Welcome to the Once Upon a Trip podcast, where we dive deep into sharing everything crazy travel stories, dating adventures, culture fusions, and plenty of takeaways to entertain and feed your inner curiosity and travel bug.
I'm your host, Mary Grace Crawford, travel enthusiast, content creator, ex-digital nomad, avid storyteller, and lover of all things Europe, based now in Atlanta, Georgia.
What a way to kick off the first Tuesday of November with another episode here with Marco. He is really starting to become a fan of recording podcasts.
We are currently contemplating the idea of creating a whole separate podcast just for all things Mary Grace and Marco, America and Germany, slash Europe.
So if you like this idea of a separate podcast to be able to keep up with these episodes a little more easily, please let me know on Instagram.
Anyway, for today, we're going to be diving into a chunk of stuff primarily about German schools and the school system compared to those here in America.
This episode only scratches the surface of this topic since anyone could go on for hours and hours about it.
But we hope that you enjoy this snippet and take something new and interesting away.
Without further ado, let's go ahead and start talking all things schools.
So I'm going to start this off by asking Marco, what kind of student in school were you if you had to describe yourself?
Oh man. I was a lazy average student who only did what was, you know, only the bare minimum.
I mean, I wasn't the troublemaker, but I was also not like the most respectful student.
Yeah, I was quite blunt with a lot of teachers, especially like around like what is it, eighth, ninth grade.
And also later, like starting eighth grade, I guess I was a bit of a dick with some teachers.
I had like a phase when I was easily ticked off and I kind of freaked out and that was, and especially when I felt like something was not fair, then yeah, teachers got an earful.
French class teachers were usually, yeah, they didn't have any authority, so they were annihilated by male students, not just me. Yeah, good times.
That's the gist of how you were as a student. That makes me very excited to really learn more about the German school system and your experience with school in general.
So easy question here. How did you get to school every day?
I was very dependent on where I live because I lived in multiple places, but in a nutshell, there were times where I walked, literally just walked, I don't know, like 15 minutes, or taking public transit, like a series of buses, but there was no like dedicated school bus, like no, not the yellow.
Not like here.
You have that kind of stuff, like if you live somewhere in a rural area, there might be dedicated school buses, but if you live somewhere in the city, you take the public transit buses, trams, or cities that have metros, etc.
What about the younger kids? So let's say some kids, parents have to go to work and they have to go or get to school themselves, all by themselves.
So they take the public buses and trains alone? Is that not unsafe?
It can come with some problems, but yeah, that's the general thing. Yeah, people, you might even have, even in first grade, you might have like six year olds going on the bus themselves.
Now granted, that may be a little bit more rare, but it happens. Yeah, you have unsupervised kids riding the bus, the public bus, like everyone else.
Oh my gosh, kids might be getting kidnapped though, is what I'm thinking. That's just really scary.
It does happen every now and again, unfortunately, but it's very, very, very rare, luckily.
But yeah, it's not exactly good for the parents' peace of mind, that's for sure.
That's why having a yellow school bus like here in the US can be beneficial in that case.
So that brings me to my next question. What did you think of the yellow school bus when you first saw it with your own two eyes?
Just your first thoughts. I loved it. I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
And because it was literally like in the movies. Like the movies, yeah.
Yeah, the bus pulls up and then you get on and it's like, yeah, you have a weird bus driver, you have all sorts of different students on the bus, you have like the geeks, and then you have people that don't give a rat's ass about school, they're like, oh my god, no.
Is that the same in Germany? I'm taking us off track a little bit, but just a little side note. Are there kind of clicky groups in Germany?
Oh yeah, definitely. Really? Oh yeah.
Same thing. Oh yeah.
I would say so. You have like popular and unpopular kids and kids that are being bullied. I think that's a universal thing. I would almost say.
Oh, that's not just an American stereotype. No.
No, but anyway, go back to describing the school bus. That was a bit of a detail.
Yeah, no, I thought it was cool. And it is very just useful, very convenient. Plus like the school is not automatically assigned to you.
Like there are multiple schools just because you live in a certain area, it doesn't mean you have to go to a specific school.
Unlike here.
Unlike, except for elementary schools, I think for elementary schools, it's kind of predetermined, but anything after elementary school, if you live on the other side of town and you have a 45 minute commute, so be it.
You can still enroll in that school after elementary school, like in fourth grade.
I think you basically apply for the next school that you're going to go to based on grades and I don't know, maybe the elementary school teachers and principals have to write like a letter of recommendation or something like that.
