Foreign language education in the US has taken another hit as Carolina education departments cut back. Marilyn Metzler, a German language teacher sees enrollment in her German classes fluctuate each year. But now she's more worried than ever about the future of the program -- and her job.
For the first time since the language program's start over a decade ago, German classes will no longer be offered in Chapel Hill-Carrboro middle schools. High school German has also been slashed, with some schools combining class levels and others losing all courses in the language.
While Metzler's program at Chapel Hill High remains mostly intact, she said she's worried that cuts to other German programs mean the school board will soon want to say "auf Wiedersehen" to the language altogether.
It's not just happening at Chapel Hill-Carrboro, either. To make up for severe cuts in the state budget this year, school districts across the Triangle have been forced to reduce electives that school boards and principals once proudly touted. Teachers and other employees are being cut.
"I understand that budgets are affecting programs," said Metzler, 57. "But I hate to think money is the single, defining issue in determining what students can learn."
Although the district is cutting German from middle school, an upper-level class will remain at Smith Middle School for eighth graders who want to continue the language in high school. Metzler is teaching the section.
"I was pretty devastated when I heard the news," she said. "This will affect our future numbers. Students who start the language early on are more likely to continue in high school."
East Chapel Hill High's German program has been cut entirely. Students who want to take German will either have to travel to one of Metzler's classes at Chapel Hill High, four miles away, or enroll in online courses.
"I don't want to take a foreign language online. You lose a huge chunk of instruction that way," said Micaela Arneson, a senior at East Chapel Hill High who had intended to take AP German after more than five years of instruction in both middle and high school.
Niel Lebeck, a senior at East Chapel Hill High who also wanted to continue with AP German, said part of the problem is that German has "less of a hook" than other languages. Spanish is useful, he said, because of the growing number of Hispanics in this country. And offering Japanese means the district has an Asian language, which is smart in a global economy.
Metzler doesn't like it when people say German isn't a useful language.
"There are many reasons why German is still a valid language to learn," she said. "It prepares you to be a global citizen, and it also helps you better understand how language works."
Frau Metzler, as her students call her, runs one of the best German programs in the state. In her 14 years with the school system, her students have regularly won national and state awards, scored high on exams and traveled abroad in exchange programs. Her German Honor Society students even started a German club where they taught elementary school students.
Despite her growing trophy closet, Metzler said she feels that she's being pushed away from teaching.
Tuesday 25 August 2009
Tuesday 11 August 2009
Mass WWII grave brings Poles, Germans together
Germans and Poles are laying ghosts of World War II to rest this week in Malbork Poland, — more than 2,000 of them.
At a ceremony Friday, they will rebury the bones that were discovered last fall in a mass grave at the foot of this northern Polish city's medieval castle, setting aside the grievances that linger from the war and often bedevil relations between the two countries.
But the uncertainties about who the dead were and who killed them may never be resolved. All that authorities can say with some assuredness is that they were probably German civilians who died in the ferocious final months of the war, in a city with a shared Polish-German past that dates back more than 700 years.
Poland and Germany are at peace today — fellow democracies in the 27-nation European Union. But the war still shadows the relationship. They argue, often bitterly, over war damages, past suffering, and the rights of an estimated 3 million ethnic Germans expelled as Poland headed into a future as a Soviet communist satellite.
Yet the grisly find by red-brick Malbork Castle seems to have drawn hearts and minds together. Polish authorities have handled the discovery with sensitivity, neither side has voiced recriminations, and discussions on where to rebury them have reached a cordial, mutually agreed conclusion.
The first bones were found in October by construction workers digging foundations for a five-star hotel by the Castle, a tourist attraction and UNESCO World Heritage site. But it took three months for the magnitude of the grave to become clear. While construction of the 175-room hotel was moved to an adjacent plot, an exhumation was ordered by Polish authorities.
Workers spent six months gently working through wet sand to amass the bones of some 2,120 men, women and children. But they found no documents, clothes or personal belongings, save for a child's pair of glasses. There also are no known witnesses to the burial.
Forensic experts and anthropologists moved in, and the evidence "indicates it is most probable that these are German civilians who died in early 1945, in February or March," says Maciej Schulz, a prosecutor at Polish state-funded Institute of National Remembrance, who investigated the mass grave.
The supposition is that they were buried in a shell crater after artillery fire demolished buildings, and that because there is no mention of the grave in Polish or German documents, it must have been filled with bodies between March and mid-May, when Soviet forces held the city.
At a ceremony Friday, they will rebury the bones that were discovered last fall in a mass grave at the foot of this northern Polish city's medieval castle, setting aside the grievances that linger from the war and often bedevil relations between the two countries.
