Saturday, January 10, 2009

God is so good, He's so good to me...

10.1.09
02:10 local time
Bassum (technically)

this morning, i got on a train in kaiserslautern at 938 to head to bremen to meet jessica. for once, all of the trains were on schedule and everything went smoothly! i met up with jessica and we drove to her apartment in the countryside surrounding bremen. we caught up over coffee and pastries and then we spent the evening chatting about the differences in the school systems (america v. germany), american politics, and ADD/ADHD diagnoses, all while she worked on school stuff for next week--shes a teacher--and i worked on a puzzle she had started. she made thai food for dinner and we kept chatting and working on the puzzle and schoolwork. eventually, we each finished our tasks and we looked over some of the textbooks she uses for teaching here. its crazy how different they are!! we also looked at differences between the books she uses for hauptschule and the ones other teachers use for gymnasium (high school). tomorrow (later today, really), we will go and hang out in bremen. i am glad to be here; what a good time!

things of note:

°9/11. some people over here think that the whole thing was fabricated by our government, esp. our president. thats insane.

°in one of the books, there is a story about matt and lilly. matt picks lilly up for a date, already drunk even though he is 17, and they go to an unchaperoned party where there are people taking drugs and eventually he gets mad and hits her and she leaves. its only interesting to me that this is in a school book. wow, crazy.

°there are many differences, even within the german school system. the issues in the hauptschule books are like the one i just said and the gymnasium ones are about things like migrant workers and civil rights and child labor laws...

°ADD treatment is different here. and people are expected to learn to deal with their problems without medication. awesome :)

liebe grüße aus dem großraum der bremen!

1 comment:

Mordechai said...

Well, maybe Matt wouldn't have gotten so angry with Lilly if he had taken some Adderall (sp?) to control his ADHD, instead of having to resort to teenage alcoholism... Silly Germans, don't they know it's better to have our youth drugged out of their minds so they grow up to develop wonderful things like Ponzi schemes...and MTV? ;) I'm enjoying your blog Sarah, so much so I decided to start my own when I get to Morocco! It's adventuresofgrego.blogspot.com. Enjoy your wonderful coat!