I don't know.
Oh, wow. It sounds like university.
Yeah.
A little bit, except it's for the younger kids.
Yeah, but for toddlers.
Yeah, that's what it sounds like. Exactly.
That decision was overturned, but back when I went out of elementary school, that was in 2005.
That was a good minute ago.
I had to, you only qualified for gymnasium if you had a certain grade average.
Now I think you can, even if your kid is not fit at all, you can still force it to go to, to the higher education school, which is usually not in the interest of the child, but some parents are a little bit stubborn.
So yeah, you apply and if you live 45 minutes out, you live 45 minutes out, you take the bus or a series of buses.
Do you think the quality of education in Germany is better than what you observed here in the US?
I would go out on a limb and say yes, it is better.
For one thing, I think the teachers that teach in Germany for the most part, maybe are more fit for the job, but they also have to go through quite an ordeal to get there.
Plus, the teachers are making a better living than they do here.
Maybe sometimes here you could think with some teachers and maybe they didn't have any other option.
And in Germany, that's not the case.
Again, of course, you still have bad teachers sometimes because there's also a shortage of teachers.
So I guess the bars, you know, the bar has been lowered.
But I think all in all, we had teachers that were great and then we had teachers that just, yeah, shouldn't be exposed to mankind.
But as far as like the whole, like the week, right, we had a specific timetable or schedule for every day.
For example, every Monday you had a series of subjects and then Tuesday, Wednesday.
First things first, students had to learn which subjects they have on which day.
Basically, I mean, it changed a little bit, but you basically had the same schedule the entire school year.
Whereas here, I feel like it kind of comes in waves.
You have one subject every day or one schedule every day for like a semester or something.
It does change every semester and your schedule does change just about every day.
Yeah.
And from fifth through 10th grade, we were with the exact same group of people, group of students the entire day.
And see, we weren't.
And it only changed in 11th and 12th grades when everyone had their personalized schedule and really you went all over the place.
Now, also just the time, how much time per period, usually one school lesson, like one subject is 45 minutes.
Now, we went in my school, we went kind of back and forth.
There were times where you really only had 45 minute periods, but then later on they shifted it to blocks as they called it of 90 minutes.
Like you had a full 90 minute stint between the breaks.
Let's say, you know, school started 7.30 in the morning, then you had 90 minutes of one subject until 9am.
Then we had like the first longer, I think then we had, I don't remember how long the breaks in between were,
but they were longer than they were here.
They were between, I think, depending on like what time of day, I think that the breaks between those blocks were between 10 and 30 minutes.
Whereas here, everyone is just like running.
It's like a three or four minute thing or something.
No, it's not that bad, but it's not much better than that.
So no, I think between classes, at least at my school, it was about seven or eight minutes.
Yeah, something like that.
It is really crazy.
Also odd numbers.
Yeah.
I don't know why.
The first thing that struck me, the school that we went to here in the States for that school exchange program,
it was the weirdest schedule.
It started at like 8.02 or something.
Yeah, that's right.
And then also every period was not the same number of minutes.
It was a totally weird schedule.
And I asked multiple people.
I remember asking multiple teachers.
There was like somebody, like the secretary somewhere in the library.
I asked so many people.
Nobody was able to explain to me why that was.
Somebody should have.
Yeah.
Well, we somebody in administration should have been able to answer that.
Another thing that was different or that is different is that from a teacher's perspective,
here in the United States, usually at least based on that one school that I saw,
the teachers have their room and that's their room.
They are in that room the entire day.
So they have a teacher assigned room and they can decorate it to their liking and whatever.
Not the case in Germany.
There are classrooms that are maybe dedicated to a specific class,
but even that class will move around the building.
Both students and teachers move around the building and have and are in multiple rooms throughout the day.
And here, you know, teachers are just stationary in their rooms the entire day.
Yeah, it's the students who move, not the teacher.
Oh yeah, another thing.
There are so many differences.
Oh, I know.
I love this.
Another thing that is extremely American are just those table or no, those desk slash chair things,
those single-seater.
The individual desk seats.
Individual desk seat.
We didn't have that.
For us, it was always a desk.
Like a table?
Yeah, literally a table, kind of a rectangular table, and you had two students sitting next to each other.
So it was a table and two students shared it?
Yes.
Okay, it was a two-seater table then.
But also like the seats were not like integrated.
Like you could actually move the seats in and out.
It was not like a one contraption thing.
It was not stuck together.
It's not.
I don't know why that is such an American thing.
