re-designed to allow the school buses to enter the campus and drop children off inside, rather than at the roadside.

Which just leaves the problem of the number of cars dropping children off and picking them up at the Waldlust entrance to solve.  Given that a pathway will be going to the new sports hall, the new concept envisages children who come by car being dropped off and picked up in front of the primary school, using the car park next to the Taunus Information Centre.  This would relieve both the Hohemarkstraße and the Waldlust of a certain amount of traffic, although at the moment I have yet to see what incentive the parents actually have to adhere to the plan.

But with maybe that small exception, everyone present at the announcement was agreed that the “round table” concept was an exemplary way to solve the problem by getting everyone together to find an amicable solution before the planning permission phase, and that the method will probably be used for other local issues in the future.

Some other posts on this topic that you might like to read:

• The Mühlenwanderweg – walking where the mills used to be
• Worldfest at Frankfurt International School
• How to get to the Hessentag: by train

Now admittedly this was not my first contact the method, having previously had conversations with teachers at both this and other Waldorf schools and learnt, for example, that the teachers are expected to prepare the lessons themselves – in most cases without the use of text books.  But it was a chance to experience the lessons first hand, as the classroom was opened up for parents of the children and anyone else interested to sit in on them and watch.

I spent the morning observing year 5, and the day started off with Greek!  Considering my recent concerns about language learning in German schools, this was an amazing experience to watch. The teacher read small parts of a text and had the children repeat it, either in unison or individually.  Then the children had to find certain types of words in the text, and one after another they marked those words together, so that by the time they reached the end, each child had the same markings on their text in front of them.  During all of this, the teacher passed through the rows of the classroom making sure that everyone’s marking really were identical.  Finally, he explained the background to the text in German, and had prepared a drawing of the article being talked about on the blackboard for the children to copy.  The text was just a few lines long, but it filled a whole lesson.

Moving out of the classroom and into a different room, we were presented with something called “Eurythmy”, a combination of music, dance, rhythm and words, not unlike something I remember from my own primary school that was a combination of P.E. accompanied by the BBC Schools Radio service.

After a break we returned to classroom for maths.  Here I was pleased to see that there was not a single handout in sight!  The lesson, on prime numbers, involved the children reciting the prime number sequence, explaining the methods that they use to work out if a number is divisible by another number, and was followed up by the teacher explaining prime decomposition on the blackboard.  The children then practised this in their exercise books, before going through the solution on the blackboard together.

I was not only impressed by what I saw, but I rather felt that this was the way I expected teaching in schools to be.  But this quality comes at a price, as unlike the state schools the Waldorf counterpart is not free to attend.

Of course, for a fair comparison, I’d have to observe the lessons at my daughter’s school in a similar manner, but as yet they have not had open days like this.  Perhaps I should suggest it at the next Elternabend?

Some other posts on this topic that you might like to read:

• A sponsored walk to Oberstedten and back
• Oberursel’s “Day of the Bicycle”
• English language teaching in German primary schools

Regular readers of this site may recall that she is being taught “school English”, which was defined as spelling “colour” with a “u”.  Whilst not exactly the words “British English” that I would like it to be defined as, I am at least happy that I do not yet have to explain that other countries leave that “u” out and in some cases even use other words for the same things.

It was whilst I was helping her revise for a vocabulary test a few days ago, that I suspected the time may already have come, and further inspection of her vocabulary book confirmed my suspicion.  In some cases, I found the translations to be unusual, but in some to be down right wrong.

And since there were some entries from her teacher in the book, I am assuming that she has seen the offending words and that this is not just a mistake that took place copying them from the blackboard.

1. feet, foot = Fußzehen; the “Zehen” are actually the toes, not the feet.  Since “Zehen” is in the plural, foot would be wrong anyway.

2. gloves = Fingerhandschuhe; I have never heard of this definition before, for me a glove is just a Handschuh and has places for the fingers.  Anything else is a mitten (“Fäustling” or “fingerloser Handschuh”).  But to be fair, I have since found the word “Fingerhandschuh” in a children’s dictionary.

