by Hannes
My first week of school was intense. The school I'm going to is supposed to be an "elite" sports school. The goal for pretty much everyone is to be training for the Olympics or professional sports. Starting last year, everyone new who's accepted into the school has to specialize in one sport. They have crew (rowing), ice hockey, tennis, table tennis, track, water polo, swimming, basketball, and mostly soccer. No one knows much about basketball here because they're all soccer freaks. When I played soccer in America I was decent, but if I were to play against my classmates here who specialize in soccer it wouldn't even be fair. They'd school me!
On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays I have two periods each day of basketball practice during the school day. It's really fun and I'm learning a lot. I'm really getting into shape! We've been having professional coaches come in to train us from Alba Berlin, the professional basketball team here in the city. They're very good and work us hard. I'm also going to start going to a club basketball team with some of my teammates from school.
Oh, yeah, there's also my other subjects: math, physics, chemistry, biology, German, English, geography, art, electronics, ethics, and history. It's very hard because everything's happening in a completely different language (duh!), but it's great because school doesn't last as long here. I have between five and seven hours of school each day. Our schedule is different every day. On Mondays and Fridays we actually get out at 1:30. We also don't have very much homework (so far). The students and the teachers rotate classrooms in our school, and there's a different teacher for almost every subject.
(This is a picture of my classmates from last year.
I'm obviously not with them!)
In Germany the high school system is completely different from America. There is the Gymnasium for people who are going to go on to college, and it goes to 13th grade. The Realschule is for people who are going on for vocational training, and it ends with 10th grade. And the Hauptschule, the "unemployment track," ends after 9th grade. Usually these schools are completely separate, but my school is a comprehensive school that combines them all. Every student gets to choose which level of each subject they want to take. Grading is also completely different here. A "1" here is like an "A" in America, and a "6" is the worst you can get and means you automatically have to redo that year.
I could ride my bike all the way to school, but that would take almost 40 minutes, so instead I ride about 5 minutes to a subway station (Bismarckstraße) and then take the subway to my school. I have a "Monatskarte" which costs almost 30 Euro (about $45) and is an unlimited public transportation ticket. It lasts for one month so I can ride anywhere in the city with any kind of public transportation. It takes me a little less than 20 minutes to get to school.
On the 8th grade basketball team we only have five people training right now. There's Dominique, the best player, Nico, who has a broken finger, and Julius. We also have one girl on the team who's also pretty good but I can't remember her name right now. Then there are seven 7th graders who we train with. It seems like most of them are little midget point guards. One of my other best friends, Jonathan, is half Romanian and speaks Romanian fluently. He plays tennis. And my other good friend is Max. He plays table tennis.
(Here are some of my teammates in a photo from last year.
Nico is in the middle, Julius is on the far right, and Dominique is in between.)
It's really cool because when I meet a new person, they always ask, "So you're new here, aren't you?" I say, "Yeah, I'm from America," and all of a sudden they're really interested. They connect Americans with pop stars and other super cool people. (They're right, of course!)