Yeah, it's literally a table and two chairs, individual.
You get your own desk.
You can put your own stuff inside of the desk.
There's like sports space.
Yeah, no, we didn't know that.
And there's like a cubby, like a place in the room of a classroom where you can keep your backpack.
You can keep other stuff.
No, we had-
You have your own cubby.
I mean, again, I can't speak on behalf of the entire nation, but the schools, I went to,
you usually had your bag just right next to the table or the desk, whatever you want to call it.
Some desks, I think, had like a little, yeah, kind of a basket underneath where you could put some stuff in.
But no, we weren't-
In that regard, we weren't as sophisticated as America is.
We had to carry our shit.
I mean, we did too.
I remember carrying a lot of books from class to class because I didn't use my-
Yeah, from class to class.
But you had a locker, like where you stored your stuff in.
I did, but I didn't use my locker so much because the thing is, sometimes some classes are far away from your locker.
You can't just swing by there.
Yeah, okay.
And guess what?
So it really depends.
It's only useful to hold big stuff.
And if you're close to the locker, otherwise, no, it makes no sense.
So you carry all of your books and other stuff around.
Okay, that makes sense. That's similar then.
Many details that are different.
At the end of the day, you still receive somewhat of a similar education as far as the subjects.
Speaking of subjects, you know, I wanted to touch upon English class and also language learning.
Because the thing is in Europe, or at least a lot of Europe, I don't know how the language education system is.
But my impression is that it's definitely a better quality one than here in the US.
Because most Americans can't really speak another language.
Or at least, no, actually, no, they can't speak another language at all.
I'm curious to know in Germany what English class or any other language learning class was like.
Like what did you do in class?
What were some differences you noticed between here in the US when you were here and back in Germany when you were in English class?
Honestly, as far as the brief insight that I got in American language teaching, I didn't see that many differences, honestly.
Because you have a book that's...
A textbook?
A textbook, you know, with like a mix of grammar, but also like dialogues, like fictitious kind of situations.
English class or any language class, French as well.
For one thing, the teacher usually would guide you through a curriculum on a theoretical basis.
Okay, today we learn tenses.
Today we learn, I don't know, English, we learn the simple past or something, or the present perfect or something like that.
So you learn the kind of the grammar rules and then they try to make you use it practically.
So either...
Like verbally?
Either by text production, you have to write a text about something, or reading that book, also reading out loud, like people like, hey, you know, you read here and...
Go around the room and read.
Or if it's dialogues, people had to kind of like role play.
Oh yeah, we had to do that too, but it was not good at all.
It was horrible.
Well, I don't think many people liked it in Germany either, but it is...
It's awkward.
Yeah, that's the thing. It is awkward. It's like music class, singing in front of class. That is, that's what it is.
I mean, some people are fan of that.
Which, by the way, we had to do too.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
Well, okay, so that part was also no different.
Yeah, so no, I think language, honestly, I think language teaching in school is, you know, as far as methods pretty much the same.
I don't know. How else would you do it anyway?
Well, I don't know, because you know, maybe you've heard, but I think in places like Finland and Northern Europe, so Scandinavia, they teach language in classes apparently in a different way.
Like they start from a younger age.
They have...
I don't think that's actually the difference why they pick up the language better.
They play games, as far as I've heard.
Yeah, well, we do that.
Well, in Germany, you do that too.
I think the difference as far as Northern Europeans learning English better is not just school. It's the entire upbringing, you know, because these smaller nations don't have the dubbing industry that Germany, for instance, amongst other countries has.
So when they watch on TV or Netflix or whatever it is, an American TV show or movie, there is no dubbing, unless it's like a kids movie.
They usually, they grow up watching things, you know, reading and hearing English, maybe with subtitles.
That's how they learn.
Most Germans don't, because everything is dubbed.
And it's dubbed in a really good way.
So, yeah, and people are lazy. And I think that is why the Swedes, the Norwegians, the Finns and the Danes, also the Dutch are doing much better speaking English than Germans, French people, Italians.
I would say within Europe we're average.
Many English speakers always think that Germans are so good at English and we always think, oh, how do you learn English so well?
Not necessarily.
Our impression is very different from what you're saying in this situation.
Not necessarily. No, not necessarily.
That's surprising.
I think you've just been exposed to people that are well educated or that have a, you know, a talent for languages. But if you're in Germany, out on the street somewhere, you might run into somebody who is very, very fluent or you might as well run into somebody who is just not at all.
I want to ask now about school lunch in Germany versus here in the US, since you experienced both.