4. boot = Wanderschuh; a boot is a “Stiefel”, the “wander-” prefix implies that the shoes or boots are for hiking.  But if it’s a hike boot, then I would use “Wanderstiefel”, and ohne “Wanderschuh” if it’s not got the high sides, ie. it’s a shoe.

5. pullover = Pullover; here I just pointed out that it can also be called a “jumper”.

6. hat = Hut, Mütze; “Mütze” for me is a cap, or a small child’s bonnet.  I guess you might say “hat” to some things in English that you say “Mütze” to in German, but these are surely the exception.

7. cap = Kappe; this is not strictly speaking wrong, but again, I would use “Mütze” to translate “cap” most of the time.

8. shirt = Hemd, Bluse; “Hemd” is correct, but “Bluse” is a blouse, and I have not been able to find a dictionary in my collection yet that says anything else.

9. vest = Weste; is this the first sign of American English creeping in?  Then it would be correct. And a “life vest” (life jacket) is a “Rettungsweste”.  A bullet proof vest is a “kugelsichere Weste”.  BUT the British underwear garment called a “vest” is an “Unterhemd”, and a “Weste” is a waistcoat.

10. I feel bad – Mir geht’s schlecht; in this form (unabbreviated it is “Mir geht es schlecht”), I am saying that I don’t feel very well, or that I feel ill, or that I don’t feel very good.  If I feel bad (eg. guilty about something, or sympathy with someone else’s problem), then it would be a completely different sentence.

I’d be interested to hear from anyone who either agrees or disagrees with my points here.  Please leave a comment below the post and let me know your thoughts.

Some other posts on this topic that you might like to read:

• Elternabend – parents’ evening German style
• German Schools and Modern Teaching Methods
• Starting school

The numbers 1 to 6 roughly correspond to A to F in the British system as well, although 5 is usually the lowest that will be given for anyone actually completing the work or a test, with 6 reserved for those who don’t do it at all.  There are also the + and – grades in-between.

But how do the marks get decided for each child in the first place?

One possible answer to that question, and probably the most plausible in many subjects, is be the teacher making the decision.  This does, of course, require a competent and fair teacher, but having heard horror stories of parents going in to schools to demand that their children get better grades (in some cases where the child had not actually done the work or even attempted a test), I had hoped not to end up in that situation myself.

Except that there are other ways to decide the mark a child receives, such as settings bands for each mark and converting the number of right answers in a test to the final mark that way.  So you might have 59 possible points available, and set 53 to 59 points to be a 1 (A), 45 to 52 to be 2 (B), 37 to 44 to be 3 (C), and so on.

I have it on good authority and from multiple sources that such tables exist, and are in some way standardised.

However despite my initial hope, I got to a point where I could not always understand why marks were being awarded that didn’t fit into this schema.  So in the end, I asked (at an Elternabend).

It turns out that regardless what may exist at a higher level, there are schools that unilaterally decide to use a different scale, at least for certain subjects.    So in my example above, a score of 52 out of 59 may get you a “2″ in one subject, but  it only be enough for a “3″ in another, even within the same school!

But it doesn’t stop there, because in some cases it appears that a type of “quota” system is in place, which can result in children being moved up or down a band if the quota is full.  Whether this definitely goes in primary schools I cannot say for sure, although I think it’s pretty unfair on the children if they learn for a test only to be marked down if everyone does well.  In secondary education the system does, however, seem to be in place in some schools.

It’s that type of system that seems to take away the merit of the individual child, and instead moves the emphasis onto their ranking within the class.  At the end of the day, this can not only demotivate the child, but if the class always has the same number of children attaining each of the grades awarded, then any deficit the class may have as a whole could possibly go undetected.

Some other posts on this topic that you might like to read:

• German Schools and Modern Teaching Methods
• A sponsored walk to Oberstedten and back
• Oberursel’s “Day of the Bicycle”