Erfahrungsberichte
The two Alexanders
With mixed feelings I think back to two of my pupils, both named Alexander. Ten years ago, the first, Alexander T., entered grade 5 of our School in Mannheim, Germany. A year earlier, he had come from Perm (Russia) together with his mother, who had followed a German engineer. They both got married and the stepfather adopted Alexander. Attending a preparatory class for one year was enough for Alexander to follow classes in German and to receive extraordinary grades in sciences. In English, my subject, his knowledge of grammar was excellent, his pronunciation, however, could only be termed as atrocious. In German communication, too, he still had some problems.
During school breaks he often told stories about his grandmother, a teacher in a small village school, who had taken him into the woods to collect mushrooms and berries (which she dried to get the family through the harsh winters). Alexander missed his grandma a lot. On leaving Russia he had to promise her to get a good graduation from school. At that time Alexander desperately wanted to become an archeologist. And Alexander really was interested in nearly everything that was offered to him. He read the books which I lent to him in the shortest possible time and he listened intensely to my Harry Potter audio cassettes. I made the same offer to other pupils of my class, of course, but Alexander was the only one, who always accepted.
Alexander was good-hearted, his somewhat round face and his stocky features reminded some of a bear. But just like bears, Alexander was not to be underestimated: once I was urgently asked for help, because he was beating all five turkish boys in his class at the same time. As we found out later, they had mocked the Russians, an insult he just couldn't stand.
To my knowledge, that was the only fit he ever had. In his class, in which the boys where dominated by two „aces“ in sport he remained an outsider. But he stoically kept to himself, improved a lot and at the end of grade 7 received a well-earned commendation to high school level.
During the following years I somewhat lost sight of him – not unusual in a school with more than 1.500 pupils. I heard later, that his parents got separated, which apparently led to a major crisis for him: he neglected his appearance as well as his school efforts, his rates were accordingly poor. But at the end of high school I saw him regularly – always with a wild mane – during our theater performances: he had found his place in stagecrafting!
When I crossed the schoolyard on my very last day at school (before retiring), I met Alexander, who had just graduated from high school. He came from the school secretary, having collected some papers. His thick mane had given way to a more tolerable haircut, and with a broad smile he showed me his final high school degree. He had also been accepted as an apprentice at SAS, his first choice, and wanted to thank me: Without my help in those first years he wouldn't have achieved all this. Of course, this wasn't the case, which I instantly told him.
But still:
This one sentence right at the end of my professional teaching career meant more to me than all the principal's and colleagues' laudatory speeches that followed.
The second Alexander, Alexander J, joined my class three years ago. He originally came from a small Polish village far away from any major city, and he also missed the nature and quiet village life, and was therefore very disturbed by the huge apparatus our school was to newcomers. nevertheless his scholarly achievements were outstanding, especially linguistically. His very first essay, a “picture story”, was the best in class, an unbelievable result for a child that had attended a German school for only one year. Alexander used an extended and more elaborate vocabulary than the rest of his classmates. He had learned German not on the streets like other kids but by reading books, above all non-fiction books.
This was, however, the only common interest the the two boys shared. Alexander's (the 2nd ) mom had left her alcohol-addicted and probably also violent husband and had fled to Germany without her son. His grandmother then took over Alexander's education, whilst his mother, from Mannheim, fought for her son's custody and finally succeeded in doing so. The grandmother was apparently a very dominant person and also a member of Jehova's Witnesses, who still had a strong influence on Alexander even when he was in Mannheim, so that he refused to attend the religion classes, although being baptized Catholic. His mother, on the other hand, had, for reasons unknown to us, converted to the Islam shortly before Alexander's arrival in Germany. To make things more complicated, the boy spent his holidays in turns at his father's and his grandmother's place, and , according to his mother, always returned to Mannheim in a very confused state.
When we found out that Alexander not only licked the pages of his notebook and tore off shreds of his books and then slowly chewed and swallowed them, whilst under the fascinated watch of his classmates, we the teachers and also the school's social worker demanded an instant psychological treatment. The mother, unwilling at first, gave in to our urging and together with the boy she appeared at the arranged appointment. However, she did not share our concerns and thought that austerity and prohibitions would get Alexander to achieve what seemed important to her: academic success and thus the high school recommendation.
This concept seemed to work out for the first few months, but after that Alexander showed signs of conspicuous behavior again: he was caught trying to open the locker of a fellow pupil. For the warden responsible for the lower classes, who had had to deal with Alexander quite often, this was the last straw: despite the protests of his English teacher and myself, Alexander was expelled from our school and transferred to a middle school close to the place where he lives with his mother; a school with about 70% of pupils having a migration background, mostly Turkish. We were worried: had our integration efforts failed despite Alexander's obvious great talents?
Since then half a year has passed and recently I have moved into the neighborhood of this school. A couple of days ago, when passing the schoolyard, I recognized Alexander's typical figure within a group of peers. I greeted him very pleased and asked how he fared at the new school. He only shrugged his shoulders, but his peers proudly explained that although Alexander never payed attention during classes he had just written the best math test of his whole grade, a straightforward “1” (the best grade you can get in Germany). But: Math had never been his favorite subject?
This warmed my heart: maybe the second Alexander would make his way, too, albeit with a couple of detours.
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