Auf Deutsch...

I’m wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt! I suppose that doesn’t sound much like interesting news, but seeing as I can’t remember the last time I needed a long-sleeved shirt (March? April? No – it must’ve been our trip to San Francisco… does that really count?) it seems like a big deal to me. It was 65 when I checked the temperature this morning, but by the time I actually made it outside around 10:00, it was probably more like 75. So at this point, I can’t say I really NEED this long-sleeved t-shirt, but I am stubbornly refusing to change…

Anyway… despite the title of this post, no, I’m not going to take Rick’s suggestion and write an entire post in German. Not only because most people wouldn’t understand it, but because I’m afraid I wouldn’t get very far before I was forced to employ the services of my German dictionary due to my present lack of knowledge. I haven’t exactly made much use lately of what I learned in high school.

In fact, I think the last time I needed my German was on a cruise we took in the Baltic Sea a few years ago. One of our stops was Gdansk, Poland. We decided to choose a taxi from the myriad vehicles waiting for tourists on the dock, so we could explore the town. Our driver turned out to be a great tour guide – but he spoke no English. He spoke Polish, and (like many of the people in Poland) German. The first thing I said to him was “Ich spreche nur ein bisschen Deutsch.” I only speak a little bit of German. Later on, as I would struggle to translate something, he’d smile and reemphasize my statement, “Ja, nur ein bisschen.” Yup. Only a little.

Dad knows a little bit of German, too (I think grandma taught German, didn’t she?), so between the two of us, we were quite able to carry on a meaningful conversation with our taxi driver. There was only one moment when I was completely confused about what he was trying to convey to us. He kept saying something about “zusammen oder allein… zusammen oder allein…” Which I knew meant “together or alone.” But I wasn’t sure what he was asking, exactly. We finally decided that he was trying to ask us whether we wanted him to walk around town with us, or if we just wanted to explore on our own. We ended up bringing him with us, since he was a local and knew where some of the good photo ops were. Plus we needed a ride back to the ship…

And it’s funny that Rick said in his comment, “I guess that’s why you were the German honor society.” Now, I don’t know if that was a typo on his part, and he meant to say, “you were IN the German honor society,” however, his original comment is correct as it is. I really WAS the German honor society when I was in school. There’s even a picture in my yearbook of my German teacher and me, with the caption “German Honor Society.” It was me. Just me.

When I started high school, German was like the “outcast” language. Everyone either took Spanish or French. French or Spanish. Hola or Bonjour. But I’ve never been one to “go along with the crowd,” so I chose German. My freshman year, we started out with eight kids in the class. This was further whittled to seven after the first week, when one of the moronic boys in the class showed up with a big swastika drawn on his notebook. Our teacher was Jewish. She did NOT appreciate that. Neither did anyone else. The stereotype of “all German-speaking people are Nazis” was broken immediately. That kid dropped out of class and I never saw him again.

In my sophomore and junior years, we had consolidated German classes, where my class and the class ahead of mine were taught at the same time. Even with two classes together, we never had more than seven kids in the room. And our “room” wasn’t even a real classroom – all four years I took German, we were relegated to a tiny little storeroom/office in the library. While the French and Spanish classes were taking field trips and using state-of-the-art language software and decorating their classrooms with flags and bulletin board collages, we were pushing aside reference books to find an empty seat and staring at an old, faded, “Hang in There!” poster that someone had long-ago stuck to the wall. We were the forgotten language.

And yet I think that actually turned out to be a good thing. By my senior year, there were only three of us left. So while those French and Spanish kids may have had nicer rooms and bigger budgets, we German students got daily one-on-one teaching. There was no way to hide in the back of the classroom (the “classroom” was about the size of a janitor’s closet… there was no way to HIDE anywhere), and with only three other people in the room, even my super-shy self had no problem speaking up when I knew an answer or had a question. That year I ended up with an average grade over 100 percent (thanks to extra credit) and placed out of needing to take the final exam. And I was also inducted into the German Honor Society. Just me, all by myself. If there’d been more people in the class, I would’ve been buried somewhere in the yearbook picture behind bunches of other kids.

From what I’ve heard since then, German has really taken off at my old high school. They have so many students now that they’ve employed another German teacher, and they take annual trips to Germany. So while I’m certain other kids are being inducted into the German Honor Society every year, I think it’s safe to say that I’m the only one who can proudly say, “I WAS the German Honor Society.” :)