Fool!

I'm quite sure it didn't escape your notice that the Friday just gone was April 1st, aka April Fool's Day.

In England the fooling has to come to a halt at midday, otherwise the joke is on the joker, but here in funny ole Deutschland the japery goes on all day, all 24 hours of it. They do take being funny seriously you know.

On Friday afternoon Jas had a friend here to play and when Rebecca came to collect Elsa she asked Jas whether what she'd heard was true...Jack (Rebecca's elder son, who's in the same class as Jas) had come home and said that after Easter they had to do four or five weekends of Saturday school because they hadn't learnt enough. Apparently they'd been given the option of going into school the 2nd week of the Easter holidays but the kids had opted for the Saturdays. And this was all due to the recent local inspection that had revealed that the children hadn't learnt enough...We were both automatically suspicious and said that surely this was an April Fool's joke but Jas was adamant, Herr B would have told them later if it were so and anyway they were just grateful they weren't in the Bear class who were so behind with their learning that they were going to have to spend the whole of the Easter holidays at school...I still wasn't convinced, where was the letter telling us about it I asked, there wasn't one, but they had been made to copy down in their homework books the details of the Saturday schooling.

Monday all became clear, it was an elaborate April Fool's joke Herr B confessed to the students.

Ha ha ha, ho ho ho.

What is worrying is that we have so little faith in the schooling system here that not only could we believe that our kids were behind with their learning and so needed Saturday school to catch up but also that such a decision (Saturdays or a week of the Easter holidays) would be left in the hands of 30 nine year olds, leaving us to be notified only by word of mouth from an unreliable source.

And so Herr B gets another strike against his name (in my book anyway) it never ceases to amaze me that the children think so highly of him!


Word of the day; the love - die Liebe