But the uncertainties about who the dead were and who killed them may never be resolved. All that authorities can say with some assuredness is that they were probably German civilians who died in the ferocious final months of the war, in a city with a shared Polish-German past that dates back more than 700 years.
Poland and Germany are at peace today — fellow democracies in the 27-nation European Union. But the war still shadows the relationship. They argue, often bitterly, over war damages, past suffering, and the rights of an estimated 3 million ethnic Germans expelled as Poland headed into a future as a Soviet communist satellite.
Yet the grisly find by red-brick Malbork Castle seems to have drawn hearts and minds together. Polish authorities have handled the discovery with sensitivity, neither side has voiced recriminations, and discussions on where to rebury them have reached a cordial, mutually agreed conclusion.
The first bones were found in October by construction workers digging foundations for a five-star hotel by the Castle, a tourist attraction and UNESCO World Heritage site. But it took three months for the magnitude of the grave to become clear. While construction of the 175-room hotel was moved to an adjacent plot, an exhumation was ordered by Polish authorities.
Workers spent six months gently working through wet sand to amass the bones of some 2,120 men, women and children. But they found no documents, clothes or personal belongings, save for a child's pair of glasses. There also are no known witnesses to the burial.
Forensic experts and anthropologists moved in, and the evidence "indicates it is most probable that these are German civilians who died in early 1945, in February or March," says Maciej Schulz, a prosecutor at Polish state-funded Institute of National Remembrance, who investigated the mass grave.
The supposition is that they were buried in a shell crater after artillery fire demolished buildings, and that because there is no mention of the grave in Polish or German documents, it must have been filled with bodies between March and mid-May, when Soviet forces held the city.
Thursday 6 August 2009
German citizenship heals old wounds.
More than six decades after his birth, the son of a French mother and a German Wehrmacht officer, retiree Daniel Rouxel was on Wednesday at last granted German citizenship.
The 66-year-old feels that by becoming a dual French-German national he finally has a legitimate identity.
"I'm German. I'm not a bastard any more. I'm a child like all the others. At last I've got the second half that I was so cruelly missing," he said, blinking back tears after leaving the German consulate in Paris.
Rouxel was born in Paris in 1943 during the World War II occupation, when his mother was working in the canteen of the German airbase in the Brittany town of Pleurtuit where his father, Lieutenant Otto Ammon, was stationed.
Ammon was killed during the Allied liberation of France and after the war, when his mother could no longer cope with raising him, Rouxel was taken on by his grandmother and moved to a small and unwelcoming Breton village.
"I'm the child born of a love made impossible by war," he said, in a recent account of his life written in support of his citizenship bid.
As the illegitimate son of the former enemy, Rouxel was a figure of hate, tormented by local youths, often forced by his own grandmother to sleep in a henhouse and publicly mocked by local officials.
Neither German nor French officials in the period after the war wanted to address the issue of children born to occupying troops, who might number up to 200,000 according to writers Jean-Paul Picaper and Ludwig Norz.
Officially registered as "father unknown" they have been subjected to years of ostracism and persecution, and the countries -- now close allies -- recently reached an agreement to recognise the children's parentage.
Germany agreed on February 19 to grant joint citizenship to those war children who want it, and Rouxel -- who has been a vocal representative of the group, even though he cannot speak German -- was the first to sign up.
The 66-year-old feels that by becoming a dual French-German national he finally has a legitimate identity.
"I'm German. I'm not a bastard any more. I'm a child like all the others. At last I've got the second half that I was so cruelly missing," he said, blinking back tears after leaving the German consulate in Paris.
Rouxel was born in Paris in 1943 during the World War II occupation, when his mother was working in the canteen of the German airbase in the Brittany town of Pleurtuit where his father, Lieutenant Otto Ammon, was stationed.
Ammon was killed during the Allied liberation of France and after the war, when his mother could no longer cope with raising him, Rouxel was taken on by his grandmother and moved to a small and unwelcoming Breton village.
"I'm the child born of a love made impossible by war," he said, in a recent account of his life written in support of his citizenship bid.
As the illegitimate son of the former enemy, Rouxel was a figure of hate, tormented by local youths, often forced by his own grandmother to sleep in a henhouse and publicly mocked by local officials.
Neither German nor French officials in the period after the war wanted to address the issue of children born to occupying troops, who might number up to 200,000 according to writers Jean-Paul Picaper and Ludwig Norz.
Officially registered as "father unknown" they have been subjected to years of ostracism and persecution, and the countries -- now close allies -- recently reached an agreement to recognise the children's parentage.
Germany agreed on February 19 to grant joint citizenship to those war children who want it, and Rouxel -- who has been a vocal representative of the group, even though he cannot speak German -- was the first to sign up.
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