And also, I just really love this specific question. It is so funny just to see what you say and what your reactions are to school lunch and comparing.
What are your thoughts and what do you remember?
Well, in elementary school, I actually ate my lunch at the cafeteria.
So you went to get the actual lunch? Yes, it was proper lunch that you ate off a actual porcelain plate and actual silverware, metal silverware. That's number one.
Yeah, no, that's fair.
That's number one.
Everything is plastic here. It's awful.
Even in hotels.
Oh, I know.
So, but that's where we digress. But anyway, it was normal food. You know, you may have like spaghetti or some German dish or some, you know, potato with some form of pork or something.
But yeah, it was no fast food. I think that is kind of the main takeaway. It was no fast food. Maybe these days, it's, there are fast food options. I can't rule that out.
But all in all, it is probably healthier than what they offer here.
I'm actually pretty certain of that. I mean, I just, I personally always brought my lunch to school. I did not eat the school lunch.
But I do remember, yeah, everything was served on plastic plates, plastic silverware was given to us. And I remember it was just, I couldn't believe it was really food.
Like it was frozen pizza that was just heated up for the students and thrown on a plate. And then you are given some canned corn or green beans.
Literally, you could tell it was from a can.
I mean, I would.
It was so bad.
I mean, I don't think that in most German schools these days, they actually make the food fresh. I mean, there are there.
I think there's like a vendor that cooks it in the morning, I think, and then distributes it to all sorts of schools.
But it is fresher.
That's about to say fresher.
It is fresher for sure.
Me personally, like in upper grades, I don't think I ever went to get that kind of lunch.
I think I only, I usually brought like a sandwich and all in all healthier, healthier than here.
And I remember also, you know, in my, my brief experience, I remember the pizza and wraps that were just drowning in mayonnaise.
Welcome to the U.S.
And just, you know, and soda and just sugar in abundance. Yeah, sugar and grease in abundance.
I think that was kind of, that was kind of the, the thing.
So yeah, food wise, I think my upbringing was better than yours.
Your school experience with food was much better than that.
Wow.
No, I, I can't with that.
What did German kids or students typically do in the evenings after school?
So you leave school, you go home, or you go somewhere else in high school.
What do you remember kids doing? Because I remember Americans usually would go hang out in the parking lot after school, like where, where their cars were.
Some people would get ready for sports games or they had extracurricular activities.
They had sports, all that stuff. Or some people just went home.
I mean, that's very individual.
I for one didn't have any extracurricular activities.
I mean, I mentioned earlier that it was a bit lazy to say the least.
But yeah, those things did exist. There were people that may have been on some sports team, soccer or volleyball or something.
Or in like some theater, some artsy stuff that existed.
If you had a certain group of friends that maybe also lived close by, you may have hung out with them.
Or ideally you went home and did your homework, right?
I think that's also universal.
You had to do homework to some extent because sometimes you had to turn it in, like you got graded on it.
Or like there was a lot of copying in the nick of time right before class.
Go to your best buddy or to some good source, to some geek that, you know, you can kind of copy.
The grading system is very straightforward.
It's very similar to Germany's.
In Germany's, it's not letters.
In Germany, it's numbers.
So it's grades from one through six, one being the best and six being the absolute worst.
Five and six are failing.
A four is really bad, but you kind of pass.
And if you have like on your,
Your report card.
On your report card, if you have a five or let alone a six on your report card, you may have to repeat the entire year.
People are not being dragged along.
You repeat the year.
It's the same here.
I mean, if you don't do well enough on the most important subjects, especially math and literature.
I don't know, but don't you have like summer school?
Oh yeah.
You have summer school to make up for your shortcomings, right?
Yeah.
Luckily, I'd never had to do that.
That doesn't exist in Germany.
Oh, wow.
So you either just fail or you...
If you fail, you fail.
No second chances.
Yeah.
Then you have to repeat the year.
Cruel.
Another thing we didn't have was, or at least not, I don't think my school had that, the tension.
Oh, that's interesting.
So I didn't know that.
We didn't have detention.
No.
I don't remember detention that that ever existed.
Not that I just, you know, believe me, because I would have definitely qualified for detention.
So we didn't, yeah, we didn't have detention.
That's a very American thing.
Detention?
What did German students do when they got in trouble?
Where did they go if there was no detention?
Either they got thrown out of class and had to wait outside, which is technically illegal,
but teachers still did it.
So that was one instance.
A teacher tried to throw me out and I said, no, you can't.
And I dug in my heels and I stayed, basically telling her off.
Oh my gosh, you really were disrespectful.
Yeah, well, now in hindsight, I'm like, yeah, especially that particular teacher that was,
it was eighth grade French.
Now in hindsight, I'm like, yeah, sorry.
Yeah, bless her heart.
Back when you were in school, where did your school take school trips?
Like you went to London or you went to like other countries?
Whereas again, I never had that experience.
It depends on the school, but my school, usually you had like once a year, usually like one week somewhere.
Now for the most part, it was somewhere within Germany, not far away, some museum.
No, no, no, I'm talking like, I'm not talking about those kind of field trips.
Yeah, those happen to every now and again, but like as far as like really a week of basically leisure,
but with your school class, usually was somewhere within Germany,
either to a city or some kind of more remote place where maybe you had nice nature or whatever.
It got interesting in seventh grade, we went actually, we went skiing for a week.
That's crazy. We never did that.
Yeah, I think in America, like liability wise, people would not do that.
No.
The school schools would be schools would be schools would be afraid to get sued.
Yeah, we went, we went skiing for a week somewhere in Germany, I think somewhere in Bavaria.
Eighth grade, we went to London by bus.
That was like, I don't know, that was like, that was like 20 hours on a bus or something.
That's crazy.
Like drive, literally driving over the continent, take the ferry and then that was.
Boom, you're in London.
Yeah, wow. Yeah, boom, after 20 hours, boom.
Yeah, 10th grade, we went to Southern France. That was pretty cool too.
For a week.
Where in Southern France did you go?
I mean, we visited places like Monaco and Saint-Tropez.
It wasn't a little bit like B&B maybe.
And we had multiple rooms, like was a whole kind of complex.
Like a block of rooms.
It was a complex with many rooms.
I think it was somewhere near Cannes, maybe.
Yeah, okay, where the film festival is.
Honestly, I don't remember the exact town where we were.
I do, I vividly remember visiting Monaco and Saint-Tropez, but I actually don't know where exactly we were normally during the day and where we stayed.
But somewhere in that area because it can't, you know, it wasn't that far because also there we went by bus, right?
That's just amazing though, because I mean, the farthest, I think I ever went on a school trip was like the Atlanta Zoo.
Yeah, no, no, no, we did go a little bit farther than that.
Eleventh grade was the school exchange, but that was special.
That was very special.
Only for a handful of students.
And then 12th grade we had another trip where actually it was different groups.
I think there were three groups.
And also it kind of depended on like this kind of the school subjects that you were specialized in.
Like all the artsy people went to Paris, all the history and yeah, I think like especially the history kind of people, they went to Brussels.
Any like English class went to London again.
And English class ultimately meant that we could basically did whatever the hell we wanted.
Like we didn't have to go to any museum, we didn't have any assignment.
So that was just awesome.
We just had a week of fun.
So I went to London again.
But in the 12th grade we actually flew.
Instead of taking a 20 hour bus ride.
But still like it was a class that took a plane again in American terms who would do that.
Yeah, we would.
We went on a plane and flew to London.
There we stayed.
I think then we stayed actually at a hostel.
The schools here are much bigger.
Like how many like your class, how many in your school year, how many people were there?
My high school, I don't know about now, but 10 years ago when I graduated there were just in my class alone.
There were I think 750 people who graduated in my school year.
And then the entire school was 2500.
It was crazy big.
It was like the ninth biggest high school at the time in Georgia.
No, we were tiny.
We were like, and the thing is the school I went to, that was already the biggest school in the city.
And we were around 100 students in the class.
And yeah, so it's fifth through 12th grade.
So let's say all classes are like around 100 people.
So yeah, maybe 800 students, the entire school.
Now, I mean, in Germany, like maybe a big school in Berlin might be different.
You might still have there like also two, 3000 people.
I can't rule that out.
But the average school is not as big as the average American school.
This was a lot of fun.
As always.
Yeah.
And we will see Marco very soon or not see, but we will hear another episode with Marco very soon.
Just stay tuned.
He'll be back.
This now wraps up today's episode of Once Upon a Trip.
We hope that you enjoyed and took something new and interesting like I really hoped for in the beginning of all this.
Please don't hesitate to let me know your comments and additional feedback and suggestions on Instagram at either at once upon a trip dot PC or at Mary Grace Crawford.
Share this episode with anyone you know who can enjoy just a little bit more Germany, America entertainment in their day.
As always, I look forward to tuning in with you again next Tuesday for another fun, adventurous trip.
Have a great week.